RUPERT IN PINK
Rupert invariably donned faded tartan trews, but with shiny black spats lodged on his insteps below the otherwise crumpled corduroys. It had to be said, though, that he could not bear certain materials against his skin, so whatever garb he did finally decide to sport, there was ever the thinnest layer of shimmer he called ‘selkie’ between the coarse material of his near colourless clothes and his own tender pink skin that covered men like him, at the turn of the century in England, a layer of so-called shimmer in the form of scarcely viable smalls that needed rinsing out by his dear mudder at least twice a day for fear of smells. This was a carefully preserved secret that never made it into the history books, nor even into any accounts of social fashion habits dictated by each era. Rupert’s era, for him, was now.
For us, Rupert’s ‘now’ was that lived in the period just ended before each of us was born — until what was later to be called the Big Change changed all that. Meantime, Rupert was the original brinkman, a term that gave its name to brinkmanship. He loved ice-skating on frozen lakes, especially on the cusp of Winter and Spring. His face shone in the early sunlight upon such a day, forgetting how cold he would feel without his judiciously positioned clothing. In fact the moving ruffs and creases upon his skin gave him a sense of false security, as if warmth within gave comfort from an absolute zero without. Whilst, in fact, unknown to him, the air around him was unseasonably warm, as the ice threatened to bend and bow under his skidding weight, his pace too fast across, though, to actually rupture at any point.
Rupert’s fate was literally sealed, however, as a certain pinkness initially seeped through his outer layers. The spats, meantime, stayed a pure glossy black. The cusp had evidently been sharper than it looked. We were born the day afterwards. Our squawls of projected pain at a life’s as yet unravelled histories sounded more like those of animal animals than human animals, more like sea beasties than placental babes, all this happening just after the midnight of the previous day had been breached.
As it happened, a shapeless shape bearing a piece of coal was our first visitor as it entered over the newly donkey-stoned steps at the front door. Our dear mutter had been on bended knees all night thus burnishing them. The coal was to keep us warm, we had assumed, with Spring barely unsprung.
***
CHINESE POTTING
Many thought the second word was a devious international plot to be disguised as a typo. The Ghost Opter knew, however, that it was simply a code or a password that was easily memorable but outlandish enough not to be guessed by strangers. The space had to be removed, of course, while the two upper class letters religiously retained. And, oh yes, a number added at the end. Any random single digit would work.
But all that begs the question — who or what is the Ghost Opter? They would describe themselves as a cross between Ghosthunter and Ghostfinder, the latter in the school of Carnacki. The former? Well, there are many candidate likenesses of Ghosthunters in the annals of literature or cinema, and in actual historical fact, too.
A second question would then inevitably be begged, like ghosts pleading on their knees to be hunted and then found, for whatever their existential reasons happen to be, as well as any real humans yearning for ghosts as signs of an after life. Non-human animals, too, have ghosts they seem to seek (and vice versa in mutual endeavour), as psychology students of such would attest. And that second question, along with its answer, is beyond a wall, not exactly an on-line newspaper’s so-called ‘paywall’, but a passworded website that is arguably more equivalent to a tenuous mansion than to a digital construction. Whose password, though? Yours or its?
Even screens have their methods of haunting themselves by gazing up into their human users’ eyes staring glassily back down at them. But as to the Ghost Opter, thus capitalised? We shall find out precisely their métier and their identity in future miniature glimpses, following today’s big change. Needless to say, our careful séances during civilised afternoon tea sessions — invitation only events that tantalisingly prick the nostrils with infusions of oolong poured delicately through mesh into fine china — remain suitable cases for upper-classification or for those of us who have simply mis-keyed the single digit number.
***
BUZZING SAND
Mining bees usually infest soil not beaches, but as Jack had to opt for the most comfortable billet each night, if there otherwise was silence, he could be heard humming in all manner of mineral bases. Mostly powdery elements, or melted, or pre-being smelted, even while hardening as he slept like the special clay used by sculptories.
Jack was not a bee exactly, but a ‘be all and end all’ type of man, although there is another expression on the tips of tongues that might have suited him, proving that those owning such tongues are not ‘know it alls’ at all. He did dress up as a bee, however, inspired by the bee sculpture to ‘save all bees’ currently cropping up in various public places, huge models of bees revolving on plinth pedestals. One in the railway station of a seaside town near Frinton. Families arrived there with their kids clutching buckets of sand to add to the sand that was already there. Making beach mountains they called mine forever, even though these kids left to go home by train without knowing that the tides would take their mountains as the sea’s own — with whatever used them (as buzzing billets or humming hives) possessing all the ghostly optics that such a sound vision entailed.
