Post-Gestalt Fiction Miniatures (8)

 ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE DREAM ARCHIPELAGO

“Nearly there,” said George defiantly, as they petulantly strained their muscles on each oar at a time. Timothy the dog barked in their ear, but never you mind, thought Julian who was often in complete telepathic harmony with Anne, beside him. He seemed to have no task in hand at all.  Dick was hanging over the side, meanwhile, using his fingers to trawl for sticklebacks.

The horizon was irregularly patched with the edges of Our Isles as they were called by the denizens of the latest small port the young ones had visited. Anne had thought Hour, George, a dialect pronunciation of Oar. Julian did not know why but he had a vision of an ancient pitcher, while Dick simply knew it was Our that was the word the previous islanders had said, as if visitors such as these youngsters were already part of the combined soul of the land masses in question — a distinct destination they had yet to reach, now readily approached, should the youngsters manage to negotiate the more boggy inlets that Dick still dredged.  Boggy, yet navigable, George was pleased to see, while we at last could discern that it was Julian at the tiller and not the unknown ghost we had at first assumed. Timmy’s tail wagged in relief that all remained well with his crew.

The sun now smeared itself further than the perfect red circle the mist had created  from its weakening power, as if this diminishing soul of once bright light were sharing itself more widely to the now perceivable clinging cliffs that had earlier been the unconnected patches of Our Isles. Joining  each to each as part of twilight. We had lost sight of the boat, but still could hear the irritating barks. At least they’d have to jettison one of themselves once they reached  the higher gravity sounds that made floating more difficult. We knew whom we hoped they’d choose. The ewer of fresh water would be our gift to them, had they the simple nous to ditch at least one of their crew. Them who had said most in our hearing or…

***

TRIGGER WARNING

The voice was in in the middle of the large parlour — not the metaphor of a near invisible elephant’s voice but that of its equivalent as a ‘horse in the room’, whereby all of us avoided looking at it, but simply, instead, to walk around it, not even whispering of its existence to selectively trusted ghosts of people whom we had once known in the room. However, when possible, without being noticed, we actually whispered into the horse’s raggedy-tag ears to keep it quietly tamed, joking about where it had lost its trunks if not its tusks. Of course, by trunks, we meant its swimming gear! 

The parlour was bigger than most and there was space enough for such an avoidable steed between the three piece suite and the old-fashioned television that we still attempted to watch. The fuzzy picture on the screen we blamed on the reception area where we lived not on the near invisibility of such an animal that acted as a translucent filter of ghosting for our viewing. Its snorts and hoof-fidgeting were disguised by the cowboy westerns that remained our main diet of entertainment, helped by plenty of gunshots, and, yes, other horses, some of which, sadly, were killed by the arrows of Red Indians.  A sad sight to see through our room’s ghost of a horse and, there you have it, that was the guilt that we all walked on eggshells to ignore, knowing that each of us knew about it but intent on never mentioning it out loud to the other.

Which brings us to where we started — the voice, the voice, the voice in the middle of the room that suddenly broke cover before we could break the horse whose voice it turned out to belong. To tame is to break is to quell is to quench is to cramp is to cow is to never recognise the guilt that we all felt as a veritable stampede, piercing through the raw hide of our skin to the souls within us. Each a horse called Trigger or Hi-Yo Silver.

Hold your horses, though, as the saying goes. I held your hands and, coincidentally, you held mine. It couldn’t be us that this is all about, surely. We never watched cowboy films, in any event, nor anything else, for that matter. After lockdown, our lower face masks had ineluctably and permanently slipped upwards, and so, without apertures for eyes, we wondered if trunks were needed at all. 

***

BELLIES UP

Every story, whatever it is about, belies its title, this being a universal truth such as mankind’s inevitable cruelty to mankind. Yesterday’s trigger warning has become today’s click and blast, as more words pour out upon the screen with a meaning that is more related to paradox than to logical connection. A meaning that exists within both these elements nevertheless. A mutual synergy of a pair of parts that belies its unnatural coupling. Whereby happy endings seem impossible in the darkening light of what was first raised above.

Jerry had spent most of his life kicking up. A small child ever predicts its larger version with grey hair. He judicially chose his optimal version on earth, so that we can, without impunity, refer to whatever he chose as the pronoun short for whatever entirety he was. This was convenient to those of us ourselves who were comfortable with thus being in the first person plural and wanted never to be forced to think about pronouns other than their surface obviousness. We are we, and ever shall be us.

We, of course, sympathised with whatever might lie within being whatever belied what lay without. Jerry told us one day that Jerry was short for Jeremiah, and if you don’t see the latter name spelt out like that and only heard it said, it might sound like a name in the same cohort of names as, say, Joanna and Jessica.

Which brings us to the core coincidence of what is spilt today as words upon our screen under the fingertips’ force of pressure that mobilises these very words, words upon words, until, the words, as ever, abruptly stop before you think the story is finished while the words of its title remain unexplained by our further wordy words beneath it. Yes, a coincidence that belies all else around it, for after Jerry married Jessica, Joanna was their first happy arrival, a happy kid that kicked up as much as Jerry — the happy beginnings of a happy ending. Words without end, for all of us.

***

It was not only the original Ada’s Byron-blood in her veins but also her early historic connections with mechanical computers that made Denzil’s version of Ada rather special. He thought about re-christening her Aida but that would have been too Verdi, too much verging on artifice than creation. Ada would have to do, especially without an Adam for her vestiges of Eve.

 Such an entity as her would ever be incomplete, and Denzil needed a balance between perfection and settling for whatever she was or had turned out to be, as was his first intention. For example, he had omitted to optimise her mathematical faculties, whilst concentrating too much on her poetic ones, a fact to which he failed to give even a second thought. She became, eventually, a rummage sale of a ‘person’, but, on and on, he still could not help testing out, within her ‘body’, brand new components that often counteracted each other, until he wished he had left well alone. This wasn’t a Mary Shelley process; it was more a slow motion metamorphosis that Kafka might have invented as fiction, had he not been too busy admiring the slopes in locations he visited. Little is known about Kafka’s slope obsession, because he generally kept it quiet. And Denzil, too, had secret preoccupations of his own that featured elbow shapes and ‘dog paths’ as well as steampunk constructions that were both old-fashioned and ground-breaking. Ada was, if anything, neither old-fashioned or ground-breaking but was simply, most of the time, quite lovely in his eyes, dressed in lace and mouthing romantic sonnets as well as algebraic equations. But the doubts still amassed on a gradual gradient.

