(published 'Silver Wolf' 1994)
She kept quiet for most of the day, except when she resorted to dark corners of the house and sobbed her heart out.
When she invited me to live with her, I was in two minds. How could I be confident that I was the one to pull her up by the bootstraps?
Relationships, in my experience, had tended to drag people down. And wasn’t I evidence of that very rule?
For years now, I’d visited Vera for quiet Sunday teas. Little more than a nephew visiting his aunt for understated conversations on dark afternoons. Except she wasn’t my aunt...it just seemed that way.
There was nothing more to it. We had originally met at night school and decided to score a few bonus points in human contact, before our results were totted up.
I was too old to be her nephew in normal circumstances, but the age difference was not impossible. I gave her flowers every time, for the price of a tea. But I would’ve given her flowers without the tea. And she would’ve supplied the tea without the flowers.
I forget now what we talked about. Sometimes it was what preoccupied the Sunday papers. Or library books we had exchanged the week before. Or, even, the weather which, needless to say, was gloomy whatever the time of year.
I’ve forgotten those conversations, since co-habitation has forced me to watch what I say even to the extent of surrendering what I once said to oblivion. A mind has only room for one set of obligations and emotional etiquette. Living with Vera brought into focus her utter sadness. She had successfully concealed this during Sunday teas. Now, I was made aware of the failed suicides carried around inside herself during the dusting, mopping and culinary duties which she assumed at the slightest excuse.
I began to blot out matters I once broached in preference to small talk. Such topics must’ve really brought her low. World news had been depressing at the best of times. And bootless badinage thankfully ensued.
Once television had run itself into the ground with interrupted jokes and even crueller slapstick, once the soap operas outgrew themselves with meaningful morals, I talked louder, mixing my own speech rhythms with those on the screen - in the hope that she wouldn’t notice.
Then we tried to switch back to ourselves: clumsy attentions towards each other... wordless shapes which weren’t really our bodies at all, perhaps... fumbling forms of darkness...
Predictably, Vera was begining to die. She was older than me, after all. We held hands, neither of us speaking... and, towards the end, it was for dear life.
I still don’t know which of us spoke last. And knowing that has no point in any event - thankful only that we had been given the chance to make such unlikely love.
www.nemonymous.com
Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Ruthven
Published 'Works' 1995
Ruthven had much pain to come. Once a rich man of the City, he now contemplated what remained of his short life. People to die, people he loved, and, finally, himself--racked with pain and pointlessness. He drew the covers to his chin and followed the cracks in the ceiling to their uneasy confluence of rivers. Suffering had been so far contained within reasonable margins, so he wondered whether the worst pain was incubating, moving slowly against fate's dam, threatening to overspill at any moment.
The bedroom window rattled in a sporadic wind, the only element breaking the only silence. And the only person, perhaps the only one in the world, dreamed everything, thousands of self-imposed dreams crowding nightmare's dam, threatening to break out in one fell swoop or, at best, simply seep through the haircracks in the ceiling--silver teardrop by silver teardrop like counterfeit shilling-coins.
There had been little rain: cold dry summers edging into endless winter. The sun was a dull orange stain upon the curtains, as if it were incontinent. He recalled the others who had shared his pillows--but even the pillows had been stuffed into the rucksacks of derelict ghosts, who were now traipsing into the distance of his fading imagination; the only remaining pillow under his head was sodden with dark sweat, into which he turned his only face with a sob.
There was more than just wind at the window. Fingernails cut their teeth upon it. They were not people, but monsters, the only monsters left to taunt the one monster who still called itself man. He turned bodily in his sleep, if indeed sleep it could be called. His dreams were of clean sheets, silk sheets--and the pillow full of teased satin feathers for a pillow-fight at a schoolgirls' midnight feast--and a body so soft, so luscious, so self-responsive, he was confident that love could outlast the night. He should have known money could not purchase such love when the chips were finally counted.
Then, through the billowing curtains, there came the creature--a huge monstrosity with huge flapping banknote wings, one huge searing searchlight eye and the smallest possible credibility--shaping out the arrival of night in its own shape, a shape the sleeper could not fathom nor, in a million years, have invented. This was the shape of pain to come, now finally come--dripping indeed with spent come. Only to find the bed empty. Empty of even the last dream. The pillow plump.
The cracks in the ceiling drew to a tangled doodle of tentacles--but nobody was left to tease out the final clear-cut image. The sleeper had departed in one final trial of nightmare--to reseek his fortune in the City, where it was said the streets were paved with gold--and the low lying motorway across the central City filled quickly with sea-water after marauders undermined the coastal dam--but the palace was water-logged and the pelican crossings impassable. The money-lenders foreclosed when the Exchange's plimsoll-line for narrow money supply fell short of the realizable residue of the readies.
Ruthven became senior dosser, on the southernmost bank, but did not have enough pockets to take what came floating down with man-made tides. Then there was the body in the water. Ruthven recognised the body that must have thrown itself in. A mock-up, a right Madame of a waxwork.
"Blimey, that body's me!" he screeched to the wizened woman who took alternate sucks with him on a bottle of pother.
"Now! Now! That can't be you, 'cos you are here." And she pointed to the bottle's glass neck which he French-kissed. "That’s your reason for living."
"But it sure looks like me bobbing like a corpse." The Thames twined between hard shoulders that were planned from time immemorial for its course. Large black inverted statues of fish creatures supped at its margins. In the distance, the searchlight on the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral winked like a lighthouse, its beams crossing the whole of the city skyline "with the revolving spokes of qod on His one-wheeler,” some smart-arse dosser nearby whined out.
Professional wreckers were discerned combing the more outlying areas, in wait for bankers--craft to be lured into the darker canal regions--yet unplumbed by any upstart A to Z cartographer recently laid off in Venice. Dislodged pavement slabs with the gold plate flaking off stood on end like reefs. Floating merchantmen cast money-notes to the wind, in the hope that such inflation-ridden confetti would placate any robbers. They even launched giant coins in cork life-rings as some cosmic game of Shove-Halfpenny. The dossers gambled upon them eventually landing between the tramline territories. It was all a cheap way of keeping busy those who would otherwise be dangerous.
Ruthven turned over under the gummed banknotes that were unaccountably warmer than newspapers. He could not sleep properly, however, because of the hard currency in his back. There was old gold with which to enamel the city basin and hard loot to sink in venture capital: such were his waking dreams, born out of sunset, by high-rise. The wizened woman put a finger to his cheek--and sunk it to the bottom bone of spent existence, through the yellow waxy loam of his flesh. She felt his heart turn over like a sick house-pet in its sleep.
The Ferris-Wheel eye in the sky hovered--a huge silent Angel Helicopter. Even as children, they never had enough pockets for the money. She wept to see how shorter she had became than when first a child. The coins were now so huge and dragging, yet worthless. She idly counted the "blessings” as they floated upon the scummy river: ancient uncustomised vehicles which used to circle the City rather than dare cross it. She turned a blind eye and took suck at Ruthven's ribbed chimney-flesh neck, whence the head had crumbled. She believed that God was probably a Dosser who could not bear the flesh-corrupted body with which He had been saddled, so he flung it off him in skin-shit desiccations of gold--whilst the vast money-spider monster sat upon the Cathedral's dome, knitting its tentacles.
The dam which finally burst was not one of fate nor of nightmare, but that of death itself. Yet Ruthven's previous pain had not presaged a healing death, only more pain, a pain that was so painful he could only hope to share it amongst others. And upon the death of each human creature, the residual pain continued to grow for those still left alive. And still does. A tontine of torment.
¬
Ruthven had much pain to come. Once a rich man of the City, he now contemplated what remained of his short life. People to die, people he loved, and, finally, himself--racked with pain and pointlessness. He drew the covers to his chin and followed the cracks in the ceiling to their uneasy confluence of rivers. Suffering had been so far contained within reasonable margins, so he wondered whether the worst pain was incubating, moving slowly against fate's dam, threatening to overspill at any moment.
The bedroom window rattled in a sporadic wind, the only element breaking the only silence. And the only person, perhaps the only one in the world, dreamed everything, thousands of self-imposed dreams crowding nightmare's dam, threatening to break out in one fell swoop or, at best, simply seep through the haircracks in the ceiling--silver teardrop by silver teardrop like counterfeit shilling-coins.
There had been little rain: cold dry summers edging into endless winter. The sun was a dull orange stain upon the curtains, as if it were incontinent. He recalled the others who had shared his pillows--but even the pillows had been stuffed into the rucksacks of derelict ghosts, who were now traipsing into the distance of his fading imagination; the only remaining pillow under his head was sodden with dark sweat, into which he turned his only face with a sob.
There was more than just wind at the window. Fingernails cut their teeth upon it. They were not people, but monsters, the only monsters left to taunt the one monster who still called itself man. He turned bodily in his sleep, if indeed sleep it could be called. His dreams were of clean sheets, silk sheets--and the pillow full of teased satin feathers for a pillow-fight at a schoolgirls' midnight feast--and a body so soft, so luscious, so self-responsive, he was confident that love could outlast the night. He should have known money could not purchase such love when the chips were finally counted.
Then, through the billowing curtains, there came the creature--a huge monstrosity with huge flapping banknote wings, one huge searing searchlight eye and the smallest possible credibility--shaping out the arrival of night in its own shape, a shape the sleeper could not fathom nor, in a million years, have invented. This was the shape of pain to come, now finally come--dripping indeed with spent come. Only to find the bed empty. Empty of even the last dream. The pillow plump.
The cracks in the ceiling drew to a tangled doodle of tentacles--but nobody was left to tease out the final clear-cut image. The sleeper had departed in one final trial of nightmare--to reseek his fortune in the City, where it was said the streets were paved with gold--and the low lying motorway across the central City filled quickly with sea-water after marauders undermined the coastal dam--but the palace was water-logged and the pelican crossings impassable. The money-lenders foreclosed when the Exchange's plimsoll-line for narrow money supply fell short of the realizable residue of the readies.
Ruthven became senior dosser, on the southernmost bank, but did not have enough pockets to take what came floating down with man-made tides. Then there was the body in the water. Ruthven recognised the body that must have thrown itself in. A mock-up, a right Madame of a waxwork.
"Blimey, that body's me!" he screeched to the wizened woman who took alternate sucks with him on a bottle of pother.
"Now! Now! That can't be you, 'cos you are here." And she pointed to the bottle's glass neck which he French-kissed. "That’s your reason for living."
"But it sure looks like me bobbing like a corpse." The Thames twined between hard shoulders that were planned from time immemorial for its course. Large black inverted statues of fish creatures supped at its margins. In the distance, the searchlight on the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral winked like a lighthouse, its beams crossing the whole of the city skyline "with the revolving spokes of qod on His one-wheeler,” some smart-arse dosser nearby whined out.
Professional wreckers were discerned combing the more outlying areas, in wait for bankers--craft to be lured into the darker canal regions--yet unplumbed by any upstart A to Z cartographer recently laid off in Venice. Dislodged pavement slabs with the gold plate flaking off stood on end like reefs. Floating merchantmen cast money-notes to the wind, in the hope that such inflation-ridden confetti would placate any robbers. They even launched giant coins in cork life-rings as some cosmic game of Shove-Halfpenny. The dossers gambled upon them eventually landing between the tramline territories. It was all a cheap way of keeping busy those who would otherwise be dangerous.
Ruthven turned over under the gummed banknotes that were unaccountably warmer than newspapers. He could not sleep properly, however, because of the hard currency in his back. There was old gold with which to enamel the city basin and hard loot to sink in venture capital: such were his waking dreams, born out of sunset, by high-rise. The wizened woman put a finger to his cheek--and sunk it to the bottom bone of spent existence, through the yellow waxy loam of his flesh. She felt his heart turn over like a sick house-pet in its sleep.
The Ferris-Wheel eye in the sky hovered--a huge silent Angel Helicopter. Even as children, they never had enough pockets for the money. She wept to see how shorter she had became than when first a child. The coins were now so huge and dragging, yet worthless. She idly counted the "blessings” as they floated upon the scummy river: ancient uncustomised vehicles which used to circle the City rather than dare cross it. She turned a blind eye and took suck at Ruthven's ribbed chimney-flesh neck, whence the head had crumbled. She believed that God was probably a Dosser who could not bear the flesh-corrupted body with which He had been saddled, so he flung it off him in skin-shit desiccations of gold--whilst the vast money-spider monster sat upon the Cathedral's dome, knitting its tentacles.
The dam which finally burst was not one of fate nor of nightmare, but that of death itself. Yet Ruthven's previous pain had not presaged a healing death, only more pain, a pain that was so painful he could only hope to share it amongst others. And upon the death of each human creature, the residual pain continued to grow for those still left alive. And still does. A tontine of torment.
¬
Friday, April 18, 2008
Folie de doute
Published 'Sierra Heaven' 1995
I am accused of gullibility. Yet it will not stretch into believing that anybody can be as paranoiac as Sandall.
I first encountered his existence at school, where both of us are cruelly bullied: a fact which fails to bring us closer, simply seeing each other as distant co-victims, too crestfallen to taken things further than that. Yet I can easily imagine Sandall telling me of the awful dreads instilled in him by a supposedly impending torture worse than having the fingernails ripped out one by one. I suspect, too, that he in turn empathises with my similar dreads, hoping the effort of cultivating me as an acquaintance, let alone as a soulmate ... is a sign of single-mindedness? A belief system unsaddled from paranoia? Or simply a tortured admission of schizophrenia?
After all, my name, if you can credit it, is Sandall.
I am accused of gullibility. Yet it will not stretch into believing that anybody can be as paranoiac as Sandall.
I first encountered his existence at school, where both of us are cruelly bullied: a fact which fails to bring us closer, simply seeing each other as distant co-victims, too crestfallen to taken things further than that. Yet I can easily imagine Sandall telling me of the awful dreads instilled in him by a supposedly impending torture worse than having the fingernails ripped out one by one. I suspect, too, that he in turn empathises with my similar dreads, hoping the effort of cultivating me as an acquaintance, let alone as a soulmate ... is a sign of single-mindedness? A belief system unsaddled from paranoia? Or simply a tortured admission of schizophrenia?
After all, my name, if you can credit it, is Sandall.
Monday, April 07, 2008
The Ghostly Time
Published 'Ammonite' 1995
Madge sung as she spun. Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo - thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless wheel-treadling - whilst seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt and the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory — and even the darkness invading her parlour from the sea could not sway such mindless efficiency.
Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead - or the dead had just seen her. The wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes. She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder was already dyed by its donor sheep. She imagined the coiling strands to be shredded threads of various husbands’ remains: those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years.
A retributive ghost, she finally assumed, had left its disembodied hand in the wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialisation, the blood from its wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. Madge smiled at this now more likely explanation - for well she might, the ghost having failed in its course of vengeance - and threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle. Then, she resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum. She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognised the familiar feel of the hand’s sweaty grip.
Another day, another night, another misplaced memory. Madge squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a ghost returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.
The sea’s sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the rollercoasting fishing-boats trailed nets like desiccated wings, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: but with no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. Yet, now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, it would have been possible to hear his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.
She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands — a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.
She wept. The privities might be those of one six husbands ago: the only man who had been able to service her better than she could herself.
The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.
Now to my own story, the one I know best. You see, I once saw Madge standing and I likened her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak. She was barely visible against a storm-cloud, the darkness of which fed upon a cross-section of the sea that was as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few seconds had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.
She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her latest husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish. This had been no raw deal on better nights when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such measures. But, of course, recently, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast
Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm? I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear:
“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney.”
She faltered in her tuneless crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too. If I had known the words of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I myself took up the strain:
“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”
The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.
Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all. Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashing eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless slumber. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the baby to whom she’d never given birth. Or was it that the past had no monopoly on ghosts?
Madge sung as she spun. Motes of dust were hanging in air’s limbo - thus frozen by the laminar flows of her faultless wheel-treadling - whilst seasonal storms stung her cottage window with salt and the oil wick grew gloomier. Madge’s singing, like her spinning, was loomed upon the rote of memory — and even the darkness invading her parlour from the sea could not sway such mindless efficiency.