Jack was an all-tradesman, a coster of every mongership, a man with a chosen mission, neither an optical illusion nor someone available to be verified by touch. His striped mask had slipped, as it often did. His face, Anne thought, was pleasant enough. She sat next to him on one of the now empty benches at the part of the promenade near the pier. They watched the kids’s mountains swill away into the dismal dusk of the near horizon, a washing away like wasps whispering, with another shimmer of sound that were the miners dying. And she wept. Listening to the last train leave the aforementioned station with the similarly fading echo of an empty aeroplane moving across the sky, having dropped its payload of Buzz Bombs one by one. Jack grasped her hand, with sweet nothings for her nearest ear. At least his own touch somehow proved he was real to at least one other. Not the last we have heard of either of them.
***
THE WOMBATS ARE COMING
Shona was at home when she first learnt about wombats in the new discipline of Anthrapologies (sic), having been co-opted for Zoom lessons rather than attending college in person. Like some of her teachers, she’d never been the same since Covid, and now all was co-visual in the visual sense of Screenology.
Her inscrutable neighbours Shona only knew as Anne and Jack having realised surely they must have become accustomed to her always being at home, with delivery vans of different sorts arriving every half hour or so. Everything went in and nothing came out. Shona suspected all her neighbours, not only Anne and Jack, were ghosts of sorts that had succumbed to the Big Change, that some called the Unfleshing. And her new range of studies that she had opted for were specialist optics within that contextual frame. The refleshing, not refreshing, of screens. The Wombats as mistaken for Rombots or sometimes brands of coffees served as Shona’s reading matter between the chicklit and the romcoms that she enjoyed as a necessary therapy. She learnt also that wombats pooped in cubes, and that their teeth never stopped growing. And that their official collective noun was a ‘wisdom’ of wombats. So different from the new collective terminology for women as opposed to wombats. But a collective so much more complimentary than the collective for men, whom she now never met in person. The two genders had long grown, in the teeth of wilder mating, even less than barely complementary for each other.
All was now in delicate balance, though, with no further sign of a tipping-point … until an unexpected knock came on her disused door. Delivery men had an oubliette into which to tip her orders, one with a coded opening like an old-fashioned coal-bunker situated at the angular root, not unlike an elbow, where the brutalist wall met the ground zero of her homebase. Who’s there? Jack, disused if not diseased from next door, it seemed. What do you want? All spoken thus muffled by the door between them. Anne has had an accident, can you help? Shona stayed silent, fearing anything she said would be wrong. Wrong for her as well as for Jack and Anne. Could ghosts have accidents? Whatever wisdom that had been co-opted by Shona induced her to withdraw to her designer purpose-built cubist cubby-hole where she kept the latest home delivery of do-it-yourself dental and mental kits in smart array, as well as means for quiet evacuation. She could sit out a siege there, but for how long? Till she grew older in years, or even longer in something else?
***
AIR ON A G STRING
Jack was an Opter, Jack was a Scryer, Jack was plainly once an Exorcist, but now Jack was a Saviour of Ghosts, indeed, Jack had been a Hunter as well as a Finder of Ghosts, and, moreover, Jack was, as some said, a Ghost himself, making this developing career easier as an unstemmed flow more unstoppable than the thrusting thermals of air that his activities engendered under the auspices of climate change. Anne, meantime, was Jack’s familiar, not a cat, not a shadowy third, as there was no shadowy second, indeed, Anne was a woman who had been a ghost of a dead person but one that had re-hardened into flesh, and now laced through with several lives, if perhaps not as many as nine, but she was a continuous thread through eyelets while maintaining a string theory that she tightened now and again within the sewn leathery appearance her acquired skin was said to have grown into, since changing from ghost particles into guts and garters. She was now air flows with G strings woven through them, as a complement to Jack’s more tenuous skills of insidious occultation.