I first met Denzil when I was researching the old customs of bazaars, jumbles and rummages as a means of raising money for religious organisations as well for charities of a more acceptable value to the sick and poor in society.  He told me about Ada, and I gathered slowly that he had got very frustrated with correcting her imperfections for them only to reveal, as a result, different imperfections. He had, in desperation, thus donated her to an organisation who happened, that very weekend, to be holding a secondhand sale in the local Hillcrest Hall. I could see the tears in his eyes for what they were, and I promised myself to visit the pick through and pick up scrimmage to see if I could salvage her and include her in my thesis for the university as well as return her later to Denzil. Imagine my consternation, when I found a far more milling crowd than I had feared; it hustled round the hall turning over discarded clothing, partially trying it on for size — and a flurry of barging folk who angled, each with sharp elbows, after choice items on the knickknack and gadget tables. But I could not mistake Ada sitting there on her own fold-up trestle, awaiting her fate, because she seemed, by her look, to trust in serendipity and eventually in a good owner.

Her smile was wry as well as sweet, as she spotted her handsome idealised Adam defiantly heading towards her through the thralls of crowd and the hubbub of near operatic solos all part of the mix of noise and background music. He turned out to be the man who I once thought was me. Neither ever gave Denzil a second thought thereafter.

 Life is an otherwise invisible series of zig-zag slopes, never too steep except in your wildest worries, but you still need perseverance to scale them.

***

A MANATEE’S MATINÉE

In the very old days, when Desmond was young, they had continuous performances of films in the smoky auditoria of cinemas, whereby, if he arrived at his tip-up seat in the middle of a film, he’d watch it from middle to middle, and still be satisfied with the plot. In older age, when ‘separate performances’, matinée and evening, came into vogue, it wouldn’t have seemed to matter, anyway how, because, by then, his mind had lost most of the plots he once pretended he had once grasped!

Thinking back into his past, now, was his habit and also his method of inhabiting the present tense.  Today, even suspense films had become artificial and staged in flashy flashbacks sometimes with blasts from some old cannon or modernistic ray gun. Drawing-room dramas with subtle innuendo and once matinée idols were far and few between, but imagine his anticipation of tantalising promise when tipped off about a film he actually might appreciate, in his twilight years, a film called ‘Man At Ease’. He never went out in the evening, so he booked the afternoon performance and duly arrived with a stub of a ticket grasped in his hand — a fact that should have given rise to suspicion, because tickets these days did not exist as they had been taken over by people scanning bar codes from a tiny screen in their hand. 

An usherette accompanied him to his seat by means of her torch. He could not see if he was in an empty or crowded auditorium, but the fact there was no smoke might have given him a clue. He was, however, bemused that the usherette had stayed with him and sat in the adjoining tip-up seat. 

The curtains swept aside from the screen, and he was worried it might be a hologram of Clark Gable that walked forth, heading his way into a barroom painting by Edward Hopper, one with a code device on its door to be swiped, but Desmond turned his attention to the now naked screen where the projector picked out shifting shapes with flippers emerging from a white backdrop, this being a liminal space now made darker by what was beamed into it, with stubby grey heads of some proportion and slowly gaping and shutting mouths, their outlines swimming as if in thick treacly smog. 

Luckily, he had come in at the end, not the middle, with flashbacks forbidden.

***

SPLINTERING HARMONIES

A haar is a sea fret, a method that mist uses so that it cannot be missed, thus eventually becoming an impediment of sight of such a threatened degree that it has to ignore the often obsolete foghorn warnings about it — by swaddling these horns or pretending they are new harmonies in an unknown work by Edgar Varèse. 

Various craft, fresh from a new historical Dunkirk, gathered in the estuary, sheltering not from a storm but by the biggest fret of all, a mass of whirling ghosts that did not need wind to summon them. The doldrums of calm were their engine of deployment in this newly imagined Sea of Sargasso spores.

Sagacious captains, each often a sole crew member upon a singular vessel, took off their heavy boots at terror of later drowning, and then tried to establish wireless connection with each other to suss out to where the customary points of the compass had drifted. To be off piste in a a widening channel without horizons was a fear more awful than simple anxiety, on the brink of terror itself. 

But ‘terror has no diary’, as the Gothic novelists once said, and silent hearsay now held full sway amid the splintering harmonies and spare parts — and within the vascular vessels of mankind, prone to bursting when a foghorn did at last find its voice close to one captain’s ear, as it happened. A siren site unmapped by any sane geography of the severing soul.

His name was Captain Saverio, degraded by the veils and floaters across his eyes as he issued his very last SOS, only to find everything was down, with no means of rebooting. The seaweed seemed not only to be tangling the rudder but climbing slowly aboard with clearer eyes than his.

Save Our Saviours, I say. A story surely cannot be a story at all, where its central protagonist is only introduced at the very finish of it, a spearcarrier to boot. 

***

THE SEMAPHORE GAMES

“Hold your horses!” broke in Arnold with complete disregard for the equestrian dressage event happening in ‘stiff upper lip’ style, shouting, as he did, from the corner of the show area where he sat in the shade of a giant brolly. He must have known a shout like that might spook any stallion worth its salt, and indeed he knew it shook his wife’s colt to its bottom belly — and he simply chuckled to himself.

With his ever being dressed in a choker of white silk at his neck, leather patches gathered in wrinkles on his elbows, over-blown pantaloons decking his otherwise scrawny hams and white-spotted spats just below his calves, Arnold had, in his fading mind, concocted a whole series of Semaphore Games where there were opening and closing ceremonies, medals of gold, silver, but no bronze for a horse’s mere brazen braying. It had to show its mettle. And medals of any colour had to be earned with whole panoplies of silent-film and slow-motion manoeuvres strictly within an enclosure as exact as a mathematical rectangle. 

Contestants had to be adept at signing for the hard of hearing, too. No loud jokes about jodhpurs. But, mischievous as Arnold was, he decided that he would  test whether they had any spine worth a stallion’s aforementioned salt by his sporadic shouting as disturbances from the sidelines. An umpire, as he considered himself to be, cheating at his own imagined rules of semaphore was one game too far, though. Even the speeches by sports dignitaries had to be done in silent mime. Only Arnold had permission to speak or even shout aloud. Hamstrung by misapplied attempts at ham acting via the fickle fetlocks of broken sanity. But even he, in old age, had to bear the consequences.