Abruptly, the wheel snagged and halted, as if something had become lodged between the wooden spokes. Her revery disrupted, Madge thought she had just seen the dead - or the dead had just seen her. The wind whined and pretended to be a thousand Hell’s demons wildly spitting upon the panes. She idly speculated that either the wick had turned the dimness pink or the very morling wool being spooled upon the floor by the wheel’s extruder was already dyed by its donor sheep. She imagined the coiling strands to be shredded threads of various husbands’ remains: those various husbands she had shorn of their manhood over the unreckonable years.
A retributive ghost, she finally assumed, had left its disembodied hand in the wheel, during a state of temporary semi-materialisation, the blood from its wrist stump dripping upon the spun wool. Madge smiled at this now more likely explanation - for well she might, the ghost having failed in its course of vengeance - and threw the barely warm hand into the fire grate as potential kindle. Then, she resumed her mindless crooning to the wheel’s relentless hum. She did not even bother to remember whether she had recognised the familiar feel of the hand’s sweaty grip.
Another day, another night, another misplaced memory. Madge squatted on the stool before the fire dreaming that she no longer existed or, at best, she was a ghost returned to find her stool empty. Perhaps, she had never lived at all and the series of men wedded to her between drowning tragedies had been no more than betrothed to a lick and a promise. She did not question how such words came to her in this state of rarification.
The sea’s sound was softer tonight outside her cottage. On those earlier occasions of storm when the rollercoasting fishing-boats trailed nets like desiccated wings, she was accustomed to stare through the fucus-spattered panes for a sign of her latest husband’s bobbing torchlit homecoming: but with no hope of catching the squelch of his thigh boots through the salty puddles. Yet, now, tonight, with the fire having doused its crackling, it would have been possible to hear his breathing at the distance of a speck on the runnelled horizon.
She had surrendered the merry-go-round of marriages after the feather-toed creatures of the sea had failed to return her last one. She had been granted simple mementoes of all previous husbands — a cheek-flap or a nuggetted finger or barnacled toe. Sometimes, the bits were delivered late, half-decades late. Tomorrow, the delivery may be a man’s sea-weathered privities on a silver tray, like an aborted Innsmouth lobster.
She wept. The privities might be those of one six husbands ago: the only man who had been able to service her better than she could herself.
The weeping made little noise, like a corpse’s. And as dawn broke, the knocking was fainter than the wings of an angel-fish; quieter even than the many squelching tip-toes that preceded it.
Now to my own story, the one I know best. You see, I once saw Madge standing and I likened her figure to a shrunken, blackened lighthouse with its one failed eye-beam flowing, then flapping down the torso like shadowy wings of a cloak. She was barely visible against a storm-cloud, the darkness of which fed upon a cross-section of the sea that was as straight, long and narrow as the distant horizon. It was strange that only a few seconds had passed since the sun first turned into a solitary purple bruise of a cloud.
She was awaiting, I assumed, the return of her latest husband who usually had to fish the sea until the last daylight was sucked back by the surfacing wreck-fish. This had been no raw deal on better nights when the giddiheads of thundercloud were nowhere near. But, today, she must have wondered why he was braving the onset of foul weather. The need for catch was surely not desperate enough for such measures. But, of course, recently, the salt-wine had scrawny fruit for fins and bones. Nothing but a mouthful of scales for breakfast
Wait, what was that shape at sea darker even than the storm? I crawled nearer to Madge’s skirts to catch her low mumbles. I cupped my fan-nerved hand to my ear:
“Ne’er-be-lickit is my belly’s tongue,
Cradle-clothes are stuffed within me,
Winding-sheets swaddle a love unsung,
And a funk-willie’s my man’s chimney.”
She faltered in her tuneless crooning, since the shape had by now become obvious to her, too. If I had known the words of her song of childlessness, I would have continued it. Instead, I made it up as I myself took up the strain:
“Hog’s lard, fear-babe and pricker-roach,
Sea-shade, blub-bring and earth-fly,
I must boil the sea, let them poach,
‘Cos gulpswollen is my birth-eye.”
The sea soon regurgitated its prey before the storm broke. I helped Madge drag it back through the sand-puddles to the cottage where we put it to bed together, like parents tucking in their only child.
Her tears were dry. I wondered if she even noticed me helping at all. Clambering to the window sill, I could see the storm had nurtured the tallest, most imposing lighthouse ever, sweeping the sky with a god’s flashing eyes. I sang, wordlessly this time, in the hope it would lull Madge into a dreamless slumber. Eventually I nuzzled up to her, to ease a bout of the shyfryngs. Seeing, my solitary birth-eye in the darkness, I assumed she knew I was the baby to whom she’d never given birth. Or was it that the past had no monopoly on ghosts?
Friday, March 28, 2008
Six O'Lantern Policemen
Another piece 'Lexophony' (written by me in the sixties) should be read in advance of the piece below.
SIX O'LANTERN POLICEMEN
Published 'Purple Patch' 1995
'Tell a mixture of
Truth and lie...
...Untill no one
Not even you
Can tell one from the other."
[Lines 2305/6, 2309/10, The Egnisomicon.]
Six o'lantern policemen in church-dome hats clapped me into the pisky nick down by the goblin shore and gave me luncheon from a truncheon. I can't understand why I'm here but since I'm here for as long as I can foresee, I ought to be able to shape out the events leading up to my imprisonment in as chronological and meaningful a manner as I can muster. So, once upon a time, there was a dipstick, who for current purposes you can call me, a long streak of nothing, a pair of trouser-braces in the tin bath. I got going somehow, did most of the right things in most of the right eyes, passed a few notches through those trouser-braces ... and ended up discovering The Egnisomicon. The Egnisomicon, you won't have heard of, but you've guessed it, it is a book, a book of sorts, and, like most books, has words in it.
I got married, naturally, had a family, one boy, one girl, and we lived happily ever after. That's one side of the story which I would prefer to end there. But promises are promises. It was my son who thought I was old before my time - surely he saw that I was giving it all I could, in overdrive to earn an honest crust and support a rickety roof of rattle-slates. My God, my two women, since my daughter surely got to be one, they faced me out about it, said I had to keep hold of the 3 cherries or the 3 oranges or whatever, for they dreamed of a one time jackpot when they could nudge me out. Their heads waltzed in my dreams like bouncing balloons. I woke with sweat soaking the sheets. I also dreamed of the Earth itself being a monster, full of curdling cream, and bouncing like a head through someone else's dream, a backdrop to someone else's personal mythos. I dug the garden too much that next summer. I still don't know why and for what. Perhaps I wanted to see how far down it was before the cream started spirting out.
"Get that dirty thing out of the kitchen!" So I took it to the loo instead. I scraped out the tin bath me old mum and dad sat in the 50's. This is where it gets harder to be meaningful, since chronology has been thrown out with the baby. I could say that we had stockpiled loads of tins of Irish stew, marrowfat peas, Italian tomatoes, haricot beans, ring spaghetti &c and I emptied their contents over the ghosts of me old mum and dad who, for all I knew, still sat in the tin bath, scrubbing the day away. I could say that I got in, myself, and started wallowing about. But that does not explain The Egnisomicon, does it? Was that a tin bath into which had been thrown all the literary preservatives and colourings that could be turned out of the pantry of words? Or was it a more important item than that, telling you of moments in the past and future that are about to meet in time present?
Significance is only self-evident after it has ceased to be significant. That's why I'm here today staring from a grinny window, mouthing silently, over and over again, the same words. And the two women and the young man who used to be my family, what about them? They think they have forgotten me, as I have indeed nearly forgotten them. Little fear, I am about to write The Egnisomicon all over again, so that it can exist for the first time. And what indeed are those words I silently mouth time after time?
“You live a day a day to put life in
Suck suck sucking on your own bleeding virtue
You live a day a day to put Christ in
Beg beg begging that death cannot hurt you."
And, down by the goblin shore, the six policemen in church-dome hats fail to wonder what it all means - but neither do they seem to notice that I eat nothing and spend all my time in the pisky nick's bath, the trouser-braces tightening notch by notch...
"What is factual is not actual."
[Line 1190, The Egnisomicon]
SIX O'LANTERN POLICEMEN
Published 'Purple Patch' 1995
'Tell a mixture of
Truth and lie...
...Untill no one
Not even you
Can tell one from the other."
[Lines 2305/6, 2309/10, The Egnisomicon.]
Six o'lantern policemen in church-dome hats clapped me into the pisky nick down by the goblin shore and gave me luncheon from a truncheon. I can't understand why I'm here but since I'm here for as long as I can foresee, I ought to be able to shape out the events leading up to my imprisonment in as chronological and meaningful a manner as I can muster. So, once upon a time, there was a dipstick, who for current purposes you can call me, a long streak of nothing, a pair of trouser-braces in the tin bath. I got going somehow, did most of the right things in most of the right eyes, passed a few notches through those trouser-braces ... and ended up discovering The Egnisomicon. The Egnisomicon, you won't have heard of, but you've guessed it, it is a book, a book of sorts, and, like most books, has words in it.
I got married, naturally, had a family, one boy, one girl, and we lived happily ever after. That's one side of the story which I would prefer to end there. But promises are promises. It was my son who thought I was old before my time - surely he saw that I was giving it all I could, in overdrive to earn an honest crust and support a rickety roof of rattle-slates. My God, my two women, since my daughter surely got to be one, they faced me out about it, said I had to keep hold of the 3 cherries or the 3 oranges or whatever, for they dreamed of a one time jackpot when they could nudge me out. Their heads waltzed in my dreams like bouncing balloons. I woke with sweat soaking the sheets. I also dreamed of the Earth itself being a monster, full of curdling cream, and bouncing like a head through someone else's dream, a backdrop to someone else's personal mythos. I dug the garden too much that next summer. I still don't know why and for what. Perhaps I wanted to see how far down it was before the cream started spirting out.
"Get that dirty thing out of the kitchen!" So I took it to the loo instead. I scraped out the tin bath me old mum and dad sat in the 50's. This is where it gets harder to be meaningful, since chronology has been thrown out with the baby. I could say that we had stockpiled loads of tins of Irish stew, marrowfat peas, Italian tomatoes, haricot beans, ring spaghetti &c and I emptied their contents over the ghosts of me old mum and dad who, for all I knew, still sat in the tin bath, scrubbing the day away. I could say that I got in, myself, and started wallowing about. But that does not explain The Egnisomicon, does it? Was that a tin bath into which had been thrown all the literary preservatives and colourings that could be turned out of the pantry of words? Or was it a more important item than that, telling you of moments in the past and future that are about to meet in time present?
Significance is only self-evident after it has ceased to be significant. That's why I'm here today staring from a grinny window, mouthing silently, over and over again, the same words. And the two women and the young man who used to be my family, what about them? They think they have forgotten me, as I have indeed nearly forgotten them. Little fear, I am about to write The Egnisomicon all over again, so that it can exist for the first time. And what indeed are those words I silently mouth time after time?
“You live a day a day to put life in
Suck suck sucking on your own bleeding virtue
You live a day a day to put Christ in
Beg beg begging that death cannot hurt you."
And, down by the goblin shore, the six policemen in church-dome hats fail to wonder what it all means - but neither do they seem to notice that I eat nothing and spend all my time in the pisky nick's bath, the trouser-braces tightening notch by notch...
"What is factual is not actual."
[Line 1190, The Egnisomicon]
Monday, March 10, 2008
Synergies
There was no way I was going to kiss a self-confessed vampire, was there? She ran the Society of Vampires that I had decided to join - not because I believed in vampires, but because I appreciated the deliciously decadent literature surrounding the concept of the Undead: fiction all of it . . . except the story I have to tell.
She struck me as a gothic creature, combining . . . the fearful gullibility of a heroine who faced the mysteries of an ancient Appennine castle and its villainous owner with battlement brows . . . and the inscrutability of a dark-haired shadow-¬cosmeticked sharp-fingered black-garbed bangle-wristed pin-nosed creature that Satan might one day take as his chosen bride and sell as a hand maiden to God when finished with.
Her name did not suit either part of this forced synergy. Hilda. Yes, that was it. I’d nearly forgotten. Or something is trying to make me forget. Hilda. The one who ran the Society of Vampires. Not that any member believed in vampires. Except Hilda. And me, since.
Then being a rather sociable young man, one who considered himself in charge, even when he wasn’t, I soon worked my way up the hierarchy towards Hilda’s right hind - or should I say left hand? After a short stint as the Society Treasurer, I became editor of the house magazine and membership secretary. The latter position entailed vetting all applications for signs of crankiness - which was understandable, bearing in mind the interest group we attracted. In retrospect, I suppose it was Hilda alone who did not want people in the Society who truly believed in vampires nor, especially, those who had convinced themselves that the they were vampires. This was because she wanted to believe she was the only real vampire on Earth. She needed to be the king-pin: the Queen Bee.
As soon as I realised that she had taken a hankering towards me as a man, I began to back-pedal. It was all very well loving the rich seams of sado-masochism when simply in the form of words and literature - which mentality in many of the other members took the shape of comic strips or Dracula films - but, being face to face with it in Hilda, was tantamount to reaching beyond the well-head of the eye for the unknown regions of the soul.
Then, there was, of course, the occasion when everything came to a crunch. Some of us had been discussing various facets of vampires in Hilda’s bedsit - a dim, and dare I say tawdry, room in a building hidden behind other buildings off the Tottenham Court Road. A few resented how vampires were given a raw deal, whilst others were becoming concerned at the over-popularisation of vampires following the success of a film blockbuster. I cannot now recall who was present, other than myself and Hilda. That day, she had been more in the mode of Poppy Z. Brite/Anne Rice than that of Jane AustenlAnn Radcliffe or, perhaps, the other way round. Whatever the case, she was showing more of one side of her character than the other. She remained the ideal hostess, however, clearing away the scrunched-up silver linings of the wine-boxes we had consumed - before they began to litter the floor like dead duck-billed platypuses, or should that be platypi? Yet, as the evening wore on and the dark shapes of people peeled off one by one, she really got her teeth into one subject. Well, mention of Hilda’s teeth just had to arrive sooner or later, didn’t it? Which brings me back to the kiss I mentioned at the start. But I’m jumping ahead again, as if my thoughts are somehow readier for death than my body.
“I don’t know if we can explain why people like vampires,” I said, knowing this was non-sequitur, but little caring. I knew Hilda had been ranting on about Jung and the Collective Unconscious, but I couldn’t help thinking there was an uncollective unconscious of which even Jung was unaware. Very few people could tap into this more esotenc sump of the universal soul. If I was the only one who knew about it, I compared it to being on board a ship without any of the common passengers or Jungian crew knowing that I was on board. But I never said anything about it - either because I was scared of my pretentiousness being ridiculed or for fear of diluting the esoteric nature of the matter - or both.
“Donald” . . . there she said it, making me more vulnerable with the release of my name . . . “People love vampires because they fear death, and being a vampire is one way of escaping that big black hole.”
“Yes, but, down deep, they enjoy the horror - the thought of drinking blood with fangs et cetera et cetera.”
“The fact they enjoy horror” . . . she picked up the remains of what she thought was the last wine-box and wrung out a few dregs . . . “is like admitting that humanity is basically evil.”
“I’m not going into the old argument about all that!” I had already expounded at length on there being no possibility of the power of good without its balance. Perhaps that was why the others had sidled from the bedsit. Some on all fours.
It is at this point that I should make clear that Hilda had already, earlier in the day, made dubious overtures to me, even before she started emptying the wine-boxes. I suppose the old-fashioned term was “making a pass”. Needless to say, I did not reciprocate her advances in any shape or form, but, since I’ve had to clarify that point time and time again to the police, there is no harm in saying it here. So, when she suddenly lunged forward with her tongue too engorged for her mouth to contain it, I was ready to defend myself. That was the only reason I had the remaining unemptied bag of Burgundy concealed behind my back. It being still floppy and wobbly with wine, like a woman’s breast wrapped in wafer-thin aluminium, I managed to stuff it into her mouth, before she pinned my hands to the sofa with her fingernails. She was not to be foiled, however. I became hysterical with outrage at the unexpected sight of what I thought was a third arm coiling from behind her back - released, as became clear later, from a leather strapping that the flimsy frock concealed. This appendage was like a huge horny sting.