Their first subject was a near neighbour called Shona, who had been a living retreat, a sleep-walking hermitage as a shell of what she once was. Her face scarred and livid, with nicks that Jack could ‘read’ as a Scryer Supreme. Once invited in, Jack helped diminish the souls of Shona’s shoes that now seemed to haunt Shona’s apartment, because when she had been a socialite she had spent all her money on fancy footwear, fashionable in their era and often high-heeled, as well as various types of walking boots and they had now silently decayed in her wardrobe, but their souls had escaped along with strings of ectoplasm laced through their virtual eyelets. Anne — being a ghost-insider, as it were, while Jack, after all, had never been a ghost himself, despite masquerading in certain circumstances of surveillance as a ghost — advised against utter upfront confrontation with these ghosts that Jack hoped to Optimise rather than Exorcise, but to snip, at strategic points, the laces that bolstered them — such a snipping being a mere means of ‘holding horses’, ‘breaking and taming unruly pigs’, as it were, rather than outright war with them.
Shona faded into the background as Jack proceeded to curate all manner of scissor devices on the floor of her apartment, with Anne looking on facetiously from the open doorway to the hall that linked Shona’s apartment to Jack and Anne’s own. A preparation for whatever the night would bring. Arches and aches, and several false starts. Tongues and levers. Nobody knew when the task had been complete, other than the tags and tassels of grey matter that littered Shona’s carpet. And hardened souls now with skid-proof ridges in shapes of more than just a cubic design. As if the once discardable boxes were the items for sale and the shoes were now used as wrapping to contain these boxes.
Jack and Anne returned to their own apartment, sure they had been successful in Optimisation of what once had been Intimidation by shoestrings without their leathery bodies. But Shona, freshly shod, was not so sure, as she shed other shoes more like new-born than anything that had been fully tamed. She superstitiously resisted making any predictable joke about virtual re-booting, though.
***
GUNFLEET HOTEL
…this being an establishment known as the Low-Key, where not one ghost had been glimpsed let alone had made a disturbance in residents’ sleep patterns. Even ghosts that had once been guests who had met a violent death kept a low profile, too. There was, however, the steady hum of the sea at night, and the stripped-down yachts softly clinked their masts’ residual rigging in a moon’s fleeting breezes that its moonshine induced, and thus these silhouettes of sea craft subtly made themselves apparent in the yard just below the windows of the hotel’s front guest rooms. And birds shifted or fidgeted wherever and however birds did tend to shift or fidget out of sight after darkness had fallen, a few of which birds being blurred shapes that gave birth to the notion of black gulls haunting the environs of Bonnyville-on-Sea.
So low-key was Low-Key, it tried to avoid its own official name, but not only that, the guests or residents themselves were encouraged to opt for remaining nameless both to each other and regarding what they had written in the reception register. But they did leave, in encrypted form, details of forwarding contact, in case of hindsight problems of their stay. It could be guessed, however, the identity of at least three of these guests in the context of such opting for anonymity, especially in the context of haunting and self-haunting and transubstantiation and half-hearted culls and/or rescues of such ambivalent entities rumoured heretofore in our annals. So they will remain nameless here, too, in the spirit of low-keyed aspirations.
The real name of the hotel itself has, self-evidently, already been blurted out up front, so the rest of this particular annal is merely damage limitation. However, meantime, there was no hope in concealing that name, anyway, nor that of the actual town where the Blue Apocryfan pub was so sought-after as a centre of letting one’s hair down, thus an irresistible draw for day-trippers to arrive at the town’s railway terminus equally famous for its Big Bee sculpture that was stationed on the entrance to the platforms. However, daytrippers simply failed to make hotels happy. They needed more than just transients. Hotels yearned for stay-overs and sleep-insiders to help pay their way in the economy of spiritual exchange for which this seaside resort was known. If anyone knew where to find it, in any event!
Chekhov was famous for the maxim that if a gun is rigged up for appearance or even mere mention in a plot, it is bound to be used in anger at some stage in that very plot. Hence the rechristening of the hotel as Moonfleet: an encryption via an otherwise irrelevant novel for children. The rest is up to you. A low profile is no doubt the optimum stance for man or moon.
***
WOODSHED
Why Steg was called Steg concerned some nasty incident during her now ancient schooldays, a past now too easily forgotten. The sound if not sight of a firework whooshed intrusively from the next door garden into hers. At least it showed Steg that someone still lived there, as she watched a hooded figure, after it shooed off an indeterminate pet, perhaps for kind reasons of preventing the latter being startled by the ignited Catherine Wheel, as it turned out. Whether a pet or a pest, Steg could not be sure. She could not be sure of anything these days, other than she ever glimpsed shadowy thirds coming and going next door, sometimes making a whole one. One shadow often shouted out the names of Jack or Anne, and the other two shrieked ‘Shona!’ As if calling back a wayward cat. Or was Anne the cat, and Shona a senile wife wandering too near their own woodshed for comfort? Steg opted for there being up to three actual people ensconced next door as well as a nameless wild cat adopted for purposes unknown.
