THE CHINAMAN’S CHAGRIN
“I can’t imagine it bland,” said embattled and embittered Mabel, as she squinted hard at a brightly coloured teapot from the Orient, demonstrating that she was hard of seeing, as well as hearing. Time ticked by, indeed, time ticked by twice.
Getting on in years meant not succeeding to make sufficient buffers against the onset of age, but succumbing to its baffling watersheds slowly, while retaining many of the prejudicial aspects of her generation that called Chinamen Chinamen. Her wrinkled face was one constant gurning of strained attempts to stay sharp-witted and clear-sighted, with her sense of hearing honed to its optimum without any intervening by the tiny filter-baffles (in her actual ear-holes) that she often called steering aids.
She knew not to whom she had spoken about the relative features of the teapot’s decorations, whether bland or not, but they did, to her eyes, seem to depict one such individual — whom she had earlier defined but now forgotten exactly how — grinning from ear to ear. She gazed up into the blur of the shape that was her husband, a man who was laconic at best. Sardonic, most Saturdays, when his duties doubled at the local bookies where he worked. He never held his horses once, but he sure knew how they’d run to a convincing short nose between. Today a sideways bet on a filly at Doncaster, odds on, and a near walkover for an outsider called Scarface, as owned by a rock band called The Machine Stops after a story by E.M. Forster.
Mabel was gagging for a cuppa, and hoped he’d soon fetch her an infusion of one, but today was just such a busy Saturday for him elsewhere, and the blur was not her husband at all, who was, at this very moment, hedging his bets by having told her — knowing she would forget — that he’d be late home due to an overlap of overtime with real-time. The blur itself, meantime, was slashed with a ‘slit’ for a mouth, as she called it, and two more for its eyes, and with wiry spokes wavering on each side of its head like wireless antennae, and its eyebrows archingwith chagrin. Eyelids flickering open. Maybe Mabel felt unable to label her innermost affairs, to tell facts from fiction, and which of these two rivals in the race of all races would pass the finishing post first by having gained a headstart in a head she had been given as hers, especially when at near sight of such a slinky silhouette of a foreign frown, she felt teased by the arrival, upon the shoulders of shadows, of an ominously ticking teaset of finest china that contained an over-brewed brand of confusions. A Deus ex Machina.
***
THE PLAYFUL OCTET
Whether it be most famously by Schubert or Mendelssohn, or even Berio, Gubaidulina, Reich &c., the Octet was simply meant to be playful, a sense of a game of Catch in an antique school playground, a divertissement of enchantments that would be paradoxically reduced when increased by one to a Nonet, or tainted by lack of a quorum in Septet terms, never as serious or emotional as a String Quartet or Piano Quintet. Well, there are exceptions to these rules, when you consider Brahms’ two priceless Sextets, that perhaps combine a strength of playfulness as well as melancholy. The most playful Octet ever, however, turned out to be a near orchestral-ensemble sound that Martin once heard, without switching anything on or going anywhere else but his bedroom; it had never been composed, let alone performed in anyone’s hearing, except in Martin’s head, if hearing it inside a head can be called hearing something at all. He became simply all brain with its moving parts, a perfect octagon, yet hung impossibly with someone else’s installations, a would-be octahedron, perhaps, of inner cathedral acoustic sound without the assistance of either tiny bluetooth airbuds or clunky pads with head brace of any size. No excuse for thinking it was music. It simply was what it was, an Octet. A lemniscate of eternity.
Martin knew nothing about the mechanics behind music, and failed to comprehend what staves were except they looked like tramcar tracks to him, and a crotchet was what he once called his Ma in the old days. Even key signatures had escaped the head that contained them, never to be found again. He looked on the carpet for them, before climbing the dark steps to assist his old Ma’s ablutions. Sadness was as prolific as the dust under his feet, each stairrod a discarded conductor’s baton, one or two once used for vast Bruckner symphonies. It was said that some of the latter’s symphonies could actually conduct themselves, given the vehicle of an accomplished orchestra. Martin’s own head now ached like an over-used Albert Hall auditorium, filled to the rafters just to hear a Trio by Beethoven.