The rest is history. When the authorities undid her other thongs and bone-ribbed corsets, they discovered sagging there a sizeable sac of yellow slime. The doctors stated, in the cool light of reflection, that Hilda had been incontinent, a condition of which she was no doubt ashamed, being as young as she was. The death was deemed caused by reasons unknown. But I know different. She was what an esoteric like me would call an Earth Stowaway - not exactly a vampire, but the next best thing. But I didn’t have to enlighten the authorities - or should I say endarken? Giving me the benefit of the doubt (if anyone could possible wreak a benefit from such a negativity), they let me off with a caution. It is perhaps surprising that the Society has continued in being after Hilda’s so-called death. As I’m less gregarious now, members may be interested to know that I spend my time reading Jane Austen novels, desperately hoping that the words don’t turn nasty. Finally, I wish you well as the new editor of the Society magazine, hoping that you will find it possible to print this as a sort of epitaph - and warning.
Donald.
She struck me as a gothic creature, combining . . . the fearful gullibility of a heroine who faced the mysteries of an ancient Appennine castle and its villainous owner with battlement brows . . . and the inscrutability of a dark-haired shadow-¬cosmeticked sharp-fingered black-garbed bangle-wristed pin-nosed creature that Satan might one day take as his chosen bride and sell as a hand maiden to God when finished with.
Her name did not suit either part of this forced synergy. Hilda. Yes, that was it. I’d nearly forgotten. Or something is trying to make me forget. Hilda. The one who ran the Society of Vampires. Not that any member believed in vampires. Except Hilda. And me, since.
Then being a rather sociable young man, one who considered himself in charge, even when he wasn’t, I soon worked my way up the hierarchy towards Hilda’s right hind - or should I say left hand? After a short stint as the Society Treasurer, I became editor of the house magazine and membership secretary. The latter position entailed vetting all applications for signs of crankiness - which was understandable, bearing in mind the interest group we attracted. In retrospect, I suppose it was Hilda alone who did not want people in the Society who truly believed in vampires nor, especially, those who had convinced themselves that the they were vampires. This was because she wanted to believe she was the only real vampire on Earth. She needed to be the king-pin: the Queen Bee.
As soon as I realised that she had taken a hankering towards me as a man, I began to back-pedal. It was all very well loving the rich seams of sado-masochism when simply in the form of words and literature - which mentality in many of the other members took the shape of comic strips or Dracula films - but, being face to face with it in Hilda, was tantamount to reaching beyond the well-head of the eye for the unknown regions of the soul.
Then, there was, of course, the occasion when everything came to a crunch. Some of us had been discussing various facets of vampires in Hilda’s bedsit - a dim, and dare I say tawdry, room in a building hidden behind other buildings off the Tottenham Court Road. A few resented how vampires were given a raw deal, whilst others were becoming concerned at the over-popularisation of vampires following the success of a film blockbuster. I cannot now recall who was present, other than myself and Hilda. That day, she had been more in the mode of Poppy Z. Brite/Anne Rice than that of Jane AustenlAnn Radcliffe or, perhaps, the other way round. Whatever the case, she was showing more of one side of her character than the other. She remained the ideal hostess, however, clearing away the scrunched-up silver linings of the wine-boxes we had consumed - before they began to litter the floor like dead duck-billed platypuses, or should that be platypi? Yet, as the evening wore on and the dark shapes of people peeled off one by one, she really got her teeth into one subject. Well, mention of Hilda’s teeth just had to arrive sooner or later, didn’t it? Which brings me back to the kiss I mentioned at the start. But I’m jumping ahead again, as if my thoughts are somehow readier for death than my body.
“I don’t know if we can explain why people like vampires,” I said, knowing this was non-sequitur, but little caring. I knew Hilda had been ranting on about Jung and the Collective Unconscious, but I couldn’t help thinking there was an uncollective unconscious of which even Jung was unaware. Very few people could tap into this more esotenc sump of the universal soul. If I was the only one who knew about it, I compared it to being on board a ship without any of the common passengers or Jungian crew knowing that I was on board. But I never said anything about it - either because I was scared of my pretentiousness being ridiculed or for fear of diluting the esoteric nature of the matter - or both.
“Donald” . . . there she said it, making me more vulnerable with the release of my name . . . “People love vampires because they fear death, and being a vampire is one way of escaping that big black hole.”
“Yes, but, down deep, they enjoy the horror - the thought of drinking blood with fangs et cetera et cetera.”
“The fact they enjoy horror” . . . she picked up the remains of what she thought was the last wine-box and wrung out a few dregs . . . “is like admitting that humanity is basically evil.”
“I’m not going into the old argument about all that!” I had already expounded at length on there being no possibility of the power of good without its balance. Perhaps that was why the others had sidled from the bedsit. Some on all fours.
It is at this point that I should make clear that Hilda had already, earlier in the day, made dubious overtures to me, even before she started emptying the wine-boxes. I suppose the old-fashioned term was “making a pass”. Needless to say, I did not reciprocate her advances in any shape or form, but, since I’ve had to clarify that point time and time again to the police, there is no harm in saying it here. So, when she suddenly lunged forward with her tongue too engorged for her mouth to contain it, I was ready to defend myself. That was the only reason I had the remaining unemptied bag of Burgundy concealed behind my back. It being still floppy and wobbly with wine, like a woman’s breast wrapped in wafer-thin aluminium, I managed to stuff it into her mouth, before she pinned my hands to the sofa with her fingernails. She was not to be foiled, however. I became hysterical with outrage at the unexpected sight of what I thought was a third arm coiling from behind her back - released, as became clear later, from a leather strapping that the flimsy frock concealed. This appendage was like a huge horny sting.
The rest is history. When the authorities undid her other thongs and bone-ribbed corsets, they discovered sagging there a sizeable sac of yellow slime. The doctors stated, in the cool light of reflection, that Hilda had been incontinent, a condition of which she was no doubt ashamed, being as young as she was. The death was deemed caused by reasons unknown. But I know different. She was what an esoteric like me would call an Earth Stowaway - not exactly a vampire, but the next best thing. But I didn’t have to enlighten the authorities - or should I say endarken? Giving me the benefit of the doubt (if anyone could possible wreak a benefit from such a negativity), they let me off with a caution. It is perhaps surprising that the Society has continued in being after Hilda’s so-called death. As I’m less gregarious now, members may be interested to know that I spend my time reading Jane Austen novels, desperately hoping that the words don’t turn nasty. Finally, I wish you well as the new editor of the Society magazine, hoping that you will find it possible to print this as a sort of epitaph - and warning.
Donald.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Mygold
Published 'Queen of the Mists' 1994
Mygold loved me more than I could imagine.
I first met her on bait market day, when the streets were caught alive with sea smells. The man I knew in the area - by the name of Fisher Codge - happened to be hanging hooks along his washing line, as I approached from a southerly direction towards the north-facing port village.
‘Goodja day, Ben,’ he called, as he proceeded to lay his nets to dry over the outside coal bunker.
‘Same to you, Codge, I’m sure,’ I rejoined, leaning over his backyard fence, ready to while away the rest of the day in his company. Might as well--better than going up to the wharfside where the market loafers were bound to be surly, with there not being much trade about these days. The fishmongers did a fitful business from their varicose veined slabs of marble, but not enough to warrant hiring someone like me to clean off the scale-curds afterwards.
‘There is a glut of bait, Codge,’ I said glumly, motioning towards the knot of wriggling worm-sized maggots in the wicker basket I toted.
‘There be more bait than fish, ‘tis true, Ben, an’ there’ll come a day, I be bound, when people’ll ‘ave to turn to bait isself to feed their tummies. Then it’ll shoot up in price agin, don’ be affeared.’
I nodded, bemused at his logic.
Then, suddenly, quite unpremeditated, Mygold lurched down Fisher Codge’s backstep which, if I only had my eyes about me, I would have seen had lately been donkey-stoned a waxen red. Indeed, being donkey-stoned. Better than being tickled with a bunny cloth any day. But all my eyes were for this unexpected vision of Mygold, not for the results of Codge’s elbow grease.
‘Ben, I’ll ‘duce yer to me nees.’
Codge pointed with a fish hook he had been sharpening with a huge rutted file. Her name be Mygold.’ I was temporarily speechless, unusual for a bait-seller. I knew her name already, by reputation rather than physical presence; she had come to stay with her Uncle from a village further up the coast. ‘Mygold, this be Ben, an ol’ mate of mine.’ And he touched me lightly on the shoulder with the file, as if he were knighting me. He didn’t know I had wandered in the direction of his homestead, purely to see Mygold for my own eyes. And I had forgotten.
She made a song and dance of ignoring me. Having started to pick fish fingers from the large bowl she was lugging and, laying them out in the sunshine on the corrugated roof of the outside privy, she hummed a tunelessness that matched her demeanour. I almost felt the live weight of her breasts, loosely hanging as they were within the sheerness of her blouse. The expanse of buttocks thrust its visage towards me, the mouth opening and shutting like that of a monkfish, as she placed the bowl on the ground to allow her to reach further up the privy roof. When she finally turned towards me, I was faced with the most memorable features. Once seen, hopefully forgotten. The peepers, although set back into the jowls, were large filmy oyster beds. The smeller, long and slender, with mean pinprick nostrils. The eater, wide and wet, with a slippery customer lolling inside. The listeners so petite they were tantamount to gills. The hair scrawled back into wayward plaits of bottle-green tendrils.
This Mygold smiled. Codge winked. I did not know where to put myself.
She returned to the house, expecting me to follow, as it was plain that she desperately fancied me. I cringed at the trail of glisten she left behind in her wake.
‘Come in fer a while, Ben, why don’t yer’?’ Codge took my arm. I felt the piercing jab of a fish-hook in the back of my neck, as he reached round heartily to lead me up the garden path.
‘No, Codge, I got to get off to the wharfside, to sell my wigglies.’
‘Can’t yer spare ‘alf an ‘our fer a nice cuppa with yer ol’ mate. ‘These ‘ere fish fingers on the privy roof may be piping hot by then and you can par-take of a few afore yer go.’
I could not free myself, since the curved copper claw had by now reached the nodules within my back. I succumbed to the fate that often awaited honest baitmen such as me. To be hooked and lined for sinkering before tea.
I got my own back in a sense, for while I was otherwise engaged, all my wigglies escaped to the privy itself where, finding not nearly enough sustenance to core through in the shit-butt, they had managed to crawl up to the corrugated roof and proceeded to corrupt the fish fingers thereupon into little better than helpings of fried bubble-and-squeak.
How I knew this was happening outside, I put down to second sight, but the fact was not enough to compensate for the pain I endured inside. It was as if all my bones were party to the same unbearable toothache, while the diamond-sharp tip of Codge’s abandoned hook penetrated to the one massive abscess within the marrow of my spinal column.
But all that paled into insignificance when compared to what Mygold did to me. Not exactly bubble and squeak: more like blubber and screech.
They did, however, throw me back into the turbulent sea of life, only slightly worse for wear. I cannot honestly claim that it’s a particularly hard life us bait-men have to lead.
I did lose one of my wigglies that day, however, which, in better times, would have cost me a pretty penny. I expect it drowned in the butt and got mixed up with the rest of the stuff in there.
Mygold loved me more than I could imagine.
I first met her on bait market day, when the streets were caught alive with sea smells. The man I knew in the area - by the name of Fisher Codge - happened to be hanging hooks along his washing line, as I approached from a southerly direction towards the north-facing port village.
‘Goodja day, Ben,’ he called, as he proceeded to lay his nets to dry over the outside coal bunker.
‘Same to you, Codge, I’m sure,’ I rejoined, leaning over his backyard fence, ready to while away the rest of the day in his company. Might as well--better than going up to the wharfside where the market loafers were bound to be surly, with there not being much trade about these days. The fishmongers did a fitful business from their varicose veined slabs of marble, but not enough to warrant hiring someone like me to clean off the scale-curds afterwards.
‘There is a glut of bait, Codge,’ I said glumly, motioning towards the knot of wriggling worm-sized maggots in the wicker basket I toted.
‘There be more bait than fish, ‘tis true, Ben, an’ there’ll come a day, I be bound, when people’ll ‘ave to turn to bait isself to feed their tummies. Then it’ll shoot up in price agin, don’ be affeared.’
I nodded, bemused at his logic.
Then, suddenly, quite unpremeditated, Mygold lurched down Fisher Codge’s backstep which, if I only had my eyes about me, I would have seen had lately been donkey-stoned a waxen red. Indeed, being donkey-stoned. Better than being tickled with a bunny cloth any day. But all my eyes were for this unexpected vision of Mygold, not for the results of Codge’s elbow grease.
‘Ben, I’ll ‘duce yer to me nees.’
Codge pointed with a fish hook he had been sharpening with a huge rutted file. Her name be Mygold.’ I was temporarily speechless, unusual for a bait-seller. I knew her name already, by reputation rather than physical presence; she had come to stay with her Uncle from a village further up the coast. ‘Mygold, this be Ben, an ol’ mate of mine.’ And he touched me lightly on the shoulder with the file, as if he were knighting me. He didn’t know I had wandered in the direction of his homestead, purely to see Mygold for my own eyes. And I had forgotten.
She made a song and dance of ignoring me. Having started to pick fish fingers from the large bowl she was lugging and, laying them out in the sunshine on the corrugated roof of the outside privy, she hummed a tunelessness that matched her demeanour. I almost felt the live weight of her breasts, loosely hanging as they were within the sheerness of her blouse. The expanse of buttocks thrust its visage towards me, the mouth opening and shutting like that of a monkfish, as she placed the bowl on the ground to allow her to reach further up the privy roof. When she finally turned towards me, I was faced with the most memorable features. Once seen, hopefully forgotten. The peepers, although set back into the jowls, were large filmy oyster beds. The smeller, long and slender, with mean pinprick nostrils. The eater, wide and wet, with a slippery customer lolling inside. The listeners so petite they were tantamount to gills. The hair scrawled back into wayward plaits of bottle-green tendrils.
This Mygold smiled. Codge winked. I did not know where to put myself.
She returned to the house, expecting me to follow, as it was plain that she desperately fancied me. I cringed at the trail of glisten she left behind in her wake.
‘Come in fer a while, Ben, why don’t yer’?’ Codge took my arm. I felt the piercing jab of a fish-hook in the back of my neck, as he reached round heartily to lead me up the garden path.
‘No, Codge, I got to get off to the wharfside, to sell my wigglies.’
‘Can’t yer spare ‘alf an ‘our fer a nice cuppa with yer ol’ mate. ‘These ‘ere fish fingers on the privy roof may be piping hot by then and you can par-take of a few afore yer go.’
I could not free myself, since the curved copper claw had by now reached the nodules within my back. I succumbed to the fate that often awaited honest baitmen such as me. To be hooked and lined for sinkering before tea.
I got my own back in a sense, for while I was otherwise engaged, all my wigglies escaped to the privy itself where, finding not nearly enough sustenance to core through in the shit-butt, they had managed to crawl up to the corrugated roof and proceeded to corrupt the fish fingers thereupon into little better than helpings of fried bubble-and-squeak.
How I knew this was happening outside, I put down to second sight, but the fact was not enough to compensate for the pain I endured inside. It was as if all my bones were party to the same unbearable toothache, while the diamond-sharp tip of Codge’s abandoned hook penetrated to the one massive abscess within the marrow of my spinal column.
But all that paled into insignificance when compared to what Mygold did to me. Not exactly bubble and squeak: more like blubber and screech.
They did, however, throw me back into the turbulent sea of life, only slightly worse for wear. I cannot honestly claim that it’s a particularly hard life us bait-men have to lead.
I did lose one of my wigglies that day, however, which, in better times, would have cost me a pretty penny. I expect it drowned in the butt and got mixed up with the rest of the stuff in there.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
The Ghoul
Published 'Black Lotus' 1993
The earth was easier to dig than the ghoul had feared after all the ground frosts of previous nights. Now, as if a thoughtful God were keeping vigil, the weather had taken an abrupt mild turn.
The solid silver trowel made easy inroads into the peaty soil, but with there being no watchful eye of the moon to oversee progress, there was no certainty as to the delving’s depth – other than the probes of the ghoul’s own fingers which consequently released the handle of the trowel whilst the other hand propped the body at the optimum angle upon the buttocks.