“Hold your horses!” he shouted even louder, as it occurred to him nobody had taken a blind bit of notice of his first shout. Even his wife had humoured him with a passing nod as she now cantered by on a gelding with her own back as straight as a set square and her eyes fixed like half-moon protractors. He somehow now knew that the  compass points within the rectangle were sharper than geometry allowed, and he vigorously signalled his dumb panic with the waving of previously paralysed arms. His cohort of comrades from the peninsular war ever said he was jolly well overdressed for his age. Arnold’s old spine now stiffer than his wife’s side saddle. Even the show jumping of his heart was now merely hopping to a drum without sticks to bang it. A bronze medal for a life lived, never likely to have been just a head short of beaten gold.  

***

PANDEMONIUM AT THE VICARAGE

Although most in the village had long known it as the Rectory, or dubbed the Clergy House by a rare few others, but from where that ‘although’ followed was the first mystery, remaining a conundrum more devious than a deliberately devised whodunnit, hence this full stop.  

Shaking off any booby-trap endings, this narration persisted with references to a priest or vicar, also known as the Reverend Thomas Apse, but the same narration had a tiny few of the villagers calling him Father Tom when shouting across the street, the latter name being a more famous name in annals other than this one. Names were either names or not names, however many times one used the word name.

A stranger in a bobble hat was a visitor to the village, eager for shelter, and also seeking a friendly church deacon or sexton to chat to about ghosts and gravestones, so that he could feel cosy and swaddled safe, with no danger from mysteries other than traditional ones of tales told around a cheery fireside.  Flaming logs or coals preferred, but even a single-bar electric heater would suffice.  The stranger sighed with relief, as he saw a friendly cleric emerge from what appeared to be the only church, but then there came another with a broad beam of a smile, well, two was perhaps even better than one such cleric. However, when a smiling, often grinning, series of clerics, some with dog collars, others with white dangly bows, began to troop out to welcome him, the stranger shivered, then shuddered with a frisson of warm fires lost and darknesses of inchoate mystery inherited. Too much of a good thing… as the misrembered saying started. He made up the rest of it.

Father Tom, the friendliest of all the holy hosts who had welcomed our stranger, relaxed back in the firelight, after an untold period of upheaval in events, sitting beside his verger as a misnomer for villager or sexton, while rocking a bobble-hatted baby in a prêt à manger. …makes an upper case God lower. The most mysterious of all mystery plays, empty stop.

***

THE SCARRED FACE

C.S. Lewis rhymes with D.F. Lewis, exactly letter by letter. And one of them wrote of Ardua who was her own worst enemy. Dressed in finery fit for a different century, she peered at her face in the mirror, a face that showed a thousand stories, a mirror that contained many more. If she had been a soldier in the peninsular war at the cusp of the Big Change, she could not have had so many scars that were more permanent than the tattoos on the rest of her body, and she thought deeply, too deeply, some say.

These were not exactly memories but conceits that created a person she had never been. However, they were her memories, too, some she shared with others in the recent trials and tribulations of border skirmishes. Faces passed intermittently  before her in the mirror, a few even without scars, yet you could tell that all had travelled through adversity to the stars. Through adversity to the stars. As above, so below. Just the tip of the glacier that was her. The wardrobe of roles-to-play-act-or-to-placate that made up the whole of Ardua. The same wardrobe upon the front of which the mirror into which she peered was fixed.

But not fixed well enough. If the ice cap fits, wear it, she thought, as she clambered into the relatively tight-fitting  wardrobe, as cramped itself as any costume she could make herself flaunt; she heard the mirror crack like ice with an unholy screech that felt like a slow unfrozen calving from the Arctic wastes of Anarchia, yes, as if the mirror outside the wardrobe door that she had shut too quickly and firmly behind her had now found its final faultline. Only vampires could screech that loudly at seeing no reflection from the mirror into which they peered, one by one, each giving an eventual sigh of sorrow and a shake of the head in resignation, in the end, mutual worst enemies to that very end. From blue tattoos to varicose flues as synonyms for limbs, from ingested bloods to congested cuds for calves as halves of what they once were as an intrinsic herd, indeed, from the very scars down below to the very stars up above, per Ardua had in fact climbed aboard a craft called Narnia. The latter pair of proper nouns, though, merely a loose assonance of names, not a rhyme at all, until realising her actual proper name in Narnia was Tania, her very best friend as exact end-echo of end.

POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (7)

 CHANCERY AVENUE

A man who could only count to twelve and blew kisses with a ‘have on you’ outburst of spittle, passed by but not before ushering in the story of George in an ill-go-rhythm of words. 

Indeed, for this George, ‘chancery’ was an expression he used to describe life itself, life being a phenomenon that was never subject to any conceivable law, but simply a rash of randomnesses, yes, a chancery of mazy mischances! A happenstance of devils and gods masquerading as rulers under their own laws, but really they were agents of enforced angles for angels that did not exist. George’s own spiritual geometry was certainly not a whimsical set of conspiracy theories, but his sense of chancery was paradoxically steeped in a yearning for such certainty —  that an after life was already waiting for him. Death was one further shake of the dice for his counter to be moved to a different board of ruled-out squares. George mischievously sniffed at the fate he set himself to follow while all along believing in it faithfully. Snakes and ladders made a ludo of everyone, once upon a time. Geology a loess of nous or gneiss.

But how can such ‘certainty’ of a yearned-for after life be reconciled with any sense of chancery in the terms that George had prescribed it? A lawless law that filled every court of the land now prevailed and, as some may say, had been increasingly demonstrated towards where such a loss happened for real today. Judges in wigs who were just as fallible as George sat in benches of illogical infallibility disguised as the ultimate logic of logic itself. Teachers for third-formers in schools had set squares that bent and wavered with every quirk of character and opposing personality. The only real certainty, George finally realised, was the art of mathematics. This ‘art’, like other arts, was, however, just another moving feast of interpretation about uncertainty leading to an aesthetic pleasure at such crafted designs of beauty or constructive distastes for dystopia. His template of contemplation, meantime, became as abstract or amorphous as what made him have the thoughts that are adumbrated here in his name by the imprecision of words. The empirical rigour of experimental rules that now told his story by a snort of disdain from a passing stranger instead of by an intoning of evidence gathered for scrutiny.

George sat in his wig, presiding over the guilt or innocence of every jury member that had been brought in before him, gathered off the street by chance choice in such a grouping of twelve, each of them staring up at him with passive eyes. No single person among them to be tried, except all or none of them. A few jurors he seemed to know, the others not, or forgotten. They spoke, by a unison voice, their vows of ‘nothing but the truth’ to an intrusive usher with a bible. Witnesses were called, but none of them come to this façade of something deeper than what is plainly told. 

