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.
No comments:
Post a Comment