It was not obvious when the blade had met wood since there was no significant difference between the earthy mulch and the rotting coffin itself. But the ghoul’s testing fingers inadvertently threaded empty eye sockets and these sightless crevices sucked upon what they considered to be skirmishing worms – but quickly stopped because, surely, Death had no possible need of true hunger.
On the other hand, the ghoul did not realise how lucky she was to have been wearing gloves (albeit lacy, fashionable ones).
The earth was easier to dig than the ghoul had feared after all the ground frosts of previous nights. Now, as if a thoughtful God were keeping vigil, the weather had taken an abrupt mild turn.
The solid silver trowel made easy inroads into the peaty soil, but with there being no watchful eye of the moon to oversee progress, there was no certainty as to the delving’s depth – other than the probes of the ghoul’s own fingers which consequently released the handle of the trowel whilst the other hand propped the body at the optimum angle upon the buttocks.
It was not obvious when the blade had met wood since there was no significant difference between the earthy mulch and the rotting coffin itself. But the ghoul’s testing fingers inadvertently threaded empty eye sockets and these sightless crevices sucked upon what they considered to be skirmishing worms – but quickly stopped because, surely, Death had no possible need of true hunger.
On the other hand, the ghoul did not realise how lucky she was to have been wearing gloves (albeit lacy, fashionable ones).
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Pal Pot
First published 'Not One Of Us' 1993
I fell head over heels in love with her when I first saw Carmina in the supermarket. She was standing by the condiments, closely examining the label of what I could just see was a jar of lime pickle. I’ve always been shy. You can see it in my eyes if you care to look: a disfiguring shyness. But I found myself momentarily cresting a veritable up¬surge of confidence, thrust thus out of character by a girl so ideal she seemed a pure, undiluted goddess of golden sunshine shafting through the drizzly clouds of my inhibitive past.
‘Pretty hot stuff,’ I said, abruptly, pointing at the jar in her band. I jumped from my skin at the sound of my own voice. I could have bitten my tongue off.
‘Yes, I thought so, too, but it says mild in small letters under the name here.’ She pushed the jar under my nose so that I could see the word ‘mild’ in small print under LIME PICKLE.
I couldn’t bear to say any more, sensing the old ‘me’ creeping insidiously back into position just behind the eyes. I simply nodded and scuttled off with my carriage into the next aisle, hoping that the baked bean cans would collapse and create a diversionary tactic all of their own.
I despaired when she queued up immediately behind me at the checkout. I was already positioning my purchases on the moving belt, with the girl at the register bleeping them through. Eventually, I remem¬bered to place the plastic ‘next customer’ divider on the belt just behind my pot noodles. And when Carmina started to deposit her groceries on the belt, I noted, out of the corner of my eye, that the jar of lime pickle was at the front, pressed up against the plastic divider. I was all a dither, my mind racing round and round the inside of my skull like a dervish chasing an impossible dream.
Yet how did I know her name was Carmina? Well, the checkout operator (a blousy girl with nothing much to recommend her) was somehow acquainted with her and, as she continued to bleep through my solitary weekend’s tucker, she chatted over my shoulder--‘Carmina, do you know Rich is going out with Wendy?’ and ‘I sure do like your eye shadow, Carmina, where did you get it from?’ and ‘Are you going to John’s party tonight, they say your ‘ex’ will be there?’--as if any such questions could have been even slightly interesting to the likes of Carmina! Nor had I seen the evidence of make-up upon our fleeting eye-contact in the aisle.
Carmina, to her credit, did not bother to answer; merely smiled noncommittally as she laid her rather exotic purchases on the belt.
I hastily left the supermarket in a flurry of squeaky, ill-packed grocery bags that bore a name that gradually made me feel more secure, as if my way home was safe from intervention. But, when I did get home, I rested my elbows on the kitchen table and burst out into intermittent fits of uncontrollable tears. I had fallen in love with an impossible dream. However, later in the evening, I cheered myself up by enacting a marriage between my pot noodles and the jar of lime pickle that had accidently become mixed up with my shopping.
I fell head over heels in love with her when I first saw Carmina in the supermarket. She was standing by the condiments, closely examining the label of what I could just see was a jar of lime pickle. I’ve always been shy. You can see it in my eyes if you care to look: a disfiguring shyness. But I found myself momentarily cresting a veritable up¬surge of confidence, thrust thus out of character by a girl so ideal she seemed a pure, undiluted goddess of golden sunshine shafting through the drizzly clouds of my inhibitive past.
‘Pretty hot stuff,’ I said, abruptly, pointing at the jar in her band. I jumped from my skin at the sound of my own voice. I could have bitten my tongue off.
‘Yes, I thought so, too, but it says mild in small letters under the name here.’ She pushed the jar under my nose so that I could see the word ‘mild’ in small print under LIME PICKLE.
I couldn’t bear to say any more, sensing the old ‘me’ creeping insidiously back into position just behind the eyes. I simply nodded and scuttled off with my carriage into the next aisle, hoping that the baked bean cans would collapse and create a diversionary tactic all of their own.
I despaired when she queued up immediately behind me at the checkout. I was already positioning my purchases on the moving belt, with the girl at the register bleeping them through. Eventually, I remem¬bered to place the plastic ‘next customer’ divider on the belt just behind my pot noodles. And when Carmina started to deposit her groceries on the belt, I noted, out of the corner of my eye, that the jar of lime pickle was at the front, pressed up against the plastic divider. I was all a dither, my mind racing round and round the inside of my skull like a dervish chasing an impossible dream.
Yet how did I know her name was Carmina? Well, the checkout operator (a blousy girl with nothing much to recommend her) was somehow acquainted with her and, as she continued to bleep through my solitary weekend’s tucker, she chatted over my shoulder--‘Carmina, do you know Rich is going out with Wendy?’ and ‘I sure do like your eye shadow, Carmina, where did you get it from?’ and ‘Are you going to John’s party tonight, they say your ‘ex’ will be there?’--as if any such questions could have been even slightly interesting to the likes of Carmina! Nor had I seen the evidence of make-up upon our fleeting eye-contact in the aisle.
Carmina, to her credit, did not bother to answer; merely smiled noncommittally as she laid her rather exotic purchases on the belt.
I hastily left the supermarket in a flurry of squeaky, ill-packed grocery bags that bore a name that gradually made me feel more secure, as if my way home was safe from intervention. But, when I did get home, I rested my elbows on the kitchen table and burst out into intermittent fits of uncontrollable tears. I had fallen in love with an impossible dream. However, later in the evening, I cheered myself up by enacting a marriage between my pot noodles and the jar of lime pickle that had accidently become mixed up with my shopping.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Confessions of a Householder
published 'The Banshee' 1993
It is the devil's own job to find window-cleaners, these days. There was once a time they were climbing on top of each other for your custom. But, now, nobody wants to lug round a retractable ladder, a bucket of soapy sloshy water and a prime cut of chamois leather. The ones you do see are usually teetering in precarious cradles hanging against godawful office blocks, wielding contraptions that look like car windscreen wipers and staring in at mindless clerks who have nothing better to do than stare back.
That is, until Mr Jones-Bishop came knocking on my door, looking for business. A well-spoken gentleman in his mid-fifties, at a guess, dressed methodically in navy blue dungarees and flat cap. He was obviously supplementing an income kindly granted him by the Government.
“Yes, I’ve been after one of you for ages. How much? And how regularly will you come?”
“How about ten bob for the whole house?”
I hadn’t heard the expression ‘ten bob’ for several years. Used to be a brown note, I recalled. But fifty pee seemed far too low. I didn’t question it, however — no point, I supposed, in preventing others from diddling themselves. No point at all.
“Well yes, that’s fine.”
He surveyed my semi-detached with a professional air. I assumed he had secured the business for the whole street.
“You’ll come once a month, then?”
“Once a week would be better all round.”
I nodded, non-commitally. He did come once a week. And a fine job he made of it, too. My windows sparkled even on dull days. I could see my face in them from both sides — not that I was in the habit of peering into my own house from the garden.
There was one irritating, if not disturbing fact, however. Mr Jones-Bishop did tend to be almost too attentive. I supposed it was because he thought that was the best way of obtaining a brew-up at my hands. But there is a thin borderline between attentiveness and sheer snoopiness. And many a time I caught him peering through the window of the master bedroom, hand in a salute of shade above his eyes, always it seemed at the very moment I was getting up....or going back to bed.
I doubted he could see me as well as I could see him, however. That was the saving grace.
It was only when he started turning up on a daily basis did I refer the subject to the communal street gossip. My neighbours (with whom I had only rare meetings), needless to say, were not short of a tongue or two. No holds barred, in fact, when a shot-gun wedding was afoot or when curtains seemed to be closed too often in a particular semi.
“What window-cleaner?” was the general response. In fact, my incessant questioning on this subject must have caused me to be the butt of a scandal or two. So, in the end, I gave up and determined to present Mr Jones-Bishop with the facts of the case.
Thus, when I heard the clatter of his ladder; the tell-tale phlutt of its padded top as it was tilted againist the bedroom window, followed by the gently screech screech of his suddy leather upon the glass, I knew he was on the job... .despite the curtains being closed. I vowed to await the characteristic click of my letterbox and the plop of his invoice on the bristly doormat.....and then abruptly open the front door.
“Why have you been victimising me? Mooning in at me all hours of the day?” But could I bring myself to say it? Could I even muster sufficient courage to open the door?
Imagine my surprise when I did and discovered him standing there, flanked by two of my neighbours with cocked shot-guns.
I immediately thought that Mr Jones-Bishop must have taken a shine to me.
It is the devil's own job to find window-cleaners, these days. There was once a time they were climbing on top of each other for your custom. But, now, nobody wants to lug round a retractable ladder, a bucket of soapy sloshy water and a prime cut of chamois leather. The ones you do see are usually teetering in precarious cradles hanging against godawful office blocks, wielding contraptions that look like car windscreen wipers and staring in at mindless clerks who have nothing better to do than stare back.
That is, until Mr Jones-Bishop came knocking on my door, looking for business. A well-spoken gentleman in his mid-fifties, at a guess, dressed methodically in navy blue dungarees and flat cap. He was obviously supplementing an income kindly granted him by the Government.
“Yes, I’ve been after one of you for ages. How much? And how regularly will you come?”
“How about ten bob for the whole house?”
I hadn’t heard the expression ‘ten bob’ for several years. Used to be a brown note, I recalled. But fifty pee seemed far too low. I didn’t question it, however — no point, I supposed, in preventing others from diddling themselves. No point at all.
“Well yes, that’s fine.”
He surveyed my semi-detached with a professional air. I assumed he had secured the business for the whole street.
“You’ll come once a month, then?”
“Once a week would be better all round.”
I nodded, non-commitally. He did come once a week. And a fine job he made of it, too. My windows sparkled even on dull days. I could see my face in them from both sides — not that I was in the habit of peering into my own house from the garden.
There was one irritating, if not disturbing fact, however. Mr Jones-Bishop did tend to be almost too attentive. I supposed it was because he thought that was the best way of obtaining a brew-up at my hands. But there is a thin borderline between attentiveness and sheer snoopiness. And many a time I caught him peering through the window of the master bedroom, hand in a salute of shade above his eyes, always it seemed at the very moment I was getting up....or going back to bed.
I doubted he could see me as well as I could see him, however. That was the saving grace.
It was only when he started turning up on a daily basis did I refer the subject to the communal street gossip. My neighbours (with whom I had only rare meetings), needless to say, were not short of a tongue or two. No holds barred, in fact, when a shot-gun wedding was afoot or when curtains seemed to be closed too often in a particular semi.
“What window-cleaner?” was the general response. In fact, my incessant questioning on this subject must have caused me to be the butt of a scandal or two. So, in the end, I gave up and determined to present Mr Jones-Bishop with the facts of the case.
Thus, when I heard the clatter of his ladder; the tell-tale phlutt of its padded top as it was tilted againist the bedroom window, followed by the gently screech screech of his suddy leather upon the glass, I knew he was on the job... .despite the curtains being closed. I vowed to await the characteristic click of my letterbox and the plop of his invoice on the bristly doormat.....and then abruptly open the front door.
“Why have you been victimising me? Mooning in at me all hours of the day?” But could I bring myself to say it? Could I even muster sufficient courage to open the door?
Imagine my surprise when I did and discovered him standing there, flanked by two of my neighbours with cocked shot-guns.
I immediately thought that Mr Jones-Bishop must have taken a shine to me.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The Door Has Bolted
If one joined the highly competitive ranks of Walk Felling, then one needed to expect knocks and brickbats as well as the bouquets and fillips.
Joanna was not terribly keen, it had to be said, when Thomas suggested her enrolling in the local Walk Felling group.
This group – according to their extremely glossy brochure (so glossy it shone at night without any lights on) – had thrived in Buckminster since time’s immemorial tolling of the city’s church bells. The group’s various ‘Captains of the Trip’, as they were called, had counted Tobias Smollett and Jonathan Swift among their number, although, in those days, these two famous authors must have presided over the group from an enormous distance. Distances have indeed grown smaller as time approached our own time – mainly due to the development of transport techniques but also often due to unexpected factors such as the miles themselves becoming relatively shorter in length (incredible though it may seem that nobody has before noticed this phenomenon or remarked upon it, safe in this account).
In short, however, today’s Walk Felling Captains have an easier task to arrange and, subsequently, control the various Trips in which the Buckminster group happens to indulge.
Joanna was a burly woman, but ‘burly’ is not a feminine word and she preferred, when push came to shove, the word ‘buxom’. But Thomas loved her, he thought, and that fact made any careless use of words quite unimportant and ultra vires.
“Aren’t there any comebacks?” she asked, as Thomas passed the enrolment form towards her. She wielded the unlit cigarette in its holder as if she were conducting the conversation orchestrally.
The clock on the steadfast mantelpiece tick-tocked ponderously, while the bay window was full of a threatening sky outside. Walk Felling was more difficult in the heat. At least wet and cool dowsed the passions.
“Comebacks?” Thomas intoned. “What sort of comebacks are you referring to, dear Joanna?”
She then embarked upon a long diatribe concerning various trial Trips she had experienced as a volunteer, i.e. accompanying those people who instigated the Trips. Thomas, she saw, was not quite himself today. His smooth skin hid his thoughts whilst also belying his age – and she wondered how she could have possibly ended up with a soul-mate so distinctly unsuited to her soul - unsuited if not by age differential, certainly by temperament and quaint interests.
He was under the weather, decidedly out of salts. Take this Walk Felling as an example: the pursuit that Thomas was so crazy about. It seemed more conducive to embittered middle-aged folk like him, not for a relative youngster she felt herself to be. She discarded the unlit cigarette and its holder, despairing of its use as a stage prop.
“Well, you know.” She glanced towards the window where the weather was now disguised by a sudden blanket of fog - probably the ideal conditions for blatant Walk Felling. “It’s all well and good Walk Felling with people but when we also do it with actual parts of their living quarters and with their other belongings, then I’m sure we’re treading on too many toes…”
Thomas shrugged. Joanna turned back to the enrolment form, quizzically sucking the pen that had replaced the cigarette holder as a comforter. There was a wording in the small print she couldn’t really follow.
“What does this mean?” She points with the pen, peering over her own buxom chest with an expression fit to fell Jack and the Beanstalk’s Giant.
Thomas erected his half-glasses upon his face and studied the bit pointed at. And read it aloud with great understanding: “No winklepickers, no trailing feet, no untoward heels, no angular ankles, no misled toes … Hmmm, well, Joanna, that simply means you have to be careful where you place your feet during a Trip. The Captain will have your guts for garters, if you don’t.”
“No, not that bit, Thomas, this bit.” She pointed again, but now not allowing her own upper body to divert the direction of her pen-tip. She read it aloud herself, this time: “Doors and windows can be approached by the signatory but only with great care; I, as signatory, faithfully do testify that those labelled with a red triangle should be deemed permanent and thus effectively ‘unwalking’ features of a house and theretofore ineligible for Felling.”
Thomas frowned. He himself had never been known to hold back when approaching apparent inanimate objects during an official Trip. Everything he saw was fair game to him – and once he’d started caving things in with his metal toe-caps, he’d always claim having missed seeing the red triangle. Yet those very thoughts belied his actual thoughts.