On the landing, he energetically jigged a little catchy Foxtrot without an evident dance partner in his guiding arms, well, except for the ghost that had earlier hung its installations upon his OctaHeadron Collider. He moved on sluggishly, as if the aborted dance had made him a devilfish out of water, and tried to spread what now felt like his eight limbs in quicker step after hearing a single plaintive syllable from on high, a sense of playacting if not placatable into playfulness — a syllable as a single black note portending a voice of muted anguish from the attic room to which he was still heading to help his Ma. The sideways ghost now hummed a Brahms lullaby behind him on the stairs. A mixed-up Martin somehow turned in his tracks by escaping their laterally liminal constraint, but he discerned nothing there.
***
THE RAUCOUS NUN
The Sacred Nun they called it, not a normal signboard for any pub, but as it was well hidden in a fold of scenic hills in Cowdenbeath, nobody seemed to care, taking it for granted, as long as one’s pint was painstakingly topped up in a cold dimpled glass, preferably without a handle. A straight glass, not a jug, as they differentiate them down south. How Steven, in deepest Essex, even knew about this pub or where Cowdenbeath actually was, took hold of his doubts when beneath the local pier, as the beach gurgled in his ears like the sound of beer pumps being pulled and white suds smoothed off. He imagined he had imagined such a tipping-point pub, one that would be Heaven for him. One needs to keep all such hostelries in business by patronising — if not condescending to — their respective level bests, beyond the old joke about bottles of Blue Nun wine that preceded the 1970s. Laughably, such a label represented the only posh vintage in town, in those days. He determined to travel to the site of these vaguely absurd meanderings to test the verity of what pumped them to the surface of his mind. And indeed whether there were any scenic hills in an otherwise fictitious Cowdenbeath.
Even Steven broke even, before others had begun to make their even bets. He now climbed the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, on returning from his photographic expedition under the pier, collating what ghosts he had upturned today, shapes and blurs that only chance snapshots could attain through spontaneity as well as the instinctively deliberate pointing of a camera. Of course, he simply knew he would never attempt to find the Sacred Nun tavern in a cavernous part of Scotland’s hilly mountains. He sensed, by what means is unsure, that the tavern’s name was not quite right; it was just a grab in the dark, as dark as the darkroom that was still developing as his bedroom. The wooden stairs seemed endless, and the noise he heard of screaming dodgems he assumed were above not in his head, not even captured on his camera, if sounds, against all bets, could be photographed at all. Raucous screams, trying to tell him something that he could not quite decipher in a visible way, well, not until he — as scared as scared could be — carefully placed the visualised screams of blue murder into the ever developing solution that he even tried to store in driptrays beneath disused taps. So ends this downbeat anecdote.
***
THE LEVITATING TURNTABLE
Francis’s favourite Biggles book as a child reader in the 1950s was, ironically, “Biggles Takes a Holiday”, where the title of Chapter IX in some editions is Biggles Turns The Table, not the Tide. He vaguely remembered this as he thought what had been given above as trigger was ‘hesitating’ not ‘levitating’, but then Francis realised it was probably intended that both words’ meanings were soon to emerge as a merged meaning. Often, too often, perhaps, he would question the triggers that were given to him for the peripheral miniatures of a much bigger day — indeed, each day was, as Francis once expressed, part of ‘you live a day a day to put life in.’ Each trigger, as title, seemed bigger than what it ignited, but, in turn, the miniatures were metaphorically meatier and, dare one say, neater, too, than what the trigger tended to portend & what it tended to intend for Francis’s mind before he commenced filling the blank space that it invited should thus be filled by Francis, and then filed as another day done.
Francis sat in his back garden, faced, frankly, with the most literal demolishment by words of emptiness. It was as if he methodically expressed — by meticulous miniaturisation into words — what was actually unfolding as he expressed it, until something happened that never happened at all, a fact which somehow turned this, in turn, from fact into fiction. He was, in fact, approached by a goggled ghost mouthing matters of a ‘big change’ happening, a much vaster maw of a morning to fill than the simple emptiness that faced Francis, in this shape of a childhood version of a fairy story, not a ghost story at all, as he soon realised, even while events were still being unfolded, upon this particular contemplative day, in fact unfolded by something bigger expressing a narrative about him, rather than Francis alone doing this about himself. Were such meditatively holy days holidays, too? Gaps between for refreshment or spiritual restitution, not hesitations at all?