“Nothing but the truth,” George echoed in a ritual refrain, again and again. And he muttered to himself of irrational numbers and the value of nothing in the quadratic avenues of algorithms disguised as school algebra. Were there candelabra in heaven? Fiery torches in hell? Protractors within the otherwise empty clockcases of time? Even a sad judge like George had a speck of Judas in his soul, as he placed a pitch black cloth on his head, and sneezed into the open courtroom of twelve jurors without intervention of hands or hankie. The latter was already aloft on his wig. The formers’ fingers making signs of blessing.

***

THE BRICKLAYER’S DILEMMA

Or 

The Disconnecteed Diptych

(i)

They carefully laid the vinyl recording of ‘Suite Italienne’ on the gramophone turntable. The hole in the middle of the dog and horn label neatly fitted the short spindle, after a judicious wiggling of it into place. No autochange device for them as that might have damaged the vulnerable grooves. 

In those old days, one did not need to specify the ‘vinyl’ epithet to disconnect it from the more compact version that eventually — we now know — followed it. And ‘one’ was an even more fitting  pronoun than ‘you’ to distinguish ‘them’ from me.

As the sapphire needle hit the grooves running, they awaited the seemingly untypical Stravinsky sounds to delight them, having forgotten that the suite’s actual ‘tunes’ derived from the more familiar name of Pulcinella. 

The day-job on the site had taken a lot out of them, and now was the time to relax with music. A hod full of back-breaking bricks on their back had to be managed skilfully so that the unbroken bricks stayed unbroken. Their own back, too. An occupation of two distinct disciplines: the first of loads and balances in a heavy-lifting exercise of utter strength and the second of Dick Whittington marching off to London with his small bag of belongings as ballast to the shoulder stick he forgot was resting in his hand, the downward pressure of which was, as if by magic, a counterweight to what belonged to him, then the skilful yet disciplined laying of bricks into set patterns of formulaic stability — the cement between being the story material that held all these disconnected building blocks of plot and character together. 

(ii)

In the old days, just after the cusp of heavy-lifted 78s became lighter-weight 45s, there were songs about seeing an alligator later, about purple people-eaters. Johnny with his hurricanes. Charlie Gracie’s butterfly. Duane’s bass guitar. Buddy’s pointy leaves. And a not so familiar name these days, thus forgotten, who had a one-hit wonder with The Song of Builder Matilda. You could hear all such songs – even Builder Matilda – on mighty wurlitzers of the musical spirit called Juke Boxes each with a tentacular arm taking its pick from the shuttling whorl of black discs and slapping it down … the disc’s middle missing: punched out – and, indeed, in those days, one never heard a single middle, but just the beginnings and ends. Like the whole of life, with things going blurred with strangeness in one’s twenties and thirties — and since dying in one’s fifties those fuzzy years became your lost middle. The middle that was punched out to make a bigger empty hole … so that the brimming music could be threaded by the chunky central spindle as it dropped with a plop upon a round rubber mat that all those Juke Boxes had at their spinning heart. Where the revolutions per minute were, should they be counted. Where the grooving was. Where the friction was. Where the needle was. Where the needle sometimes got stuck, hanging from your pick-up like a huge foreign insect with a tubular torso. 

Yes, that was their lost middle. Once upon a time, though, they woke up to find themselves barely forty-five, let alone fifty, however much judicious wiggling they did to make themselves even younger at thirty-three! They looked downhill in both directions of coming and going. Yearning for the spires of an imaginary Heaven, not London Town. Finally, they even hoped to meet their God and Maker, their own Builder Matilda in the skies. A ‘continuous performance’ of old cinema days.

You’d forgotten your name. But it came back to you briefly when you reached the magical age of seventy-eight  – before you forgot your name or its replacement code yet again: this time forgotten forever. ‘Forever’ here is doing a lot of heavy-lifting for just one word’s meaning, I guess.  A back with countless backs to carry.

***

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUSTBIN

There was no mishap for it, Brad thought.  The lady, blousey and boozy Louise, was not his girl friend simply because his ex had dumped him for another dude, but good old Louise was someone he would have dated anyway, even if his latest ex had never been his ex in the first place or now remained a prospect who he hoped one day would become an ex ex. 

He really must put that particular ex in the final exit of his mind, and to concentrate on Lady Louise, or Big L as he thought of her, a woman with an even bigger heart, and to settle down for a while, when such whiles, these days, could last for a lifetime or at least for a hop, skip and jump of time which would seem like a lifetime.

Brad had done Big L a big injustice; she was never boozy at all. He just liked the word that seemed to go with ‘blousey’, the latter epithet only being true in plainly objective terms by dint of the fact that she often wore a floral one — with a skirt to nearly match it and with far more make-up than his previous ex would ever have considered for temporary  use on her face let alone as permanent tattoos on her legs and arms. The nose rings were common to both ladies, it had to be said. All such marks and trinkets, meantime, told their own backstories, which he needed to ‘read’ as far as possible before even contemplating linking up with their fronts. No, if the real truth were told, it was Brad who was the boozy one. Lazy, too, unlike either lady. 

He tried to scribble all this down before he became a self-induced write-off and to get his thoughts as straight as the lines of the eventual printed version, while casting himself in the third person singular. Nothing could be made up, and with no false appendages, but merely to set out the unvarnished truth. But he needed sustenance to get the awkward text skimmed off to reveal a more unpretentious clarity. The beery belly was his downfall, though, in his room empty of any ladies, let alone invented ones! Shortlisted for the slush pile with one mishop of love’s rebound into his own softening footprints behind him. A surly lady with earrings on a stool had raised a red flag, anyway. He should dust himself off before he became the has-been he had always been.

At least, with regard to the beer, that was his measure beyond which he never went, so thankfully he had never resorted to anything harder. This was difficult enough.

***

THE ALEXANDER QUADRANGLE

Alexander once loved Hannah, until the palindromic novelty of her name wore off. Which is hardly the correct context for later when he coincidentally — because of his own name — encountered the ‘The Alexander Quadrangle’ terminology in textbook of medical exercises, and he immediately thought of some painful sessions in the wrangling out of already existing pains by a mathematical theory involving four sided shapes, that inevitably meant four different angles of manipulative traction. The mediaeval rack was not even close. The impending incentive of a morning star that would kiss his brows if he did not comply was only at the back of the mind, if a consideration at all.