Steg’s real name happened to be Catherine, but the irony was lost on her, and, like many others these days, she lived hand to mouth. She needed the bonus of a heating allowance in order to eat at all. Every garden in the terraced row had a landlord-locked woodshed in its back garden, and shooing rights against anything that might wander into the wrong garden. Few realised, mainly because they were too old to climb, that the attics inside the various back-to-back twouptwodowns had connecting attics without partitions above the bedroom ceilings. Even the houses opposite each other across the road had some sort of concealed connection between them. Whether underground or not. Or by some other means facilitated by whatever each woodshed contained. Steg often wondered whether a woodshed was called a woodshed because it was hewn from wood or because it contained such wood to help refuel the debit side of her accounts after the loss of the government heating allowance, if only she’d remembered the password the landlord had given her to the woodshed’s lock.
Once Steg thought in old-fashioned terms that she was being wooed by the landlord, because in her younger days, she felt herself to be quite attractive. But since the Big Change, he had become more of a ghostly figure one could never contact. Elusive as much else in her life. Including the inscrutable relationship of her nearest neighbours. Steg occupied an end-of-terrace house, rather than in the middle of two such ‘tunnelbacks’, as such abodes were once called. And so her own woodshed assumed a greater importance, as it should. Another firework was ignited under the lighted hand of a Jack or an Anne (or even a Shona, depending on the time of night.) Steg heard it hiss and splutter before three separate fireworks from a single fuse whooshed up to the blacked-out sky with somehow sparkly but low-key hues, one of which at least landed in flames on her woodshed. It gets, Steg instinctively knew, to the darkest point of night just before dawn. Steg would show soon that she had been only one step away from remembering something important, as she felt something else with a tail slip past her between her feet. As another thing, even darker than the blacked-out sky, could be glimpsed skimming, with unlit fuse, from roof to roof, across the road.
***
WINDOW SHUTTERS
But they usually had firm fluent speech, without one sign of such hesitation, their inner curtains as a special form of alveolar or tongue process. The handle to open and shut it might have been a means of controlling what entered or left through it, and this window in question today that the Ghost Opter investigated was decked with outside shutters, as if it were emulating a continental version. The shutters, initially, seeemd vestigial, with no purpose other than a cosmetic one. But where a blatant cruelty of outright exorcism encountered, in a grey area, a sense of salvage or rescue of whatever spectral entity happened to be framed within it as a seeming reflection of what was neither outside or inside the glass that had crumbling putty along its edges, the Opter soon realised he had reached the end of some sentence too early. The whole phenomenon described above, in hindsight, with his having just used the word ‘spectral’, seemed to be the perfect example of ‘spectrality’ that, until now, had been hidden in plain sight.
The next event was the Opter’s ear clamped to his mobile phone seeking advice on how to proceed from someone who was overheard from his own lips to be called ‘Anne’. Is it jammed? The shutters seem rusted at their hinges. Are they shutters similar to what were used in antique cameras? Don’t think so. So they are just for show? Look like it. Take photos, send them to me and I’ll make a decision, Jack, don’t do nothing without my say-so.
The next event that could be observed was the Opter taking photos with his phone of the lock device on the inner window handle as well as the shutter hinges, but all he seemed to get was low-resolution images of his own reflection in the smeary glass, half-pervaded by the striped translucent bars that had been stuck to the inside of the glass as a mockery of net curtains. The glints that outshone the sun did not help.
He suspected this was where the essence of the ghost resided, still pressed against the translucent bars. He scried, from outside, each narrow viewpoint of clarity, seeking, high and low, for signs of faded fingerprints of where it had suckered onto the glass. He muttered something to himself about ‘shutter speeds’, but what he meant will never be discovered. Just as his phone rang back, its timer had abruptly expired, and just the slice of what happened truncated at both ends of what had been written down about it above. What should have been an open and shut case had evidently lost its window of opted opportunity for resolution. Lucky, at least, to have reached this stuttering stop
***
THE PASSIONATE VELOUR
Shona knew that velour often had a nap, but so did velvet, and she was never sure of the different qualities of sleep each granted her. When using a velour pillow, she dreamed of the usual ghosts, but they were more tenuous and stretchy. On the rare occasions, she managed to get hold of a velvet pillow, she saw the ghosts for real in the room around her, even when fast asleep. Not that each pillow was made entirely of either fabric, but were filled with feathers of different birds, sometimes a mixture, sometimes the feathers of a single breed of bird, and she could never tell which was which. In some senses, the pillows themselves were part of her dreams, but when she woke up, she ever forgot the dream so as to remember to check out the pillow upon which she had, the previous night, opted to collapse her partially unconscious head. Opted being the operative word, of course.