“I can’t sign this.” Joanna sighed. “It makes me liable to counter-tripping, it seems. Even upon my own house.”
****
Thomas eventually convinced Joanna and they both took her enrolment form to Trip HQ where the Captain held court, as it were.
The latest Captain – in a long line of Captains – had a quizzical moustache which he constantly twirled with his yellow fingers as he read the form that Joanna, with some misgiving, had eventually signed. Each form was indeed different from all other forms. There were no standard rules of Walk Felling – in fact there was potentially an infinite number of ‘sets of rules’, in ever-increasing permutations. The Captain simply had to check what things Joanna was allowed to do and what she wasn’t allowed to do, all within the realms of reason.
Thomas looked on, beaming – proud that his lady consort of the moment was soon to be allowed entry into the ranks of Buckminster Walk Felling. Even the HQ’s inner door swung to and fro in the fresh-gusted air … creaking out its celebration of Joanna’s entry.
*****
Her maiden Trip was to be that very afternoon. Thomas and Joanna traipsed behind the dishevelled shape of the Captain towards Buckminster Common. There, they could see the huge electricity Generators that hulked glossily on the horizon like lowered souls in prayer. These machines hummed, even at this considerable distance, giving the air – which was now generally cool and clear – the odd waft of perceptible warmth.
The Captain was smoking like a chimney. And he, together with Thomas and Joanna, and a number of other Trippers, slowed their own walk to an amble as they approached an area where already the Trip’s catharsis was primed. At least a score of strangers was seen striding vigorously in a circle, round and round an odd burial-mound that was covered with a house door. They were crooning some difficult words that were nevertheless easy to hear.
“We expectorate the Trip, we ooblivate the Trip, we stagnivate the Trip, we duminate the Trip…”
And the Captain’s group itself, whilst approaching these circling crooners, intoned their own reply: “You simply await our Trip!”
Joanna knew, by strength of the wording of the particular set of rules that she had signed with her own fair dinky scrawl upon the enrolment form, that she was the only one of the Trippers who could actually tackle this door.
The door was clearly not walking and it bore a red triangle – of sorts. So it would have been difficult to justify full-blooded Walk Felling in its own case. Except by Joanna.
She would need to swallow all compunction and simply attack the door while it was down. Meanwhile, the Captain, Thomas and the other Trippers tackled the circling crooners at mid-calf level - a surprise manoeuvre in the form of a variation upon ‘weakening ankles’, but it resulted in all participants, Trippers and Tripped alike, sprawling on the Common like dismantled beetles.
Joanna was not among them. She had been seen chasing the door into the distance, towards the horizon where the Generators moaned on and on forever – lighting up Buckminster City and all its pubs, as the place awaited the return of the excited Walk Fellers after weathering a variably hot day on the Common.
Thomas, when in his cups, wondered if he should ever see Joanna again.
(unpublished)
Joanna was not terribly keen, it had to be said, when Thomas suggested her enrolling in the local Walk Felling group.
This group – according to their extremely glossy brochure (so glossy it shone at night without any lights on) – had thrived in Buckminster since time’s immemorial tolling of the city’s church bells. The group’s various ‘Captains of the Trip’, as they were called, had counted Tobias Smollett and Jonathan Swift among their number, although, in those days, these two famous authors must have presided over the group from an enormous distance. Distances have indeed grown smaller as time approached our own time – mainly due to the development of transport techniques but also often due to unexpected factors such as the miles themselves becoming relatively shorter in length (incredible though it may seem that nobody has before noticed this phenomenon or remarked upon it, safe in this account).
In short, however, today’s Walk Felling Captains have an easier task to arrange and, subsequently, control the various Trips in which the Buckminster group happens to indulge.
Joanna was a burly woman, but ‘burly’ is not a feminine word and she preferred, when push came to shove, the word ‘buxom’. But Thomas loved her, he thought, and that fact made any careless use of words quite unimportant and ultra vires.
“Aren’t there any comebacks?” she asked, as Thomas passed the enrolment form towards her. She wielded the unlit cigarette in its holder as if she were conducting the conversation orchestrally.
The clock on the steadfast mantelpiece tick-tocked ponderously, while the bay window was full of a threatening sky outside. Walk Felling was more difficult in the heat. At least wet and cool dowsed the passions.
“Comebacks?” Thomas intoned. “What sort of comebacks are you referring to, dear Joanna?”
She then embarked upon a long diatribe concerning various trial Trips she had experienced as a volunteer, i.e. accompanying those people who instigated the Trips. Thomas, she saw, was not quite himself today. His smooth skin hid his thoughts whilst also belying his age – and she wondered how she could have possibly ended up with a soul-mate so distinctly unsuited to her soul - unsuited if not by age differential, certainly by temperament and quaint interests.
He was under the weather, decidedly out of salts. Take this Walk Felling as an example: the pursuit that Thomas was so crazy about. It seemed more conducive to embittered middle-aged folk like him, not for a relative youngster she felt herself to be. She discarded the unlit cigarette and its holder, despairing of its use as a stage prop.
“Well, you know.” She glanced towards the window where the weather was now disguised by a sudden blanket of fog - probably the ideal conditions for blatant Walk Felling. “It’s all well and good Walk Felling with people but when we also do it with actual parts of their living quarters and with their other belongings, then I’m sure we’re treading on too many toes…”
Thomas shrugged. Joanna turned back to the enrolment form, quizzically sucking the pen that had replaced the cigarette holder as a comforter. There was a wording in the small print she couldn’t really follow.
“What does this mean?” She points with the pen, peering over her own buxom chest with an expression fit to fell Jack and the Beanstalk’s Giant.
Thomas erected his half-glasses upon his face and studied the bit pointed at. And read it aloud with great understanding: “No winklepickers, no trailing feet, no untoward heels, no angular ankles, no misled toes … Hmmm, well, Joanna, that simply means you have to be careful where you place your feet during a Trip. The Captain will have your guts for garters, if you don’t.”
“No, not that bit, Thomas, this bit.” She pointed again, but now not allowing her own upper body to divert the direction of her pen-tip. She read it aloud herself, this time: “Doors and windows can be approached by the signatory but only with great care; I, as signatory, faithfully do testify that those labelled with a red triangle should be deemed permanent and thus effectively ‘unwalking’ features of a house and theretofore ineligible for Felling.”
Thomas frowned. He himself had never been known to hold back when approaching apparent inanimate objects during an official Trip. Everything he saw was fair game to him – and once he’d started caving things in with his metal toe-caps, he’d always claim having missed seeing the red triangle. Yet those very thoughts belied his actual thoughts.
“I can’t sign this.” Joanna sighed. “It makes me liable to counter-tripping, it seems. Even upon my own house.”
****
Thomas eventually convinced Joanna and they both took her enrolment form to Trip HQ where the Captain held court, as it were.
The latest Captain – in a long line of Captains – had a quizzical moustache which he constantly twirled with his yellow fingers as he read the form that Joanna, with some misgiving, had eventually signed. Each form was indeed different from all other forms. There were no standard rules of Walk Felling – in fact there was potentially an infinite number of ‘sets of rules’, in ever-increasing permutations. The Captain simply had to check what things Joanna was allowed to do and what she wasn’t allowed to do, all within the realms of reason.
Thomas looked on, beaming – proud that his lady consort of the moment was soon to be allowed entry into the ranks of Buckminster Walk Felling. Even the HQ’s inner door swung to and fro in the fresh-gusted air … creaking out its celebration of Joanna’s entry.
*****
Her maiden Trip was to be that very afternoon. Thomas and Joanna traipsed behind the dishevelled shape of the Captain towards Buckminster Common. There, they could see the huge electricity Generators that hulked glossily on the horizon like lowered souls in prayer. These machines hummed, even at this considerable distance, giving the air – which was now generally cool and clear – the odd waft of perceptible warmth.
The Captain was smoking like a chimney. And he, together with Thomas and Joanna, and a number of other Trippers, slowed their own walk to an amble as they approached an area where already the Trip’s catharsis was primed. At least a score of strangers was seen striding vigorously in a circle, round and round an odd burial-mound that was covered with a house door. They were crooning some difficult words that were nevertheless easy to hear.
“We expectorate the Trip, we ooblivate the Trip, we stagnivate the Trip, we duminate the Trip…”
And the Captain’s group itself, whilst approaching these circling crooners, intoned their own reply: “You simply await our Trip!”
Joanna knew, by strength of the wording of the particular set of rules that she had signed with her own fair dinky scrawl upon the enrolment form, that she was the only one of the Trippers who could actually tackle this door.
The door was clearly not walking and it bore a red triangle – of sorts. So it would have been difficult to justify full-blooded Walk Felling in its own case. Except by Joanna.
She would need to swallow all compunction and simply attack the door while it was down. Meanwhile, the Captain, Thomas and the other Trippers tackled the circling crooners at mid-calf level - a surprise manoeuvre in the form of a variation upon ‘weakening ankles’, but it resulted in all participants, Trippers and Tripped alike, sprawling on the Common like dismantled beetles.
Joanna was not among them. She had been seen chasing the door into the distance, towards the horizon where the Generators moaned on and on forever – lighting up Buckminster City and all its pubs, as the place awaited the return of the excited Walk Fellers after weathering a variably hot day on the Common.
Thomas, when in his cups, wondered if he should ever see Joanna again.
(unpublished)
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Flossie's Return
Published 'Pirate Writings' 1993
In the end, Flossie had been away too long. Following the ugly divorce, she had decided to have the first ever holiday on her own and go the whole hog this time with two months outside her English homeland. To call it a Grand Tour would have been stretching it too far, but many high spots of Old Europe had been on her itinerary; those resplendent representatives of history’s old disguise where Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires were living memories. Not that she gave herself any time for meticulously planning her sudden return to England resulting in suitcases full of dirty underwear, unmemorable keepsake knickknacks and diverse hats, all being hastily thrust into the back of a taxicab at Heathrow Airport. She actually relished returning to the salubrious terraced house in Hampstead, despite the eventual necessity to get her teeth back into earning a living. And no husband. She had put him to the back of her mind. Now his image returned, the nearer she was driven towards the abode he had rudely abandoned all those months ago..
It looked at first as if things hadn’t changed, as the taxi drew up outside the familiar railings. In fact, the doorknocker seemed just as sparkling as she’d left it: which was perhaps more surprising than she realised. The road appeared narrower, but she put that down to having just been charcoal-sketching wide avenues and esplanades amid the artistic environs of what was now another world away. The people in the street with whom, only two months ago, she may well have been at least on nodding terms, were strangely scruffy; their faces swarthy and hair showing signs of concealed racial curls, eyes piercing, as they witnessed Flossie’s undignified scramble from the taxi.
“Oi, Miss, don’t furgit yer luggidge!” called the driver as she hustled up her front steps to unlock what she hoped was her front door. She had expected him to get out and tote the cases from the boot up to the door. If he expects a tip, he’d better shake a leg, she vowed to herself. The lock was well oiled and easily stirred, but the door itself was unseasonably stiff, the wood swollen in the frame, or the frame shrunk, or a combination of the two. She put a shoulder to it, causing her to unbalance into the hall, dropping the flowery hat she’d purchased in Florence.
“Oi, Miss, don’ trip up over yer own foot!” The driver laughed, if sneering could be called laughter, as he arrived at the top of the steps, lugging baggage with one hand and holding out the other like a plate of meat – as if he were a rich beggar.
“Thank you.” She hastily regained her composure, and sunk a foreign coin of high denomination into the pit of his grimy palm.
He put his nose to it, as if he eschewed testing it with his gappy teeth. “Oi, Miss, I can’t spend this ‘ere funny munny in the Dog ‘n Drake.”
“I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got till I change it back in the morning.”
“And I’m afraid I’ll ‘ave ter take yer all the way back to Heathrow where yer started off, unless yer give me proper goose for the gander.”
Flossie cringed. The gratuity had suddenly assumed a necessary purpose, an importance that her latterly foreign-steeped mind couldn’t conceptualize. She wondered about going next door, where old Mr Phipps lived. He’d lend her a few shillings, no doubt. Not that she owed the taxi-man anything beyond his fare, which she had settled with her remaining pukka English currency. It was simply that she felt more vulnerable in England than she did abroad, for some unaccountable reason. Perhaps, the more noticeable absence of her erstwhile husband. After all, he had been a dab hand at dealing with the servant class. Not that there were any servants left in England. The thoughts were a stream of consciousness, but oddly logical. Even that last one. And the next. Only loosely gratuitous. “Hold on, while I arrange something,” she said, finger in the air, as if she was conducting somebody else’s argument.
Mr Phipps must have changed his curtains … and repainted his door! Two months was an unconscionably long period to have been away. Even the echoing sound of the knocker upon the heel was more reverberant, as if the house was a louder sound-box, or as if fabrics and furniture were depleted, or perhaps both. Probably neither. Not shrunk nor swollen.
“Mr Phippsl Mr Phipps! Are you there?” she called through the letter-box, using it like an extension of her mouth. She expected to hear the soft pad of his shambling slippers as they took their customary shine along the parquet in the hall, but no such welcome sounds. She shrugged and returned to the taxi-man, who was stepping from foot to foot on the spot in an attempt to give the appearance of wasting time.
“I’m afraid you will have to take that coin today and come back tomorrow if you need it changed. I can assure you it’s probably worth far more than I would have given you, given half the change, and, after all, there is no law to say I need to give you anything....”
The man looked askance, as if to say even the long tradition of English law had been altered by an Act of Parliament, since she went away. Real politicians were on Summer recess, so anything could’ve been passed.
“I hope you don’t consider me mercenary,” said the man n a suddenly posher accent, “but I can see you are a generous lady who would sooner treat me than trick me...”
“Well, whatever, please be reasonable.”
“Me, Madam? I’m the most reasonable man you’re ever likely to meet. Reasonability, that’s my watchword.”
“In that case, can we call it a day?”
He looked up at the darkening sky. “More like the night, Miss, much more like the night, I should say.”
She did not appreciate the humour, but decided not to antagonise him further. She pulled the luggage into the hall and slammed the door behind her, the dubious coin still grasped in her sweaty palm.
Flossie stood for a few minutes in the dimness at the foot of the steep stairs. Eventually, she heard the door of the black cab slam and drive off, hopefully with the driver in it, she mused to herself.
The stairs certainly seemed steeper than she remembered them, with tall treads. She managed to drag the first item of soft baggage towards her bedroom at the back of the house. Uncharacteristically, she had forgotten to switch on the light at the bottom before grappling with the ascent. Come on, Flossie, old girl, get a grip on yourself! She gritted her teeth and after much fuss and bother, she arrived on the landing. She’d have a quick bath and change into... into what? Damn! All her clothes were stiff with European dirt – except, that was for the oddments left behind in the tallboy in her bedroom, still mixed up with her husband’s ancient cast-offs. She couldn’t think properly. That taxi-man had upset her more than she realized.
The landing was even darker than the hallway. She had always thought it best to leave all connecting doors firmly shut, whilst away, in case of fire. That would account for the darkness. Still, she had very thick navy-blue velvet curtains in the bedroom (owing to the light early mornings before her departure), and she could not recall whether these had been left undrawn.
She stood for a few seconds, regaining her breath (or what she hoped was her breath) and, as she did so, she heard a vehicle drawing up outside. Surely, it wasn’t that stuffy taxi-driver returned for his damned money. But, no, it soon drove off again, without any sound of car doors. Leaving the bulging case where it was and not bothering with the top light switch, Flossie felt her way to the bedroom door ...
....which was no longer made of the erstwhile wood, but curtain-strings of black beads that rattled like a snake as she passed through. In the room itself, the darkness bore more of a yellow tinge than the usual black or cloying grey. A group of individuals squatted where her bed used to be, sucking on long pipes that seemed to be giving off most of the darkness. They exchanged pipes. One of them crooked a finger, as if beckoning Flossie to join them. Flossie. She simply stood and stared open-mouthed, not even daring to breathe beyond a fitful respiration, which her lungs forced on her. She closed her eyes, momentarily, and, on opening them...
...she was relieved to see that the bedroom, as she recalled it, had returned, with the print curtains hanging at the open window, in that red lacy material she’d always liked as a free filter of the sun. Indeed, a low sun across the Heath threatened to dip below the horizon leaving the sky streaked with a display more fitting for some of the places she’d just visited on holiday.
