THE PERIWINKLE WATERFLOWER
It usually grew near — or even in — waterfalls. Mainly near, because it didn’t endure long enough to be seen when actually budding in such downward rushes. Why am I so concerned to impart this information? I told Sally why, but she’s too shy to tell others in case they engage her in conversation. Maybe it was her size that made her self-conscious. Or the flecks affecting her skin. So I thought I’d better write at least some of this down before my knowledge of matters would be lost. Periwinkle is a colour between blue and purple as well as an item of nature study in itself. Bless its heart. Brings out a smile when I think of it, especially as a colour that Sally often wears as the colour of speckled designs in her frocks. She often called it lavender, not periwinkle. But I insisted on my terminology. And she gurned in assent, and she now calls it periwinkle. Here, though, in the main, I use the word as an adjective of colour, not as a noun representing a non-invasive plant common to our lands, waterfalls or not.
Sally, a wallflower? Well, true, I first encountered her sitting at the side of a dance floor watching the various couples sweeping by her in ostentatious waltzing motions. Her best frock, evidently, but nobody noticed. Except me. And I engaged her in conversation, because I had been too long idling in the shadows or sidelines, nursing a half drunk half a bitter in a dimpled glass. I sat one seat away in a whole row of otherwise empty seats, and set in motion my only chat-up line. Sorry, that sounds a bit of a crude expression, as I only wanted to bring a smile to her face, with no other intentions present in my mind. Ice-breaker is better than chat-up line. I might rewrite all this. But it is important to get it straight first-off, my frame of mind changing by the moment. All needs to be conveyed as part of what I initially called the Periwinkle Waterflower. Nothing can shift that, as I somehow believe myself to be the only one that survived the ice age that followed the planetary exodus ironically caused by constant invasive heatwaves. At least it is known that human life survived. Or at least whoever wrote this survived.
I look down as if into a mirror of lavender-tinged water and see, below it, seeming sheets of frozen freckles end to end, very twinkly with dimples and woken stars eager to become suns. And I smile at my own perverse misnomers simply written down to mislead you towards a denial that words and any who read them will inevitably vanish. And, like a newly launched galleon, I watch her sally forth, in blue, upon the universal dance floor of an even bluer sky. Large enough to allow mere mortals to see. Bless her heart.
***
SHALLOW WATERS RUN DEEP
Not sure Sarah’s friend Huck Finn got this common saying right, but it was good enough for Sarah. It made a sort of oblique sense, not as clear-cut as the ‘still waters’ version, but with a pervasive wisdom that reached truths otherwise unfathomed. Huck was much like that himself, with open signs of simplicity and a down-to-earth nature; he was old enough to not only suffer this nickname on everyone’s lips when meeting him but also to take credit for digging deeper than most other souls were able to manage. To the third level if not the fourth. It was as if his awkward turns of phrase were part of a birthright as an ‘oracle’ who had earned such a word to describe him through many years of a life walking the common ground so close to it as to be, yes, ‘down to earth’. Not only oracle, but also uncle to Sarah, thus avuncular enough to be a trusted friend, too. ‘Mon oncle,’ she quipped in honour of the Jacques Tati film with that title, and they both laughed at memories of going to the cinema in France to see this film not long after it was first made, a fact that also gave a clue as to Sarah’s actual age which somewhat belied her young looks. And this prose description of them grows deeper on the page if not its inner meaning which remained as shallow as it seemed, with no real point other than to help the words flow towards a premature or inconclusive ending, extending higher and higher above and lower and lower below the mark or point of where a few may have stopped after reaching it. Until the narration reached the seemingly lowest level, if the seabed can be thus called as a base so grounded that it seemed an unquestionable ending. Huck could be vaguely discerned to be moon-walking holding the hand of his adopted niece. Both smiling that someone had been kind enough to create them and make them live. Until the limit of lines, as levels or marks, reached the point where they had been left above while things rambled on quite a long way below even that, after everything should have finished beyond the very final plimsoll mark of what can only be called a second seabed. Rambled and meandered amidst the lower depths whereto even Jules Verne never sent his Captain Nemo. But the place certainly existed then, where the sea creatures grew wilder, more colourful and were quite unknown to science and impervious to logic. At a third level where only those privileged enough could even imagine existing. Verne was French, too, like Tati. Unlike Twain. One wonders whether Verne used binoculars. It remains certain, though, the two authors were almost exact contemporaries. Tati was ever away on a time-share holiday, so he probably didn’t count. All three of them wore a monocle. Some of this is still true.
“Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.” – The Tempest
***
WHIFFLING THROUGH THE BROAD LEAVES
Oh, M.R. James had it right, but that does not prevent our wandering into the byways of the boy who was given a shilling instead of a sixpence and the creature created from linen sheets that rose on the bed next to the bed where we slept. And what happened to us afterwards? If you have not read the source work, please don’t count yourself one of us! You can sidle off with just a sixpence. And count yourself lucky. No more loud creating by the likes of you. Even sounding out as a form of creating-like-hell should not be sharp and sibilant with plosives, but softened with fricatives, to allow gentler spirits to follow us from the otherwise deserted beach that was grey and striated with groynes. When does a shriek grow blunted enough to become an understated groan?