No, none of these things, and Alexander soon gathered the terminology related to a place that really existed. A geometric area of walkway between the buildings of a college that the students called a quad. There had been some demonstrations, with flags, about it not being called Alexandra, but such demands soon died a death after the Big Change. One little old lady with a red flag stating ‘We want DER not DRA’, however, did remain upon sit-in but she ended up being a diaphanous bag-lady whom everyone turned a blind eye to. She probably was never there at all. Often, later  she returned as a real ghost present at one angle of the rhombus shape that was between the science block and the English literature one, the library at another angle, and shoppery in yet another, and she was known as the ‘earring lady’ because she often rang each one in front of the student accommodation that towered at the end of the liminal space that she then occupied in the said quad. The hindsight fact, though, was that everyone wanted the DER alone and not the DRA, the latter to be airbrushed from history, even to the extent that nobody knew there once was a Princess Alexandra in England, a stately lady who gave out degree certificates without anyone blinking an eyelid. No connection with the so-called earring ghost, however.

Alexander sighed, just as he terminated his research there. He had not realised that tinnitus could be a terminal disease. The Belltower of Babel the climbing of which gave him vascular vertigo that no amount of misangled yoga could cure. A pain he could not bear, until he changed his name to Barbara.

***

CIRCULATING LIBRARY

The Babel Stockroom was the most useful part of the library with carrels galore to use for private study, as silent as the name wasn’t! I ways had to laugh at that. But even serious bibliophiles needed a sense of humour when wading through dusty coughs of tome after dusty tome each with hard covers, all spines embossed by letters of gold. Paradoxically, their dry contents often brought a smile to the ugly face, as I thought of my lead Professor who had set me the task of trawling such boarded-up texts for knowledge for which he would later take credit. His name was Asinine, or at least that was how it sounded when on the gleefully whispering lips of my fellow students ambitious for would-be degrees as Masters. Well, to be serious for a moment, Professor Asternine was a wise old soul but a bit set in his ways. Whatever we told him about the carrels from within which the library seemed more like a dizziness induced by a screen than a steady book in the hand, it was like water off his duck’s back. We called it the Great Giddiness, as the whole world, outside of the words we pored over, seemed to go round and round, while the studious carrel in which we sat remained as still and silent as a forgotten pin-cushion in these library galleries with meaning-opposite names. Imagine my consternation, when, one day, I heard the pad-pad of old Asinine’s slippers, evidently coming to check on my progress. I quickly took to studiously riffling the pages of the biggest book I could muster from the pile of volumes on my carrel desk. Only to find it wasn’t a book at all but a sort of ring-folder with foxed and crimped papers clamped in a dissorted pile within it. So not exactly a ring-folder but a box-file, this being a developing situation, as I turned my face up to give the new arrival a weak smile. It was a ring-folder, after all, as I heard the beginnings of why this was the Babel Stockroom, with a quasimodo of peals making iron echoes in the humid air around me. Volumes with volume. I clamped my hands to my ears, and closed my eyes. I always wondered why these relatively small carrels needed a revolving chair more fitting for an open-plan office rather than it being a static seat on firm wooden struts, an antique chair on four legs if possible, I now asked.  I felt a touch on my elbow as if to staunch the developing situation developing any further. At least this was sanctuary from the more inimical worlds outside, spinning uncontrolled beyond these relatively peaceful groves of learning inside the library. I had been steadied in my student anxieties by one single touch on the elbow, enabling me to ignore what went on below the plimsoll line of a typical student’s mental ill-health as caused by such a boarded-up lockdown. Even the pealing bells had been blocked. I started coughing again. To be serious for another moment, I had forgotten I had bluetooths hidden in my lugs. Oh, to be in one of the library’s Vertigo Rooms further up in the attic area. A mansion, if not a tower, without roof or chimneys. The air would be fresher, if colder, but with teetering views at which to scream! A sense of humour, remember.

***

PENITENTIAL PSALMS

Those designated as Penitential Psalms are numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. And when Danielle looked at these numbers, she was convinced she saw a mathematical sequence in them. She had originally been brought up in the religion for which these psalms were important. But today, in middle age, she was aggravated by such a religion, and scorned it as strongly as any lapsed member of it could possibly do. She had become more interested in numbers and their nature than in the ineffable or the numinous she had been taught as a child. This new interest was not a conspiracy-theory sort of numerology, but a genuine belief in the power of numbers being greater than words. Numbers themselves ordered with consecutive letters as Providential Psalms. Algebraic  psalms that had (a), (b), (c) &c. as their reference points. Her new boy friend — one in a long line of others — looked askance at her methods of self-worth, and he declared suddenly that he was an avid faith-healer, and before she could knock the relationship on the head at such an admission, he explained that he used the Penitential Psalms as an instrument in cleansing and thus healing his clients, and perhaps such a coincidence proved that they should stay together forever. She had struggled long with the aforementioned sequence of Psalm numbers in the Bible, and now she was shaken to the core, that her interest in numbers, in actual fact, could be fully in synergy with religion, however numinous the latter was. Danielle picked up the Bible she’d owned since the death of her parents and naturally started revisiting it via the Book of Numbers until … meaning, meaning, words written in a mysterious hand upon her bedroom wall, soon trickling off into meaningless numbers. Amen.

He got his coat. 

***

ALICE LEAVES HOME

“And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good?” — Oliver Onions, from THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS (1935)

Till now, of course.

And what of Alice? She never found her own wonderland wherein she could rule the roost over red-hearted queens and teflon pans. “Six sixes are thirty six,” she often intoned to herself, in a refrain that could last forever if she had enough breath to mutter it under. Afternoon teas spreading around her like nostalgia sweetened by angels. Beneath the tablecloth, just bare wood, stained with older meals when the noisy individuals were under her thumb, and public bars were crowded just for her flirting banter. An invisible smile upon her face disguised as a real one. She had their measure, these evil rulers of big cities where such tyrants sat in offices and counted as far as ten. They could not multiply, only divide by intent and arithmetical error. Till they zoomed off to goodness knows where, perhaps a raftered attic that became an open plan workplace, a virtual vista upon money-making without resort to the foul breath of other mortals. If Alice had lived long enough, she’d’ve never worn a light blue mask but welcomed everyone with a kind kiss or, at least a handshake still dirty from travelling. Elbow to elbow would never be a thing for her, had she lived long enough, I say, had she lived long enough, I say, her wayward grandson’s own repeated refrain.  