She smiled. Must have been the strain. Travel was an hallucinant: made you see some things more clearly, others less so. Plumping down on the bed, she stared up at the ceiling, which her husband had once stippled. It was covered in cracks and an archipelago of foxing – more such blots and blemishes than she could recall. But, two months was a long time.
Still feeling caked in foreign filth, she gradually dozed off, in an attempt to catch up on what she considered to be her beauty sleep or, rather, English sleep. She thought she heard underchatter grunting from next door. Mr Phipps must have company. Strange, he never had people in before. She yawned. They may not be people. She laughed at the illogicality of her dozing mind and snored simultaneously. She stirred when the vehicle drew up outside, doors slamming....
In the end, Flossie had been away too long. Following the ugly divorce, she had decided to have the first ever holiday on her own and go the whole hog this time with two months outside her English homeland. To call it a Grand Tour would have been stretching it too far, but many high spots of Old Europe had been on her itinerary; those resplendent representatives of history’s old disguise where Ottoman and Holy Roman Empires were living memories. Not that she gave herself any time for meticulously planning her sudden return to England resulting in suitcases full of dirty underwear, unmemorable keepsake knickknacks and diverse hats, all being hastily thrust into the back of a taxicab at Heathrow Airport. She actually relished returning to the salubrious terraced house in Hampstead, despite the eventual necessity to get her teeth back into earning a living. And no husband. She had put him to the back of her mind. Now his image returned, the nearer she was driven towards the abode he had rudely abandoned all those months ago..
It looked at first as if things hadn’t changed, as the taxi drew up outside the familiar railings. In fact, the doorknocker seemed just as sparkling as she’d left it: which was perhaps more surprising than she realised. The road appeared narrower, but she put that down to having just been charcoal-sketching wide avenues and esplanades amid the artistic environs of what was now another world away. The people in the street with whom, only two months ago, she may well have been at least on nodding terms, were strangely scruffy; their faces swarthy and hair showing signs of concealed racial curls, eyes piercing, as they witnessed Flossie’s undignified scramble from the taxi.
“Oi, Miss, don’t furgit yer luggidge!” called the driver as she hustled up her front steps to unlock what she hoped was her front door. She had expected him to get out and tote the cases from the boot up to the door. If he expects a tip, he’d better shake a leg, she vowed to herself. The lock was well oiled and easily stirred, but the door itself was unseasonably stiff, the wood swollen in the frame, or the frame shrunk, or a combination of the two. She put a shoulder to it, causing her to unbalance into the hall, dropping the flowery hat she’d purchased in Florence.
“Oi, Miss, don’ trip up over yer own foot!” The driver laughed, if sneering could be called laughter, as he arrived at the top of the steps, lugging baggage with one hand and holding out the other like a plate of meat – as if he were a rich beggar.
“Thank you.” She hastily regained her composure, and sunk a foreign coin of high denomination into the pit of his grimy palm.
He put his nose to it, as if he eschewed testing it with his gappy teeth. “Oi, Miss, I can’t spend this ‘ere funny munny in the Dog ‘n Drake.”
“I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got till I change it back in the morning.”
“And I’m afraid I’ll ‘ave ter take yer all the way back to Heathrow where yer started off, unless yer give me proper goose for the gander.”
Flossie cringed. The gratuity had suddenly assumed a necessary purpose, an importance that her latterly foreign-steeped mind couldn’t conceptualize. She wondered about going next door, where old Mr Phipps lived. He’d lend her a few shillings, no doubt. Not that she owed the taxi-man anything beyond his fare, which she had settled with her remaining pukka English currency. It was simply that she felt more vulnerable in England than she did abroad, for some unaccountable reason. Perhaps, the more noticeable absence of her erstwhile husband. After all, he had been a dab hand at dealing with the servant class. Not that there were any servants left in England. The thoughts were a stream of consciousness, but oddly logical. Even that last one. And the next. Only loosely gratuitous. “Hold on, while I arrange something,” she said, finger in the air, as if she was conducting somebody else’s argument.
Mr Phipps must have changed his curtains … and repainted his door! Two months was an unconscionably long period to have been away. Even the echoing sound of the knocker upon the heel was more reverberant, as if the house was a louder sound-box, or as if fabrics and furniture were depleted, or perhaps both. Probably neither. Not shrunk nor swollen.
“Mr Phippsl Mr Phipps! Are you there?” she called through the letter-box, using it like an extension of her mouth. She expected to hear the soft pad of his shambling slippers as they took their customary shine along the parquet in the hall, but no such welcome sounds. She shrugged and returned to the taxi-man, who was stepping from foot to foot on the spot in an attempt to give the appearance of wasting time.
“I’m afraid you will have to take that coin today and come back tomorrow if you need it changed. I can assure you it’s probably worth far more than I would have given you, given half the change, and, after all, there is no law to say I need to give you anything....”
The man looked askance, as if to say even the long tradition of English law had been altered by an Act of Parliament, since she went away. Real politicians were on Summer recess, so anything could’ve been passed.
“I hope you don’t consider me mercenary,” said the man n a suddenly posher accent, “but I can see you are a generous lady who would sooner treat me than trick me...”
“Well, whatever, please be reasonable.”
“Me, Madam? I’m the most reasonable man you’re ever likely to meet. Reasonability, that’s my watchword.”
“In that case, can we call it a day?”
He looked up at the darkening sky. “More like the night, Miss, much more like the night, I should say.”
She did not appreciate the humour, but decided not to antagonise him further. She pulled the luggage into the hall and slammed the door behind her, the dubious coin still grasped in her sweaty palm.
Flossie stood for a few minutes in the dimness at the foot of the steep stairs. Eventually, she heard the door of the black cab slam and drive off, hopefully with the driver in it, she mused to herself.
The stairs certainly seemed steeper than she remembered them, with tall treads. She managed to drag the first item of soft baggage towards her bedroom at the back of the house. Uncharacteristically, she had forgotten to switch on the light at the bottom before grappling with the ascent. Come on, Flossie, old girl, get a grip on yourself! She gritted her teeth and after much fuss and bother, she arrived on the landing. She’d have a quick bath and change into... into what? Damn! All her clothes were stiff with European dirt – except, that was for the oddments left behind in the tallboy in her bedroom, still mixed up with her husband’s ancient cast-offs. She couldn’t think properly. That taxi-man had upset her more than she realized.
The landing was even darker than the hallway. She had always thought it best to leave all connecting doors firmly shut, whilst away, in case of fire. That would account for the darkness. Still, she had very thick navy-blue velvet curtains in the bedroom (owing to the light early mornings before her departure), and she could not recall whether these had been left undrawn.
She stood for a few seconds, regaining her breath (or what she hoped was her breath) and, as she did so, she heard a vehicle drawing up outside. Surely, it wasn’t that stuffy taxi-driver returned for his damned money. But, no, it soon drove off again, without any sound of car doors. Leaving the bulging case where it was and not bothering with the top light switch, Flossie felt her way to the bedroom door ...
....which was no longer made of the erstwhile wood, but curtain-strings of black beads that rattled like a snake as she passed through. In the room itself, the darkness bore more of a yellow tinge than the usual black or cloying grey. A group of individuals squatted where her bed used to be, sucking on long pipes that seemed to be giving off most of the darkness. They exchanged pipes. One of them crooked a finger, as if beckoning Flossie to join them. Flossie. She simply stood and stared open-mouthed, not even daring to breathe beyond a fitful respiration, which her lungs forced on her. She closed her eyes, momentarily, and, on opening them...
...she was relieved to see that the bedroom, as she recalled it, had returned, with the print curtains hanging at the open window, in that red lacy material she’d always liked as a free filter of the sun. Indeed, a low sun across the Heath threatened to dip below the horizon leaving the sky streaked with a display more fitting for some of the places she’d just visited on holiday.
She smiled. Must have been the strain. Travel was an hallucinant: made you see some things more clearly, others less so. Plumping down on the bed, she stared up at the ceiling, which her husband had once stippled. It was covered in cracks and an archipelago of foxing – more such blots and blemishes than she could recall. But, two months was a long time.
Still feeling caked in foreign filth, she gradually dozed off, in an attempt to catch up on what she considered to be her beauty sleep or, rather, English sleep. She thought she heard underchatter grunting from next door. Mr Phipps must have company. Strange, he never had people in before. She yawned. They may not be people. She laughed at the illogicality of her dozing mind and snored simultaneously. She stirred when the vehicle drew up outside, doors slamming....
Friday, December 21, 2007
Specialist Treatment
"We can't get her mouth unclamped and she's all swollen up like a hot air balloon."
The woman's uncurtaining laughter-lines revealed that she was about to crack a sick joke about her daughter's state, but the doctor had been called from his warm-bodied bed to tend to a supposed emergency and was not in the mood for small talk.
"Is she upstairs?" He fingered the stethoscope that he always kept around his neck, using it as some people worry beads.
"Yes, the dentist is with her."
"Why both of us?"
"We needed a second opinion," piped up an ironic voice from the corner of the study. The figure was barely visible in the roaring firelight - an undersized individual with eyes even darker than the rest of him. If his daughter had trawled any birthrights from the likes of him, she would feel no doubt very ill-engendered and one could scarcely have enough pity left for possible sons-in-law. "There are more bleeding medical specialists in the world than real people, I sometimes think," said this giant foetus of a man whilst he stroked a shiny human skull on a nearby desk as if he were demonstrating the point. He then held up a glass of black wine and said "Bottoms up!"
The mother pulled a long heavy-duty thermometer from her capacious apron pocket, heated it in the raging fire and reinforced her husband's instruction to the doctor to lie face down on the bare floor, so that she could insert it as far as it would go.
Upstairs, beyond the dark landings, the dentist and the daughter were conjoined mouth to mouth, one gradually absorbing more than the other was able to release with integrity...
When Earth's oceans are covered with huge slicks of blood, one wonders if there is any point in normal vampirism, thought the solidified stack of stunted shadows that called itself a man. He climbed the steep stairs towards the snorting noises in his daughter's bedroom, huge hypodermic syringe in tow. Who needed specialists, anyway?
The mother screeched something at him from the foot of the stairs.
Published 'Wicked Mystic' 1993
The woman's uncurtaining laughter-lines revealed that she was about to crack a sick joke about her daughter's state, but the doctor had been called from his warm-bodied bed to tend to a supposed emergency and was not in the mood for small talk.
"Is she upstairs?" He fingered the stethoscope that he always kept around his neck, using it as some people worry beads.
"Yes, the dentist is with her."
"Why both of us?"
"We needed a second opinion," piped up an ironic voice from the corner of the study. The figure was barely visible in the roaring firelight - an undersized individual with eyes even darker than the rest of him. If his daughter had trawled any birthrights from the likes of him, she would feel no doubt very ill-engendered and one could scarcely have enough pity left for possible sons-in-law. "There are more bleeding medical specialists in the world than real people, I sometimes think," said this giant foetus of a man whilst he stroked a shiny human skull on a nearby desk as if he were demonstrating the point. He then held up a glass of black wine and said "Bottoms up!"
The mother pulled a long heavy-duty thermometer from her capacious apron pocket, heated it in the raging fire and reinforced her husband's instruction to the doctor to lie face down on the bare floor, so that she could insert it as far as it would go.
Upstairs, beyond the dark landings, the dentist and the daughter were conjoined mouth to mouth, one gradually absorbing more than the other was able to release with integrity...
When Earth's oceans are covered with huge slicks of blood, one wonders if there is any point in normal vampirism, thought the solidified stack of stunted shadows that called itself a man. He climbed the steep stairs towards the snorting noises in his daughter's bedroom, huge hypodermic syringe in tow. Who needed specialists, anyway?
The mother screeched something at him from the foot of the stairs.
Published 'Wicked Mystic' 1993
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Compliments of the Season
Published "Stayin' Sane" 1993
It was a mild Christmas.
I had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air—fresher than my mother’s parlour, in any event. Of course, Mum had originally been delighted with the prospect of having us altogether with her for Christmas. My family of wife and children lived with me on the other side of the country, if countries can have sides, or even fronts and backs. I had thus conveniently maintained it was difficult to sort out the logistics for more regular visits. She accepted this, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have lifted up hills to let us through.
I sauntered down the garden path, where I had played at being Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Watching the lugubrious clouds curdle across the near benighted sky, I abruptly noticed a sleigh rough-riding upon an inverted cone of condensation, drawn by a flight of scrawny reindeers with knotted antlers. The occupant of the sleigh was a Plug-Ugly with a scar laddering down his cheek, designer white stubble and a bag marked swag on his shoulder. His snow-laced tunic was a syrupy red and thus mightily peculiar in the context. “Oi! Oi!” he yo-ho-hoed in a snarl, “nobody’s getting presents this year, except for moi.” He enunciated the ‘moi’ after a pregnant pause and with vigorous deliberation.
I made my way back to my mother’s house thoughtfully. I was indeed somewhat sad because both my children had been killed only a few months before Christmas in a particularly gruesome road accident. My boyhood sweetheart of a wife had since run off with my best friend. I wondered if there was anything in the superstition that bad luck came in threes. I vowed to break something valuable when I returned inside the house.
Mum had already made it abundantly clear that she wanted me to stuff the huge turkey ready for tomorrow’s festivities. Pity there would only be place-settings for her and me at the family table. Sellotaped to the front door was the usual three-dimensional plastic image of a jolly old man in a red cape with billowing white beard. Somehow, I could not summon up the rightful Yuletide spirit. Yet, before entering, I planted a false smile upon my lips, so as not to let the side down.
Later, as we prepared for an early night, my mother announced: “I’m going to leave a nice glass of Sherry and a warm mince pie in the fireplace for Father Christmas.” I nodded, absent-mindedly.
It was a mild Christmas.
I had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air—fresher than my mother’s parlour, in any event. Of course, Mum had originally been delighted with the prospect of having us altogether with her for Christmas. My family of wife and children lived with me on the other side of the country, if countries can have sides, or even fronts and backs. I had thus conveniently maintained it was difficult to sort out the logistics for more regular visits. She accepted this, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have lifted up hills to let us through.
I sauntered down the garden path, where I had played at being Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Watching the lugubrious clouds curdle across the near benighted sky, I abruptly noticed a sleigh rough-riding upon an inverted cone of condensation, drawn by a flight of scrawny reindeers with knotted antlers. The occupant of the sleigh was a Plug-Ugly with a scar laddering down his cheek, designer white stubble and a bag marked swag on his shoulder. His snow-laced tunic was a syrupy red and thus mightily peculiar in the context. “Oi! Oi!” he yo-ho-hoed in a snarl, “nobody’s getting presents this year, except for moi.” He enunciated the ‘moi’ after a pregnant pause and with vigorous deliberation.
I made my way back to my mother’s house thoughtfully. I was indeed somewhat sad because both my children had been killed only a few months before Christmas in a particularly gruesome road accident. My boyhood sweetheart of a wife had since run off with my best friend. I wondered if there was anything in the superstition that bad luck came in threes. I vowed to break something valuable when I returned inside the house.
Mum had already made it abundantly clear that she wanted me to stuff the huge turkey ready for tomorrow’s festivities. Pity there would only be place-settings for her and me at the family table. Sellotaped to the front door was the usual three-dimensional plastic image of a jolly old man in a red cape with billowing white beard. Somehow, I could not summon up the rightful Yuletide spirit. Yet, before entering, I planted a false smile upon my lips, so as not to let the side down.
Later, as we prepared for an early night, my mother announced: “I’m going to leave a nice glass of Sherry and a warm mince pie in the fireplace for Father Christmas.” I nodded, absent-mindedly.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Karew
Published 'A Theater of Blood' 1993
It had not turned out to be the ideal venue for a honeymoon. Having taken my new bride to an east coast, I did hope to entice her into the life-style of the locals and away from that prissy part of London where she thought the world started ... and ended.
Night seems to come earlier by the sea. That’s because the days are shortened by the gull cries, the salt savours of ripe fish and bracing beach walks. It’s strange, the fuller life is, the shorter it becomes. We’re lodging at a fisherman’s hut in sight of the lighthouse. The surge of its sporadic beams through the dark hours acts as the natural seabreak to the crests of our lovemaking. Pent up urgency is far sweeter than its eventual release ... or so all the theory in the manuals told us.