The book had broad leaves, one of those large-size omnibuses of ghost stories, yet this one was strangely without any illustration. So why such small print upon its coffee table proportions? My head was often ‘lost in the clouds’ or ‘slow on the uptake’ that members of my family told me to ‘wake up and smell the coffee.’ This book taught me that those who ‘whiffle through the broad leaves’ are very much akin to such an uptake of the slow wit, with any knowingness in its wake. I have spent most of my life thus ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’. Whiffling like the sound of bicycle wheels on hardened sand. And I guess we all are whiffling like this to some extent. Pleased with half a crown, because that is better than no crown at all.
The ghostly bed linen yawned, and held out a hemmed edge scrunched up like a hand open-palmed for a gratuity. Any coin would suffice for it to bite through. Milled along its circular edge or not. A book’s pages are initially just another form of white sheets. Oh, M.R. James, in person, points at me for several sullen hours and then puts this finger into his stifling white collar. A collar not circling the neck but broadened into a dangling bow on his chest. Ah, the wide margins so empty deadly blank they are. Oh, the sounds of pages riffling are so soft, silence imitates them if only with bravado. Which of us will become sharper in uptake to haunt him? Nobody answers except the sea. And I remember I spent most of my early years with a print of Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ on the wall above my bed.
***
A BECKONING FROM THE FOREFATHERS
The King of All Points of the Compass relaxed back into his seat after receiving the expected phone call, and knew he had been given yet another temporary reprieve with regard to his health and longevity. This one, in itself, was good news, but soon enough there would be another phone call he would need to await with anxious expectation, and so it continued into the always unknown number of futures that criss-crossed beyond anyone’s scrutiny. Even his own.
The ‘all points’ in his title ironically encompassed only a finite number of event-symptoms in whatever future it was that chose to become pre-eminent. A human being was a small mite compared to this vast complex clock-tower as a metaphorical symbol, much of which required renovation. He smiled at the irony. Inanity was always preferable to insanity, if not irony.
He needed, after gathering his thoughts, to rise from his seat and inform the Squeaky Queen about the phone call but she was in another part of the turreted mansion. He had to avoid the part where the roof had collapsed overnight, a fact making him negotiate the already busy kitchen area. Many chefs and cook apprentices acknowledged his passage between the hobs and ovens by bowing, then towing themselves back to the tasks of plucking and gutting.
He threaded through an attic area he never knew existed until today. He sensed he was on the right track, however, as he heard the bony meeting of joints that, these days, were more like creaks than squeaks. Still, he and the Queen had come through all manner of heavens and hells, and again he smiled at the irony of life. And that included the vista of the sky that even penetrated as far as the cellar to which part of the mansion he had been diverted by ever-changing circumstances. Attics and cellars seemed often on the move, changing their identities at a whim.
The Squeaky Queen was eventually reached at the point where all directions multisected. Where all clock-hands, too, merged as one in a vast fountain of bricks. Cook-hands, too. Then, the couple knelt in obeisance to the invisible forefathers who beckoned forth the couples’s bi-directional prayers so that where these prayers precisely crossed each other in the ether a new future was sectioned. Thus, inanities were hospitalised if not, ironically, the roofs.
***
GUSSETS FOR GHOSTS
Charmed by the gossamer of dream, Kate fumbled to the side for the discarded nylons, tucked between the under-sheet and the mattress. Who cared about the ladders? Why worry about the denier or size? They were magical ones that eased her from waking into sleep then back again, via dream. They were nylons for the arms, not the legs, after all. A new fashion style that had replaced high-fashion gloves in the ranks of society. Still, these stockings were just as vulnerable, it seemed, as the more common ones for the legs. Perhaps, even more so. Arms were involved in all manner of tasks that legs were never privy to. Certain jobs that rich folk needed to do for themselves, and cooking as well as shaking hands with others. Not to mention the unmentionables that were otherwise more appropriate during discussion held privately for hidden areas of the human shape. They all had their own form of bespoke coverage by ulterior versions of gloves and stockings, some intricately fitting interstices that even Kate obviated.
She rose from the bed at last, with the morning already pushing hard into the afternoon. Time to open a new packet of arm slicks, so lightweight she hardly expected them to have transposed from dream into reality without growing coarser. Once opening the packet, she needed to acknowledge the time deadline of pulling them onto her arms. A few seconds too late and they would clog upon the elbows and sit awry in scrawny wrinkles…
Kate heard a loud ‘tut! tut!’ as she awoke sufficiently to have her own volition. But this was the noise of the sheathes tearing; it was not her new-found voice complaining at her own clumsiness. Soon there may be next to nothing at all between where her arms joined the body.
“She bowed her head, acceptingly, then folded her arms, consoling the elbows.” — Elizabeth Bowen
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