She once treadled the Singer machine with cigarette ash growing from the filter end lolling in her mouth.  She’d sometimes laugh and do a defiant jig, and then left home for her own open plan vista, a reality far below of small houses and trains, a place to which she hastened, before the tyrants learnt to lie through their teeth with the conviction of mad hatters. All became evil compared to her good. And there was another refrain forgotten even upon the point of remembering it. Alice did come home again, however, but to whose home? She now the queen of red hearts. And where is she now? Tatting and tutting, no doubt. Playing in her post-advancement with the patience of biro wordgames, as was her regular wont down here. I do the same, sort of, in my miniature way, while still advancing, but just as wayward as her.

There’s always hope after the latest now. Not too small, not too big. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

***

WHERE ZELENKA AND ZORN COME TOGETHER

Trigger warning: this Miniature of mine in several keys ends with a bathetic neologism. Jan Dismas Zelenka, the Baroque composer, somehow found himself listening to the Beatles. He had heard nothing like it since creating, painstakingly on handwritten staves, his own version of ‘Dixit Dominus’ but with a unique ‘Amen’ as imprimatur for posterity. He had studied all the Psalms, true, but why he chose no. 113 as his baseline remains a mystery, bearing in mind that those designated as Penitential Psalms had been numbered 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143. A magical sequence of mathematics to die for, give or take an occasional Visitor from Porlock — a tantalising run of numbers  that 113 could only occlude, scholars said. 

John Zorn — the avant garde jazz musician of much later in the essential sequence of words and numbers if not in the normal timelines upon our world — was also said, by scholars, to compose in the ‘classical’ idiom, thus straddling the styles as well as the chasms of history, whereby, quite unpremeditatedly, insects scaled up from between the symphonic staves of Kalevi Aho and, surely, given impossible hindsight, such crawling notations became the monsters that overtook a human dystopia that once had already claimed victory over the humans who had caused it in the first place. At source. Then as well as now. A palimpsest of Z with Z, and the rest of the alphabet cloaked in a defunct future of hopeless salvation.

Ah, men. Two dismal-looking old ones could be seen scrabbling in the wastebin at the park’s entrance near where I lived, struggling to seek I know not what. I peered through my watchful binoculars, through which I blamed many things that I saw, and chuckled when they voraciously tugged out piles of musical scores but nothing I assumed they could have wanted to find to eat. Ah ha, how wrong I was. I found myself, in fact, treated with a viable vision of visionary visible music as they took blowable and scrapeable and bangable implements from their pockets, therefrom to soar with the figurative angels into space, our only means of space-craft with the name Psalmation embossed on its side, as it turned out, to escape what we had irretrievably done to the world, i.e. that  perfect storm of synchrocities with consequent diaspora, all aligned with what had also crept upon us, almost unawares, from every point of the compass. Points that had become unaccountable numbers, not the usual letters of N, S, W, and E. Music in ricochet with music and a recurrent ‘big bang’ to hang onto until the closing Amen. The last chance Psalmoon. 

POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (6)

 SHOWER TALK

Angus knew many people had their best thoughts when showering themselves at the beginning of the day. Many, too, sang songs there.  A few, though, actually talked to themselves, as if addressing nobody but the power-driven spray that spread over them in fleeting seconds of time and then vanished down the outlet grille. Angus’ opening gambit of speech — after first stepping into the blinding palaver of potential lather that became as ephemeral as life itself — was to enunciate in a false voice of adopted slang: “Hello, John’s gotta new mottah!” The ‘o’ in the corrupted spelling of ‘mottah’ being strung out beyond temporality to represent ‘motor’ as a stretched limo. ‘Hello’, too, extended into gustily drawled syllables of mock Cockney. He somehow knew subconsciously that this word was often spelt as ‘hallo’ or ‘hullo’. Rarely the latter, although he’d seen it thus in official print.

Then, as if any sort of behaviour were allowed without being called weird, he told himself short stories in the shower — aloud!  Short stories that were  shortened into Drabbles — the latter being the official dictionary term for witty caprices of prose comprising exactly one hundred words each. Soon as spoken, though, forgotten. Otherwise, Angus would’ve had a million such Drabbles to impart to paper and posterity. Alexei Sayle, the instigator by means of his song’s expression serving as the title of each one, would be proud to have been such a prompter of potential literature via the whimsical auspices of Angus himself, even though any such triggered Drabbles tended to fizzle out into the residual dribbles of the shower’s now spent motive force. An unseemly spluttering that became a single drip that dangled seemingly forever from the drooping head.

The actual caprice above was not a Drabble at all, Angus guessed by miscounting its words. But it was one simply about one — a miniature doubled down upon paper in the showy longhand of official perpetuity by someone else whose proper name posterity falsely shortened to John.

***

A TOWN CALLED FARRAGO

I find myself gradually becoming more forgetful. However, it is fascinating to study, in real-time, the gestalt of this personal entropy phenomenon from within myself. A slip solipsism during which process my acts of music listening, dabbling in photography and writing fiction miniatures are an invaluable support along with the equally invaluable support of my close family, closely followed by my on-line ‘friends’ whom I ‘follow’, some of them quite closely, who may be closely reading this. Closeness as a form of unknown beyonds. Reading or reviewing fiction books, processes increasingly beyond me, with concentration now creating farragos of meaning and purpose instead of synchronicities and serendipities. Connections only disconnect, yes, no big deal. Just wanted to put all this out there.

Although your fresh fiction books are now bereft of my attention, they will still exist without me. As does everything else, but where does truth stop and fiction begin, the exhausted stranger wonders, checking his watch to see if it’s his best time he’s done today or not. Closely followed, he stares into a shop window and becomes a breathless character in a story that this should have been at the start. A shop window with nothing but minimal residua behind it, and most of the other shops are shuttered, but many people still mill about on the sea front or flap about in the sluggish sea, especially today when confusion reigns as a synonym of an earlier word I have now forgotten. The pier still thrives and the sea front’s gardens are well cultivated but the town’s hinterland is more of a conundrum. A fiction miniature that becomes a mock marathon of Innsmouth amphibians like wild mini-brains scattering from the Pavilion Bowl intent on winning the marathon race in different directions of marked-out routes, with breaths lost at each beat of their presumed hearts. It is what it is forever; you can even read it beyond its finishing line because the words can chase themselves beyond the throwing arcs of an umpire’s time measurement — even after the author of this forgotten farrago has vanished and thus ceased writing it. Closely followed by what never followed it at all. And I try to disown most of its racing beyond its own beyond, but I know the invaluable paragraph above this second paragraph still stands. Its ink never running.