Francis used paragraph breaks as a tidal rhythm to conceal or, on some days, even reveal a sense of a self-confessed hesitation, as he watched the now elf-like ghost slowly levitate as a holy blooming of self or soul to fill the holistic hole that Francis felt the morning had become within him. His own whole train of thought had turned the tables upon himself, as in many an adventure yarn of good versus bad when it comprised childhood fiction’s expression of situations in which good alone always won.
He would always be unsure if this always always applied. To live a day a day seemed never enough.
***
THE BANDSAW LEGACY
With two pulleys, a driver and an idler, Gordon’s bandsaw was his prize possession in a shedful of tools, plus smaller items like washers, nails and screws compartmentalised in a flat rusty tin with a lid that showed signs of having once been painted red. The bandsaw was plainly more important than his lathe. Back gardens of terraced properties in the 1950s ever boasted such shedfuls, but Gordon’s was the only one with a working bandsaw, one that was so much better than its kindred jigsaw type of device that seemed to have the sole benefit of merely giving its name to what it could produce as patient pastimes for otherwise impatient children to put pictures back together again. A bandsaw was, in short, what the word looked like it meant. A happy commune of tasks, a ‘bandsaw legacy’ just by adeptly cutting up its own lettered label of durable posterity , e.g. in making gnawable cableways, swayable alcayades*, analysed laneways, scalawag bandages, balanced bendways, and much more.
Gordon soon realised there were missaws in some of the derived words, having first been given this indication by the mysteriously asterisked ‘alcayades’ that later turned out to be a typo the correction of which was beyond the reach of even Gordon’s finely-tuned bandsaw legacy, i.e. the correct word, in hindsight, being ‘alcayatas’, that are L shaped screws, also known as elbow screws.
Much could be gathered in putting the results of a bandsaw together, unlike the child who often remained temperamentally jiggered to pieces, never getting beyond the straight pieces! It takes much compartmental strength to complete intricate miniatures of ‘repair shop’ skilfulness, a legacy left to Gordon’s otherwise idler of a son who happens to be myself as still driven to succeed simply by compiling yet another bandsaw puzzle such as this miniature that needs to be read, not simply looked at as a rusty memento.
* ‘alcayades’, or governors of provinces, about him, standing barefoot, trembling, bowing to the earth, and, at every word he spoke, breaking out into passionate exclamations of praise, as, great is “the wisdom of our lord the king;…” [from the internet]
***
GRAPPLING WITH ZERO
She was a mathematician, she wasn’t the cat’s mother. Her two catchphrases were “hold your horses!” and “you haven’t even got beyond the straight pieces.” Whether the slowest kid in the class kept the others down to its level, she wondered, as she looked into its defiantly scarred face. Since the Big Change, she had all manner of curricula to teach them, only to receive a one word assessment of her maths teaching skills, especially as she had to mix part of her days with instruction on emotional health. And the tiny kid with scars most of all.
She had sat the slowest kid beside the fastest. This seemed awfully traditional, but why not double-down upon her role as someone they called Miss Crosspatch. Her first catchphrase — now forgotten as it was in the finite oblong of the previous paragraph — meant ‘don’t rush your simultaneous equations!’ or some such, and the second catchphrase never had any meaning at all because nobody could catch the core of it. It was as if some middle was missing that mathematics knew and literature didn’t. Not an absolute zero exactly, but an approximation to zero as an irrational number of ideas teeming. The last word would complete the picture no doubt, as yet another oblong slipped away.
Some of the kids even grew up to remember Miss Crosspatch as someone they had fought against but now loved, in hindsight, for her wisdom. But where was she now, so that they could thank her? Such is life, it has to be said. Somewhere there is a teacher’s frown saying ‘don’t rush it!’ But the words keep coming, nevertheless, teeming out of nowhere into nowhere. Each word a piece of the bandsaw legacy of picture puzzles, and a negative number compared to which zero was huge. All hung overlong through the obtusely blurred memory of a tiny face too scared to face the world. And, thus, we ever reach the last word but one.