I was brought up not far from here. Nevertheless, the locals have grown beyond my comprehension since I left for the big city as a young man. They now seemed older, more weathered, with gnarled expressions that took rather than gave. Those I half recognised failed to acknowledge me. Even the young women looked as if they were wed to sea dogs. The fish-wives were closer to death, their mouths opening and shutting, upon seeing me again, but failing to say anything.
Many lags pointed to my bride, nudging each other, spitting foul oaths into each other’s ears ... and I did not give them the benefit of naming her by introduction. Even on the first day of this ancient honeymoon, I had surrendered hope of anything good rubbing off on us. If I had been born here, I must have died years ago. I laughed to myself at that thought.
In any event, it little mattered, for we loved each other, Nancy and I.
The hut where we stayed was little more than an upturned hulk, pitted by centuries within centuries of salt spray. The windows had been forced through the seasoned wood with jagged gutting knives, by the look of them. And, by the relentless warning beacon, we watched the gravestone tongues in the churchyard—whereto the cliff edge had reached, already consigning the once-ancient church itself to the fate of the tides. A graveyard with nothing to landmark it except the remnant stubs of tombs, this was one unromantic view from our bedroom window. Though death must have its own romance, I have heard it said.
“I wish it were not so quiet,” Nancy said, nuzzling my chest, as she resettled into the ruckbed from gazing out of the ill-cut window.
I was entranced by her shapely form—sculptured as it was against the twirling beacon—aching for her to tiptoe back to our bed to staunch a new wave of passion in my loins. Now that she had returned, I was falling into half-dreams, so tenuous they may even have been dreams within dreams—imagining her to be but a tenant of one of those graves. Corpses do not stink of fish. But sweat does.
I woke fitfully to say: “The sea is sounding...”
“Yes, but that is just an ingredient of the silence,” was her almost voiceless reply.
If her parents could see her now, they would not recognise the little office girl, their Nancy who was still wet behind the ears with first communion. The words she spoke were too poetic for the city. At least, some good had come, I thought, as my passion was spent against her rump.
The revery became full-blooded dream, though it was merely recounting the previous day’s activities. Searching the town’s library for old books about the churchyard. dusty (sometimes, sticky) volumes that had return dates decades ago stamped down the margins. The retired librarian retained a catalogue, but most of the spines were unreadable and the listing itself stained by foxing. Apparently, though, the most telling books were kept together furthest from the sea in the attic, and we soon discovered in one corroded tome that the set of gravestones viewable from the hulk were those of rat catchers.
Nancy wondered whether rats were common at seasides, but I soon put her right. There was one rat catcher, the book said, by the name of James Wilkins, who had actually been buried with the rat that killed him. A two-way thing, ratting, I assumed. Though in my days as a child in this area, I had known only one rat-catcher who told of killing thousands in one sitting. I didn’t believe him, of course. Until he showed me the bodies he hung as trophies in the tall fishing-tackle hut near the Naze beach.
“There are rats in the sea,” I remember him telling me, with a knowing touch to the nose.
The honeymoon period was due to end shortly. We had long spent our passions, so we both fell fast asleep. Then, I was unaccountably drawn to the hulk’s window to see why the beacon had stopped flashing. Being spring, I know the sunrise would soon streak its screaming oranges and reds along the sharp divider of sea and sky. However, I was quite unprepared for the glow that the sea itself gave off, a lambency seeming to filter, not from above, but from below. It was constituted of a myriad flickering tails, long luminous tangles and tentacles undulating in the manner of living flesh-coloured seaweed.
“Nancy, Nancy...”
She snored, oblivious to my calls. I went over to shake her, but she was trapped by her own dream. I had no option but to return to the ragged window – I could have sworn that one of the gravemarkers was moving, dislodging, even growing...
There was knocking at our door ... our sealords had arrived to turf us out. The honeymoon’s over. It was suddenly strange now to recount my thoughts from an entirely different perspective.
“Mr Karew, Mr Karew,” came the shouts of the landlady, “the sea’s swelling, we have to lodge back at the Bell...”
I recalled the Bell Inn. The regulars had scorned us when we asked for London ale. They had pinned us to the damp circular corkboard with their piercing scowls. Fish in aspic upon the bar sold for less than the price of pork scratchings. Strange spurting noises from the pumps. Beer swill that still gurgled in the glass – I had forced it down my gullet to silence it. I did not want to lodge there of all places. But maybe I don’t know my own mind, and the sea is rising higher...
“Don’t worry, Mrs...” I could not recall the name that had appeared on the booking documents. “Nancy and I will sit out the storm.”
“It is not a storm, Mr Karew, but you know best...” The voice faded, as she spoke.
My confidence in knowing best, as she put it, was not strong at the best of times. I could not keep my thoughts from leapfrogging...out of kilter with their own meaning.
I returned to the window. The sea was indeed rising—the tide was rolling innards—surging rattail intestines, seething eels amid the spume and wild insulting fingerstalls. It all moved as one. Covering the graveyard in one giant swell of disintegrating kelp and fucus.
I relaxed. This could be nothing but a dream. If it were real, then I was surely mad. Or, at best, dead.
I swivelled to her whom I have wed so recently. Nancy Karew had the largest rat head I have ever seen, pillowed against the headboard we had earlier ground our love upon. And I ducked to kiss its red lipsticked snout for forgiveness. I felt its wagging fishtail tongue probing mine, making the curdled beer in my stomach heave in tidal swells of sick.
We awoke in unsion. The Bell Inn, after all, was not such a bad place. Set back from the town’s cottages, it had probably withstood the big swell ... the hulk would have evidently floated off towards the newly islanded graveyard ... the lighthouse no doubt foreshortened, with its night-light still flickering feebly in the watery sunshine.
More in half-recognition, I saw James Wilkins lying between Nancy and myself in the bed, his body, I assumed, having floated in on the surgetide. “Ridden on ratbacks” were the words that haunted my convoluted thoughts. I must have been a ghost, for Nancy ignored me as she turned to smile on him.
The call of the Bell lady came unseasonably early.
“Mr Wilkins...Mr Wilkins... excuse me, but breakfast been on the table a good half hour. You wanted it a bit earlier, remember, to go on the last lighthouse trip...”
They kissed lightly and slowly dressed.
A gravestone had toppled in the night, they notice, on their last stroll in that direction, with the jagged etching: ROBERT KAREW, Ratman of this Parish, Sorely Rued, 1743-1764.
They soon forgot it as they rode the gentle swells towards the white gull-haunted lighthouse. They had left the best moment for the last day of the honeymoon. Something to cherish when back in the City.
I the ghost must wake and leave the lovers free.
If ghosts do dream and death’s a romance, then I’m a kingfisher’s daughter
THE MISCREANT ON THE MOONSTREAM, Rachel Mildeyes.
It had not turned out to be the ideal venue for a honeymoon. Having taken my new bride to an east coast, I did hope to entice her into the life-style of the locals and away from that prissy part of London where she thought the world started ... and ended.
Night seems to come earlier by the sea. That’s because the days are shortened by the gull cries, the salt savours of ripe fish and bracing beach walks. It’s strange, the fuller life is, the shorter it becomes. We’re lodging at a fisherman’s hut in sight of the lighthouse. The surge of its sporadic beams through the dark hours acts as the natural seabreak to the crests of our lovemaking. Pent up urgency is far sweeter than its eventual release ... or so all the theory in the manuals told us.
I was brought up not far from here. Nevertheless, the locals have grown beyond my comprehension since I left for the big city as a young man. They now seemed older, more weathered, with gnarled expressions that took rather than gave. Those I half recognised failed to acknowledge me. Even the young women looked as if they were wed to sea dogs. The fish-wives were closer to death, their mouths opening and shutting, upon seeing me again, but failing to say anything.
Many lags pointed to my bride, nudging each other, spitting foul oaths into each other’s ears ... and I did not give them the benefit of naming her by introduction. Even on the first day of this ancient honeymoon, I had surrendered hope of anything good rubbing off on us. If I had been born here, I must have died years ago. I laughed to myself at that thought.
In any event, it little mattered, for we loved each other, Nancy and I.
The hut where we stayed was little more than an upturned hulk, pitted by centuries within centuries of salt spray. The windows had been forced through the seasoned wood with jagged gutting knives, by the look of them. And, by the relentless warning beacon, we watched the gravestone tongues in the churchyard—whereto the cliff edge had reached, already consigning the once-ancient church itself to the fate of the tides. A graveyard with nothing to landmark it except the remnant stubs of tombs, this was one unromantic view from our bedroom window. Though death must have its own romance, I have heard it said.
“I wish it were not so quiet,” Nancy said, nuzzling my chest, as she resettled into the ruckbed from gazing out of the ill-cut window.
I was entranced by her shapely form—sculptured as it was against the twirling beacon—aching for her to tiptoe back to our bed to staunch a new wave of passion in my loins. Now that she had returned, I was falling into half-dreams, so tenuous they may even have been dreams within dreams—imagining her to be but a tenant of one of those graves. Corpses do not stink of fish. But sweat does.
I woke fitfully to say: “The sea is sounding...”
“Yes, but that is just an ingredient of the silence,” was her almost voiceless reply.
If her parents could see her now, they would not recognise the little office girl, their Nancy who was still wet behind the ears with first communion. The words she spoke were too poetic for the city. At least, some good had come, I thought, as my passion was spent against her rump.
The revery became full-blooded dream, though it was merely recounting the previous day’s activities. Searching the town’s library for old books about the churchyard. dusty (sometimes, sticky) volumes that had return dates decades ago stamped down the margins. The retired librarian retained a catalogue, but most of the spines were unreadable and the listing itself stained by foxing. Apparently, though, the most telling books were kept together furthest from the sea in the attic, and we soon discovered in one corroded tome that the set of gravestones viewable from the hulk were those of rat catchers.
Nancy wondered whether rats were common at seasides, but I soon put her right. There was one rat catcher, the book said, by the name of James Wilkins, who had actually been buried with the rat that killed him. A two-way thing, ratting, I assumed. Though in my days as a child in this area, I had known only one rat-catcher who told of killing thousands in one sitting. I didn’t believe him, of course. Until he showed me the bodies he hung as trophies in the tall fishing-tackle hut near the Naze beach.
“There are rats in the sea,” I remember him telling me, with a knowing touch to the nose.
The honeymoon period was due to end shortly. We had long spent our passions, so we both fell fast asleep. Then, I was unaccountably drawn to the hulk’s window to see why the beacon had stopped flashing. Being spring, I know the sunrise would soon streak its screaming oranges and reds along the sharp divider of sea and sky. However, I was quite unprepared for the glow that the sea itself gave off, a lambency seeming to filter, not from above, but from below. It was constituted of a myriad flickering tails, long luminous tangles and tentacles undulating in the manner of living flesh-coloured seaweed.
“Nancy, Nancy...”
She snored, oblivious to my calls. I went over to shake her, but she was trapped by her own dream. I had no option but to return to the ragged window – I could have sworn that one of the gravemarkers was moving, dislodging, even growing...
There was knocking at our door ... our sealords had arrived to turf us out. The honeymoon’s over. It was suddenly strange now to recount my thoughts from an entirely different perspective.
“Mr Karew, Mr Karew,” came the shouts of the landlady, “the sea’s swelling, we have to lodge back at the Bell...”
I recalled the Bell Inn. The regulars had scorned us when we asked for London ale. They had pinned us to the damp circular corkboard with their piercing scowls. Fish in aspic upon the bar sold for less than the price of pork scratchings. Strange spurting noises from the pumps. Beer swill that still gurgled in the glass – I had forced it down my gullet to silence it. I did not want to lodge there of all places. But maybe I don’t know my own mind, and the sea is rising higher...
“Don’t worry, Mrs...” I could not recall the name that had appeared on the booking documents. “Nancy and I will sit out the storm.”
“It is not a storm, Mr Karew, but you know best...” The voice faded, as she spoke.
My confidence in knowing best, as she put it, was not strong at the best of times. I could not keep my thoughts from leapfrogging...out of kilter with their own meaning.
I returned to the window. The sea was indeed rising—the tide was rolling innards—surging rattail intestines, seething eels amid the spume and wild insulting fingerstalls. It all moved as one. Covering the graveyard in one giant swell of disintegrating kelp and fucus.
I relaxed. This could be nothing but a dream. If it were real, then I was surely mad. Or, at best, dead.
I swivelled to her whom I have wed so recently. Nancy Karew had the largest rat head I have ever seen, pillowed against the headboard we had earlier ground our love upon. And I ducked to kiss its red lipsticked snout for forgiveness. I felt its wagging fishtail tongue probing mine, making the curdled beer in my stomach heave in tidal swells of sick.
We awoke in unsion. The Bell Inn, after all, was not such a bad place. Set back from the town’s cottages, it had probably withstood the big swell ... the hulk would have evidently floated off towards the newly islanded graveyard ... the lighthouse no doubt foreshortened, with its night-light still flickering feebly in the watery sunshine.
More in half-recognition, I saw James Wilkins lying between Nancy and myself in the bed, his body, I assumed, having floated in on the surgetide. “Ridden on ratbacks” were the words that haunted my convoluted thoughts. I must have been a ghost, for Nancy ignored me as she turned to smile on him.
The call of the Bell lady came unseasonably early.
“Mr Wilkins...Mr Wilkins... excuse me, but breakfast been on the table a good half hour. You wanted it a bit earlier, remember, to go on the last lighthouse trip...”
They kissed lightly and slowly dressed.
A gravestone had toppled in the night, they notice, on their last stroll in that direction, with the jagged etching: ROBERT KAREW, Ratman of this Parish, Sorely Rued, 1743-1764.
They soon forgot it as they rode the gentle swells towards the white gull-haunted lighthouse. They had left the best moment for the last day of the honeymoon. Something to cherish when back in the City.
I the ghost must wake and leave the lovers free.
If ghosts do dream and death’s a romance, then I’m a kingfisher’s daughter
THE MISCREANT ON THE MOONSTREAM, Rachel Mildeyes.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Dear Mr Whizzo
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
I saw your advert in the Chronicle and I was wondering whether you can bring your show to my son’s birthday party on 24 July. You will be required at 3 p.m. at the above address. Please let me know if you require any additional equipment. When confirming your availability for the date, please quote your fee and I will, by return, finalise the arrangement.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy
P.S. It is a young teenage party, so any dubious props will not be required. Conjuring, balloon-bending and juggling all would be fine. I don’t suppose you’re into jiggery-pokery, anyway.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am grateful for your letter which I only received today. The postman is not so lightning quick with his prestidigitation as I! Anyway, I shall be delighted to attend your son’s party at the appointed time. The fee will be at your discretion according to satisfaction.
Yours dutifully “Whizzo”.
P.S. My speciality is sawing a lady in half. I hope you do not consider THIS trick to be dubious.
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
With reference to your letter of 21 July, I am pleased to confirm the arrangement. Do you know this part of the town? Our address is not in some of the street maps, believe it or not. To assist you, I attach a little hand-written sketch that takes you from the Broadway. We are at the end of the cul-de-sac that you can see I have called Brown Street because that is on the nameplate up on the end terrace, but the correct postal address is as you see it at the head of my letter. Any problems, please ring the telephone number shown which is my neighbour’s (we don’t have one ourselves). With regard to your P.S. I have only just had the carpet cleaned, so I would prefer you to give that particular trick a miss. I look forward to meeting you on the day. My son is over the moon.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am sorry I did not attend the party. It was not for the want of trying. But my sense of direction is as bad as my rabbit-pulling is good, no doubt. Brown Street turned out to be a long, endless road of semis where some of the houses were unnumbered and others randomly so it seemed. As for the telephone number you gave me, it got hold of someone who said they couldn’t hear me because of a lot of noise from their neighbours. I hope your son was not too disappointed by my non-appearance. I expect he has grown out of my old tricks, anyway.
Regards, “Whizzo”.
P.S. Call me again when your grandchildren arrive!