***

THE BLIGHTED WRANGLER

Candlelight hardly ever works well on dark breezy beaches. Whether it was dealing with disputes between people or the handling of horses, there was no doubt that Edwin could be called a wrangler supreme. I suppose that was because he was effective at both activities, if not simultaneously! Georgina first met Edwin when she, too, was groomed to be a groom while at an important racing stable doubling as a ranch in the USA. And they both got involved in political divisions amid the rest of the stable staff, a climate of prejudices that prevailed at that time and in that place, and the nature of the bitter polarities involved can now be easily empathised with. Since then, history has passed on, as it always does, and the pair of them coincidentally parted company on the cusp of the Big Change. But, by complete chance, they met again in England during this country’s latest Civil War, on the north east Essex coast, where they happened to be employed as camp adjutants on the edge of an erstwhile seaside holiday resort. A camp once called Butlins long before either had been born. They had been issued with neighbouring chalets that were more like bivouacs, and Georgina could not help noticing that Edwin had aged considerably, far more so than the number of ensued years should have accounted for. A strawberry mark in the shape of a tiny face had appeared on his right elbow as if it had always been a birthmark. But she knew it wasn’t, until, she began to doubt if he was the same man, despite having common memories with her from when they were supposedly in America together. There was something slightly ‘off’ in his behaviour or demeanour that nagged at her.  Something out of kilter with the man she used to know. Not a previous fling exactly, but certainly a friendship that went beyond friendship. It was no accident that the word ‘blight’ was only one letter more than ‘light’, or the latter one letter short, and which of them articulated this oblique conceit remains a type of mystery that one stares into the grey waves of the North Sea to somehow solve. She imagined herself back into the old days on the so-called ranch, wondering which branch of destiny each had taken since then. Both self-evidently seemed to have been through the wringer. On later scrutiny close-up, she saw that the tiny face on his elbow was hers. Still, she often tended to see faces in the clouds when anybody else would see none. It depended on the light, and whether the light was coming or going. A glow, glimmer, twinkle or direct beam in equine eyes to be tamed. A scarlet sparkle from a fire’s reflection in a stirrup cup of celebratory wine. And Georgina heard Edwin’s whispers about wars. Wars for her ears alone. Strangely calming rather than inflaming whispers as they shivered — shilly-shallying together on the cold sand — wondering whether to break open the tins of beef-jerky they had stolen from a beach hut near the open concrete wastes where the Butlins holiday camp used to be situated before the Big Change was finally flung across the Atlantic, later to slowly infiltrate England. But it was the latter country that had already snuffed out its light by more than just the figurative red sea’s division from nearer neighbours across a far narrower body of waves than the Atlantic. Whispers can be mangled in both directions of sound, squeezing echoes into roughly ranged ranks of tamed insistence. Mark my words.

***

SPIKY BALLS

The singular star rose prematurely, even before dawn was possible. Then another, and another, static meteors or asteroids, as they sparkled steadfastly and, once risen, remained in perfect stasis. If stars’ sparkles could be described as spikes, these were the nearest to the latter that George had witnessed to being such. He had himself risen before dawn, thinking tritely that it is ever darkest just before dawn, but, even now, dawn seemed as far away as ever, with no sign of its presence moving like a glowing worm along the still invisible horizon.  

To imagine finite borders to reality was as easy as daydreaming within durably daydreamy minds. George perched himself on his bungalow’s stoep and tried to outstare the stationary stars. Were these signs that the borders of anyone’s mind had already been transcended and he was witnessing something his mind did not understand even if he himself did. If such distinctions were possible.

“Hey, George, why you up?”

The voice he heard from the eaves area of the bungalow was one with which he was long familiar. But he had only started mourning its absence since an untimely passing a few months before. 

“Just morning star-gazing, my dear,” he heard his own voice respond.

“It is nowhere near morning, George. Get back to bed!”

By now, the spiky points of light had sphered out into blobs or bobbles, as tiny as they were circular. They were no longer bearing suspect outer streaks as appendages or pointing fingers that betokened whatever journeyed forth upon their beams had already left and were even now stooping towards where George sat chewing on the fat of old age, as if all cockpit airlocks within each star had turned shyly in on themselves. Not that George was fat at all. His own bony fingers pointed inward like ulna drifts.

He smiled as he felt a touch on his elbow as she had always touched him when wanting him to turn round and have a hug.

***

BELLEROPHON

Ralph worked as a bellhop in an American hotel where such assistants-for-guests were still called bellhops. Ralph being of Welsh / English stock knew that bellhops were once called bellboys in London in the heyday of hotels such as the Regent Palace, and eateries such as the Lyons Corner Houses that had silver tiers of assorted cakes to go with infusions of tea just like the Ritz. His English father had played in a Palm Court Ensemble in one such Corner House. Ralph’s Welsh mother had returned to Llanelli, hoping one day the Olympics would arrive there and she would be asked to be umpire for the Long Jump, and furnished with a stool together with flags of red and white to wave. This had been her forte. Which word returned Ralph’s thoughts to the Forte restaurant group that once employed him as a scullery assistant. How he had become a bellhop in America is a longer story than this one. 

The New York hotel in question had  suites named after Greek mythology such as Chimera and Pegasus, and somehow Ralph knew instinctively that reality was made up of connections and synchronicities that could not be accounted for by common sense. His mother had taught him this about life, while his scorning father once told him that he had his head in the clouds. But, defiantly, he said he hoped that would always be the case.

One day, he had to answer a call to the guests in the top floor Chimera suite and to fight off all manner of sexual importuning. But that was not important enough, however, to mar the rest of his life, but he carried thereafter a vague burden of boredom, but he obviated it with imaginary wings instead of his elbows and took a long run before escaping each day into the wide wide sky with a wild bray of abandon. Silver tears often ran down his leonine face. Somehow, though, his face should have been equine. Any consequence of the tears sculling along cracks in both cheeks below were merely coincidental even when hardening as an argent mineral. Meantime, from the mazy associations of thought, the random boreholes of fateful lucky-dip, the mingled destinies of desire, the chance encounters of wartime and the often obscure corners of history, there always arrive better things via the byways of intrinsic hope. He had learnt that from himself, and no one else.