***
THE CROW’S CHRONICLE
A world without passwords would be heaven indeed, if that was not a non sequitur in the making. Indeed, Aver was not a bird watcher, never a twitcher between friends, and, laughably, he did not know the meaning of orthography or even how to spell it. Indeed, the society in which Aver lived boasted no sanctioned vocabulary at all, let alone the means to differentiate between a crow, a raven, a rook, a castle or any other breed of corvid. Magpies, corvids by nature, were snatchers of words to eat whilst jays, perhaps corvids themselves, were feeders of such words to make them bigger, but even a word like ‘passeriforme’ could never, in itself, recreate a blackbird to pass as a corvid at all.
The crow called itself a black bird, though, with the important space between the two words. Aver knew this as he had the skill to talk with crows, albeit crows alone. No other ‘bird’ would do. Crow as the verb to boast, crow as the forename of a special form of nest, and, most important of all, crow, when in its past tense, as the word for sailors on a ship. Aver spoke into the depths of a nest upon one such ship, in the hope to attract attention of the crow within it, as his legs wrapped around the top of the mast so that he could more easily leer dizzily into the woven abyss of twigs and grass blades that bound these twigs amidst the dried mud. He needed to elicit from the crow the chronicle of the day, the log, as it were, of the ship’s onward journey. The crew stood below gazing up at their captain whom they knew under a different name to Aver. Or was it a different name than?
If the cabin boy and the chief mate were ever at loggerheads, Aver never discovered, other than the fact that tears in the white rigging made things sadder than they actually were, as the ship eventually foundered in Newfoundland, a part that was deserted, as predicted by the crow’s chronicle. To fulfil destiny was easier than charting a voyage that contravened it, as the crow would have attested to those who could understand crow lingo, after Aver had drowned, a ‘dying fall’ while there fleeted, across his mind, a whole world of words teeming from a series of abandoned vocabularies. And now the rest of the crew wailed in despair as they realised they had been logged out, without one possible password to get back in. The default password of Raven2 had been changed, it seemed. Even oddly angled chess moves or random picks of upper or lower case and number failed to make even a single encryption twitch. And, however strong the repeated creations were, such nonsenses failed to move our story on.
***
FLAT-LINING TARA
After landing successfully in a derelict aerodrome without the barest sign of even one residual runway, Tara’s piloting skills were justly praised by the reporters present at the event. Flashbulbs popped, champagne corks, too. The suspicion that her forced return to the ground had been pre-planned — even rehearsed while wearing a long dress more suitable for a cocktail party of filtrated and inflated chatter — failed to take away from her razzamatazz of glory.
Everything is staged to some extent, even accidents.
The land around the aerodrome that soon vanished further into the undergrowth infiltrating around it was continuously inflated within the annals of history as a land called Tara, as named after the pilot who had made it famous. A land that was the only permanent point amid ferocious love between each and every pair of people as well as the strange embracing of wars among plural peoples.
Everybody thrives on conflict and the communal battles to survive. Empathy as a protective force.
Tara, in the branch of history that grew along the flat lines of a deforested alternation of time that paralleled nothing but itself.
She gazed into the fruity complications of her spiky cocktail as she fended off small talk with an unanswerable phrase. Call it deadlining, call it whatever you like, this did not quell her interlocutor’s response. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a dambust.” Would she tell of her famous landing upon her now even more famous land. The eponymous location that headlined what we knew of her, by the account above that came out of nothing, as it were, other than the incontrovertible fact she existed plain and simple before us in her scarlet frock similar to the aeronautic technology that also decked her trusty skycraft with the tented shapes of multiple rudder systems so as to optimise the thermals. Whatever Tara said in response to the man who had thus rudely flat-lined her at the party remains closeted in a different account to this one. Although, that fact remains unsure as the final crafted copy has not quite landed yet. Chockful of the chocky-blocky of clocktime.
After all, tomorrow is another day. It depends which one you choose.
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