These were in the days she had already encountered, for her, the still nameless couple of whom some of us already know the names. This man and woman themselves were in her dreams, but not yet identified for who or what they were; maybe they were those who exchanged teeth for coins under children’s pillows, or who were, indeed, on some nights of Shona’s slumber, those whom she somehow adopted as a formulation of poltergeists as pillowghosts — particularly on the more brave occasions when the better part of velour was half the battle towards a more restful sleep. Velvet often meant nightmares, not dreams. Velour, on the other hand, stretched credulity as well as the membrane of a nap into a passionate oblivion, if that is not a contradiction in terms.
On the night in question, meanwhile, Shona was still a child and, upon waking, she hastened to turn her pillow, not for checking its fabric, but to discover whether her milk tooth was still there, or a shiny shilling instead. She guessed two fairies had conducted a passionate quarrel about it, as it was still there, but its tiny pliable whiteness was somehow broken in two. She shook her head in dismay and in hope of forgetting the passions inherent within any vale of sleeping at all, she bravely proceeded to open the bedroom louvre upon the daylight outside, which act of defiance foreshadowed, for her as a singular breed, a future that featured shutters.
***
BOWLING THE BONCE
The game of Tombola gave Tom his name, because his parents went to the Bingo most weeks, and the family name was obviously implicit, too. Well, there you are. Arthur and Joyce Bowling were often at the Hippodrome in Colchester, eyes down, specially provided pencils with indelible lead arteries akimbo over numbers printed on harsh paper stubs of different pastel hues, eager and excited.for the easy win during an ancient era where National Lottery jackpots were as yet unknown. And ghosts sat in adjoining booths, similarly arched over their stubs, pretending to be real people, going for broke rather than succumbing to hopelessness and despair. Some words were superfluous, other expressions tautological, lessons unlearnt as well as untaught, with their taut tightropes of fate as broke as the clasps on empty purses or wallets that they carried.
Going for broke, opting for it as a means of optimised choice. Friends with Jack and Anne, and other ghosts equally hoping for the bounce of ‘bunce’ as an unexpected gain that was as expected as it never emerged. Informal terms for heads, meanwhile, were frowning with concentration, not concern, over their adopted numbers. Noddles and bonces bowed, as two women gabbled in the booth next to that of Jack and Anne who frowned at such noise while gripping pencil stubs in their fists over rough paper. Shona and Dalena were the women, as an item even in days when items were acceptably settled stones as set in different items of expensive finger rings, as opposed to nose ones.
Today, Arthur and Joyce Bowling had brought along youthful Tom, to instruct him in the lore of soon to be lost lotteries. He was bored, hardly able to concentrate on the numbers being called by a huge bearded bonce sitting behind bouncing balls in a transparent bowl, all the while whirling within it, on the stage up front. Microphone in hand, its voice echoed round the horsedrome like a braying hinny being held against its wishes. And Dalena suddenly emitted a hoarse ‘House!’ And all gasped and gawped in awe and envy, as the Bingo hall’s checker ticked off her crossed-through numbers as pre-printed on crudely cropped paper. She was given the nod, and her now blousy excuse for a head veiled in nothing but a low denier nylon mask that she blinkered with her own now tenuously thinning hands rose to claim her now fading promise of a prize.
“Goodbye, Dalena”, shouted youthful Tom in her wake, having already fallen in unrequited love with her.
Arthur and Joyce hustled Tom home, without even saying goodbye to Jack and Anne. Tom never accompanied them to Bingo again. And it was already too late to forget he had seen, with the youthful sharpness of sight, that each bouncing ball, whirling about in the see-through bowl, had his own face imprinted upon it instead of a number, each a miniature of the adopted slang for his own big head before it had grown a hirsute beard. Needless to say, in this tale of superfluous tautologies, nobody knew what happened to Shona. Or what feckless fate had opted for her, instead.
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