***

HENDERSON’S ROTATOR CUFF

He knew, as Hender’s son, that whatever adversity affected the shoulder would end up creating audible creaks in the rest of the arm as well as visible winces aloft. He toyed with the gold fastener that clipped the bottom collar of his bad arm’s sleeve, an item of scape-coat that terminated with such a collar at the wrist, while primly covering the rest of the arm above, including the unmentionable joint on the way down, between the shoulder and the wrist. Hender had once taught his son that such a wrist collar should be like a turntable for a train, only turned when there was a train upon it who wanted to change direction on a single track. Hender had once written a text book about it and actually made some money from it when people used to buy and sell things on-line, long out of fashion since the Variable Wrist Syndrome was virally repetitive enough to stop people risking stationary mid-arm ulna drift. This compelled them to revive pen and paper devices before the fingers followed any unmentionable joints or hinges towards their own bony winces of pain and decay and ultimate namelessness as aforementioned fingers. Hender, by the hindmost of lost hindsight, if he were still alive, would no doubt feel guilty about his son’s ear that he had euphoniously muffed for not listening to him — incubating an infection that soon spread along the neck to the upper arm, after having the ear clipped if not muffed and, then, wrenched round as if there were no gracefully artful way to train pain into tamer symptoms or to reclaim, by cropped rotation, those bigoted people still stuck stationary on the same track all their lives without pen and paper to describe their reasons for such stubbornness. Why the ‘shoulder’ alone — with its traditional label still intact — was left incriminated (the arm having by now vanished, through being blocked  from the mind up its own solipsistic sleeve) was something Hender had hypothesised about in his notable book, i.e. that something, before it escaped, had to, well, ‘accept’ blame with its proper name!

***

THE PINCERS’ RETURN

The scrutineer took the screenprint about crustaceans in hand and sighed. He, for one, knew well enough that ‘pincers’ as a tool was or were always pincers whether singular or plural. Unlike pincers on insects. Pincers as tools differed significantly from pliers in meaning and use. However, he did not want this to be a pedantic study in prescriptive wordplay, but how does one change a screenprint once it is a screenprint. Scrunch it into a ball and throw it away, he thought, then go back to the computer, make any alterations, then create a fresh screenprint. He wasn’t paid much as a scrutineer, so any extra time spent would be ill-spent, so he decided to let the screenprint stand and advise the customer how to attach it later as  photo or pdf document. Cutting such corners however meant that the photo fell off the album page and he would have to go back to Boots the chemist for another negative. A further saving he made was not having a darkroom. But don’t waste macadam for a pennyworth of tar, as he thought the old saying went. He mused on his dilemma, considered the conundrum of pincers and whether they would ever be found again, having been lost in a bottomless tool chest in the garage. So he decided to bring in the Recruiters, a voluntary organisation of half seekers of lost changers and other remotes, and the other half being accomplices of the lost items themselves. Such individuals would be half the battle won at least. They knew where the pincers were, even if they weren’t letting on. He visited their office with Recruiters and Suppliers emblazoned on their barcode above the door that jingled when you opened it. Men looking like the Two Ronnies were standing behind the counter and staring as if they dared the scrutineer to fully enter and approach where they stood. They obviously had ‘find’ facilities on their handhelds as shortcuts, having omitted much of the narrative exchanges that intervened between recruitment and eventual supply of the lost item. And there is no way that the lost details can be supplied, as this is a screenprint, not an editable document. IMPORTANT: Hold it between the teeth of the supplied tool for fear of contamination via the fingers as prehensile pincers themselves. Maybe too late by now.

***

KINDRED HATS

They are kind, very kind. Gwen knew that the members stood or fell from that sense of hat, a togetherness they imparted to others, a complicity of like with like. That hat in particular, the Platonic Form of Hat with its intrinsic rouge radiating out in several directions toward other hats of various styles and fashions, some more fascinating than others. It was usually a pipe dream most of the time, but today it had become real. Gwen knew she was not allowed the luxury of ‘dream’, whether a pipe one or not, because dreaming only happened by accident as well as with a degree of self-indulgence that bordered on solipsism. Everything could be explained away by dream, but that was far too easy; it was that hat that mattered — that hat that sat as the optimum crowning of the day, whereby Kings and Queens were born. Gwen welcomed the other members of the Kindred Hats with a smile, as she knew instinctively it was a red letter day. A special epiphany, untarnished by religion or other false hopes. It just was. It was not only optimal, but perfect. Nobody spilt anything, nobody backbited during the manicured cucumber sandwiches, no quibbles of who was mother when the teapot of infused redbush took its turn in the proceedings, no quirks of unchiming humour over what was happening in the day to day world, indeed no political debate at all. It was a stasis of how she had ever dreamt a Kindred Hat day might be able to pass. With smiles and bonhomie, followed by a pre-organised trip to the zoo.

But, of course, that was where it went wrong. The turnstiles of entry were stiff to turn, indeed rusted up, the attendant surly, the giraffes with the shortest necks she had ever seen, tigers muted by their own mewing, and there was, of course, the essence of elephant itself. An elephant that had been left unmentioned in the room where they earlier had tea. Not a way to finish off this otherwise perfect expression of what had happened. An elephant with a huge smoking pipe in its mouth instead of a trunk. ‘Tsk, tsk,’ said Gwen, irritated. 

***

OLIVE VILLA’S DEMISE

Is a large house with a frontage-wide balcony always a villa? The eponymous lady — who sat sedately on a bench in Clacton seafront’s ’Spanish Garden’ near the pier — often loved words for their own sake, and somebody she once knew bore a name that was in strong assonance with an alternative word for ‘passing’. She herself had been roughly named after a large balconied house in a small town just along the coast from where she sat; the town had Naze in its name, and the house in question was near a different pier belonging there from time immemorial. She remembered a small boy who lived in the house in the early 1950s, and, even further back, she summoned up a residential houseboat called ‘Onward’ moored on the Naze-named town’s backwaters, where, as it happened, the lady imagined she had lived with her own mother for a while during what they called ‘the war’. But that begged many questions of who begat whom in a seedy top-floor flat above what is now a Baguette shop even closer to the pier than the large house. How it was possible that the oasis of unworried time in the large house — with often friendly ghosts on the landing — should have thus happened between the seedy flat and the abode that has yet to be invented in this ‘storylet’, i.e. a small downtrodden terraced back-to-back —  near the backwaters that flooded it during the 1953 storm — where the young boy later lived. Even the Baguette shop is now something different. Everything changes. Even wars bore their own alternate assonances. So, onward, soldier from Wales. Never falter, friendly ghost. The old lady lifted herself from the Clacton bench on a sea’s wide frontage and imagined where she had lived, throughout her life, abode by abode. Her last being on the tip of the Naze itself — unless she was beguiled  by some well-begotten blend of life and death that made places and people in life, as collateral damage, seem confused by the words used to name them. Words for inanimate things, too, are often misnomers. The title given me by someone called Denise, however, prompted such craft afloat, whatever the passing storms of mind and body borne upon or within them. Each mooring-place is for pausing. And who knows if pauses ever pass. Each mother who gives shelter to another mother.