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
Thank you for your letter. I am extremely mystified by what you write. If it was not you who gave such a splendid performance at my son’s party, who was it? When you stepped into our broom cupboard under the stairs saying that when we opened it again you would be gone - and you were right, nothing but the gas meter chatting numbers through. And not one false bottom to be seen, of course, as lesser magicians so often use at the Variety House. I think it’s marvellous indeed you using my house as a prop. You ought to go on the stage! We did get a lot of complaints, however, from parents whose kids never came back from that game of Hide and Seek you organised. No complaints from me, though! I hope that small token of my appreciation I gave you was sufficient recompense. I was so head over heels with excitement, I didn’t know my fingers from my thumbs. Anyway, I assure you that I shall recommend you highly to my friends at the Ladies Group. By the way, your trick of making the house next door completely disappear along with everybody in it was really a coup-de-theatre.
Yours, Agnes Tidy.
P.S. I liked your cheeky costume. Very snazzy! Who sewed on all the sequins?
(published ‘Krax’ 1992)
I saw your advert in the Chronicle and I was wondering whether you can bring your show to my son’s birthday party on 24 July. You will be required at 3 p.m. at the above address. Please let me know if you require any additional equipment. When confirming your availability for the date, please quote your fee and I will, by return, finalise the arrangement.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy
P.S. It is a young teenage party, so any dubious props will not be required. Conjuring, balloon-bending and juggling all would be fine. I don’t suppose you’re into jiggery-pokery, anyway.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am grateful for your letter which I only received today. The postman is not so lightning quick with his prestidigitation as I! Anyway, I shall be delighted to attend your son’s party at the appointed time. The fee will be at your discretion according to satisfaction.
Yours dutifully “Whizzo”.
P.S. My speciality is sawing a lady in half. I hope you do not consider THIS trick to be dubious.
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
With reference to your letter of 21 July, I am pleased to confirm the arrangement. Do you know this part of the town? Our address is not in some of the street maps, believe it or not. To assist you, I attach a little hand-written sketch that takes you from the Broadway. We are at the end of the cul-de-sac that you can see I have called Brown Street because that is on the nameplate up on the end terrace, but the correct postal address is as you see it at the head of my letter. Any problems, please ring the telephone number shown which is my neighbour’s (we don’t have one ourselves). With regard to your P.S. I have only just had the carpet cleaned, so I would prefer you to give that particular trick a miss. I look forward to meeting you on the day. My son is over the moon.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Tidy.
*
Dear Mrs. Tidy,
I am sorry I did not attend the party. It was not for the want of trying. But my sense of direction is as bad as my rabbit-pulling is good, no doubt. Brown Street turned out to be a long, endless road of semis where some of the houses were unnumbered and others randomly so it seemed. As for the telephone number you gave me, it got hold of someone who said they couldn’t hear me because of a lot of noise from their neighbours. I hope your son was not too disappointed by my non-appearance. I expect he has grown out of my old tricks, anyway.
Regards, “Whizzo”.
P.S. Call me again when your grandchildren arrive!
*
Dear Mr. Whizzo,
Thank you for your letter. I am extremely mystified by what you write. If it was not you who gave such a splendid performance at my son’s party, who was it? When you stepped into our broom cupboard under the stairs saying that when we opened it again you would be gone - and you were right, nothing but the gas meter chatting numbers through. And not one false bottom to be seen, of course, as lesser magicians so often use at the Variety House. I think it’s marvellous indeed you using my house as a prop. You ought to go on the stage! We did get a lot of complaints, however, from parents whose kids never came back from that game of Hide and Seek you organised. No complaints from me, though! I hope that small token of my appreciation I gave you was sufficient recompense. I was so head over heels with excitement, I didn’t know my fingers from my thumbs. Anyway, I assure you that I shall recommend you highly to my friends at the Ladies Group. By the way, your trick of making the house next door completely disappear along with everybody in it was really a coup-de-theatre.
Yours, Agnes Tidy.
P.S. I liked your cheeky costume. Very snazzy! Who sewed on all the sequins?
(published ‘Krax’ 1992)
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
An Unmistakeable Silence
Published 'The Bound Spiral' 1992
From the way her case opened and shut throughout the day, I could assess her moods even if I never saw her in person once.
The thought of abandoning her home was one thing, but the enactment was evidently quite another. Several changes of mind. Once the bedroom was empty even of the case. But the next it had returned and where it had been in the meantime was a mystery.
It goes without saying that my hiding-place was under the bed. I could hear her clip-clopping upon her high-heels around the bed, but I did not lift the tassels of the quilt for a surreptitious look. Until I heard the clicking of the lock followed by a period of unmistakeable silence, I was reluctant to emerge in case she was still at large. But out I’d eventually come, eyes squinting...
I suppose she was justified in having such qualms about staying with a husband who spent most of his hours awake under the bed. But I was taught to look at both sides of a story — and a double-jointed wife who spends most of her time in a suit-case is not exactly a bed of roses.
From the way her case opened and shut throughout the day, I could assess her moods even if I never saw her in person once.
The thought of abandoning her home was one thing, but the enactment was evidently quite another. Several changes of mind. Once the bedroom was empty even of the case. But the next it had returned and where it had been in the meantime was a mystery.
It goes without saying that my hiding-place was under the bed. I could hear her clip-clopping upon her high-heels around the bed, but I did not lift the tassels of the quilt for a surreptitious look. Until I heard the clicking of the lock followed by a period of unmistakeable silence, I was reluctant to emerge in case she was still at large. But out I’d eventually come, eyes squinting...
I suppose she was justified in having such qualms about staying with a husband who spent most of his hours awake under the bed. But I was taught to look at both sides of a story — and a double-jointed wife who spends most of her time in a suit-case is not exactly a bed of roses.
Monday, November 12, 2007
The Parachutist / Penguins at Midnight
THE PARACHUTIST
First published 'Night Owl Network' vol 2 No 13 (1993)
It had been raining for hours on end. But what in heaven was “it”?
I discovered the man hanging from a large tree. The sodden ballooning of the white parachute trailed above him, punctured here and there by branches. I was near enough to guess that his boots dripped blood as well as rain-water. In the middle of Coulsdon, this was a strange occurrence, to say the least.
I looked to see if anybody else of the human persuasion was in the vicinity. There was no surprise in realizing that the force-ten winds of the earlier storm had cleared most of the suburban streets, their full effect having lasted past most people’s bedtime.
I knew the parachutist was not dead, since he was attempting to pull off his boots: a strenuous activity which sent showers of what must have been icy spray upon him from higher branches and, with each groaning tug, the white fabric began to gape with ferocious snagging noises. He would soon topple to the pavement, a good few yards beneath him, far enough to damage a bone or two.
I wondered whence the blood was seeping until, in the increasing light of the declipsing moon, I discerned a black stain down the length of one of his sides.
He had not noticed me witnessing his progress. After all, soon after encountering the sight, I had camouflaged myself behind another tree. An enemy parachutist had been my first illogical assumption.
But the Second World War had been over for forty-five odd years . . . and the other wars which were still proceeding these days across the surface of the Earth were certainly not anywhere near Coulsdon (or even Purley).
I tried to reconcile my feelings. I knew I was a sane person. I worked for an insurance company, so I must have been. On the other hand, here I was roaming benighted Coulsdon when I should have been in my snug togetherness of a bed. Perhaps this alien parachutist was nothing but me dreaming.
Throwing caution to the receding wind, I came out into the open and called to him:
“Are you OK? Shall I call an ambulance?”
There was no reply. The tree had become bereft of any strange, anachronistic inhabitant whatsoever. The wind resuscitated fitfully. The uncanny rustling of the branches made me shiver.
A jumbo jet droned heavily across the clearing sky like a UFO moving gently above a foreign planet, intent on making landfall at Gatwick. Even at the depth of night, pilots stayed awake, matchsticks propping up the midget chutes of their eyelids like frozen ripcords.
For a reason of which I comprehend no more the cause than I know where we are all going on this strange traveller planet called Earth, I wept uncontrollably. The man was beyond help.
Eventually, I squelched home in my wellingtons. It was already whitening from the direction of Croydon. But what in heaven was “it”?
=============================
Penguins At Midnight
Speed-writing exercise at Writer's Group in Clacton
When he talked to himself, he very rarely listened. Being lonely made him feel rather good, inasmuch as silence and lack of company insulated him within a cocoon of self – and the world’s pain couldn’t cross that silence, collecting outside the silence looking in, powerless to touch him through the silence.
Amid the silence, he had his own peculiar and irritating habits as he watched himself in the corner of the room dressing up as all sorts of creatures. He knew he was immune even from his own behaviour, being so utterly lonely – loneliness being the strongest anaesthetic. He watched himself as creatures from the zoo, many animals or reptiles or birds, often all at the same time. Loneliness was a multiplying force as well as a numbing one. There he was in the kitchen dressed in his lion suit and now he watched himself coming down the stairs wagging a trunk from side to side and simultaneously he heard loud noises from the toilet as a swamp creature conducted its ablutions – and as the evening wore on into night, he saw the two thousand wings of a thousand birds – and upon the stroke of midnight waddling penguin suits crossing the moonlit lawn outside the window.
He was immune. Against the disease of mind or body. Perfectly insulated. By the security of silence. By loneliness. By the loneliness of madness screening out the same madness. But one day – following the march of several versions of himself as various wading birds – he suddenly felt decidedly iffy. He tried to warn himself to get a doctor quick but, as ever he wasn’t listening. Or couldn’t listen because of the silence. And so he never knew he was a dicky duck with flu and no quack.
First published 'Night Owl Network' vol 2 No 13 (1993)
It had been raining for hours on end. But what in heaven was “it”?
I discovered the man hanging from a large tree. The sodden ballooning of the white parachute trailed above him, punctured here and there by branches. I was near enough to guess that his boots dripped blood as well as rain-water. In the middle of Coulsdon, this was a strange occurrence, to say the least.
I looked to see if anybody else of the human persuasion was in the vicinity. There was no surprise in realizing that the force-ten winds of the earlier storm had cleared most of the suburban streets, their full effect having lasted past most people’s bedtime.
I knew the parachutist was not dead, since he was attempting to pull off his boots: a strenuous activity which sent showers of what must have been icy spray upon him from higher branches and, with each groaning tug, the white fabric began to gape with ferocious snagging noises. He would soon topple to the pavement, a good few yards beneath him, far enough to damage a bone or two.
I wondered whence the blood was seeping until, in the increasing light of the declipsing moon, I discerned a black stain down the length of one of his sides.
He had not noticed me witnessing his progress. After all, soon after encountering the sight, I had camouflaged myself behind another tree. An enemy parachutist had been my first illogical assumption.
But the Second World War had been over for forty-five odd years . . . and the other wars which were still proceeding these days across the surface of the Earth were certainly not anywhere near Coulsdon (or even Purley).
I tried to reconcile my feelings. I knew I was a sane person. I worked for an insurance company, so I must have been. On the other hand, here I was roaming benighted Coulsdon when I should have been in my snug togetherness of a bed. Perhaps this alien parachutist was nothing but me dreaming.
Throwing caution to the receding wind, I came out into the open and called to him:
“Are you OK? Shall I call an ambulance?”
There was no reply. The tree had become bereft of any strange, anachronistic inhabitant whatsoever. The wind resuscitated fitfully. The uncanny rustling of the branches made me shiver.
A jumbo jet droned heavily across the clearing sky like a UFO moving gently above a foreign planet, intent on making landfall at Gatwick. Even at the depth of night, pilots stayed awake, matchsticks propping up the midget chutes of their eyelids like frozen ripcords.
For a reason of which I comprehend no more the cause than I know where we are all going on this strange traveller planet called Earth, I wept uncontrollably. The man was beyond help.
Eventually, I squelched home in my wellingtons. It was already whitening from the direction of Croydon. But what in heaven was “it”?
=============================
Penguins At Midnight
Speed-writing exercise at Writer's Group in Clacton
When he talked to himself, he very rarely listened. Being lonely made him feel rather good, inasmuch as silence and lack of company insulated him within a cocoon of self – and the world’s pain couldn’t cross that silence, collecting outside the silence looking in, powerless to touch him through the silence.
Amid the silence, he had his own peculiar and irritating habits as he watched himself in the corner of the room dressing up as all sorts of creatures. He knew he was immune even from his own behaviour, being so utterly lonely – loneliness being the strongest anaesthetic. He watched himself as creatures from the zoo, many animals or reptiles or birds, often all at the same time. Loneliness was a multiplying force as well as a numbing one. There he was in the kitchen dressed in his lion suit and now he watched himself coming down the stairs wagging a trunk from side to side and simultaneously he heard loud noises from the toilet as a swamp creature conducted its ablutions – and as the evening wore on into night, he saw the two thousand wings of a thousand birds – and upon the stroke of midnight waddling penguin suits crossing the moonlit lawn outside the window.
He was immune. Against the disease of mind or body. Perfectly insulated. By the security of silence. By loneliness. By the loneliness of madness screening out the same madness. But one day – following the march of several versions of himself as various wading birds – he suddenly felt decidedly iffy. He tried to warn himself to get a doctor quick but, as ever he wasn’t listening. Or couldn’t listen because of the silence. And so he never knew he was a dicky duck with flu and no quack.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
A Frightening Landscape
Published before - but where? Magazine lost.
The tree branches were limned against the sky ... at first appearing as zigzags of black lightning then, as the air grew warm, like rivulets of India ink. It was evidently uncertain whether the sun had just set or was about to rise. There was no sense of time. And gradually the air grew a whitened edge or margin ... a migraine of shimmering light, except there was nobody around to suffer such an ailment as migraine or anything else ... whilst the air itself smelt of sickness. Through these ribbons of dawn ... yes the sun was surely rising ... there appeared the loping, humping shapes and, if there were anyone watching this landscape evolve before their very eyes, they would also have heard the bleating noises of these creatures great and small. Pitiful sounds, yet fraught with menace and mystery. Yet there can be no mystery without a conscious mind testing its own ability to fathom it. The mystery ... as well as the menace ... was the landscape becoming brighter, clearer, yet more menacing, more mysterious. The earlier darkness had seemed to insulate itself ... releasing no thought of danger and fright from its cloying embrace. Night had almost been comforting with its propensity to become a shroud. Night had indeed concealed night. Now, with the screaming orange rim of sun peeping above the horizon, the branches of the trees had become ... not zigzags of black lightning, not rivulets of India ink ... but flesh-coloured limbs, praying, begging, that night might hasten its own return to conceal such creatures from each other.
The tree branches were limned against the sky ... at first appearing as zigzags of black lightning then, as the air grew warm, like rivulets of India ink. It was evidently uncertain whether the sun had just set or was about to rise. There was no sense of time. And gradually the air grew a whitened edge or margin ... a migraine of shimmering light, except there was nobody around to suffer such an ailment as migraine or anything else ... whilst the air itself smelt of sickness. Through these ribbons of dawn ... yes the sun was surely rising ... there appeared the loping, humping shapes and, if there were anyone watching this landscape evolve before their very eyes, they would also have heard the bleating noises of these creatures great and small. Pitiful sounds, yet fraught with menace and mystery. Yet there can be no mystery without a conscious mind testing its own ability to fathom it. The mystery ... as well as the menace ... was the landscape becoming brighter, clearer, yet more menacing, more mysterious. The earlier darkness had seemed to insulate itself ... releasing no thought of danger and fright from its cloying embrace. Night had almost been comforting with its propensity to become a shroud. Night had indeed concealed night. Now, with the screaming orange rim of sun peeping above the horizon, the branches of the trees had become ... not zigzags of black lightning, not rivulets of India ink ... but flesh-coloured limbs, praying, begging, that night might hasten its own return to conceal such creatures from each other.
Friday, November 02, 2007
A Country Dusk
published 'Dark Dreams' 1990
I fell in love with the picture as soon as I had entered the room. Strangely enough, it was the frame that first attracted me (because there were several other artefacts in its vicinity vying for my attention); it trailed golden vine leaves between studs of even deeper, finer gold. Evidently wood, but spiritually real gold. Gorgeous marginalia, true, but nothing compared .......
Once drawn into the actual canvas itself, I was enchanted by a little mid-Victorian girl playing by a stream, with a hoop leaning against her - but no way could she have bowled it across the rutted field towards the archetypal thatched cottage where her mother beckoned her to come in. A dusk scene, presumably, but above all its intrinsic charm was quite inexplicable: maybe it was the red flowers spotting the girl's pinafore or the twined green tendrils curling like eels from between her feet towards the mother or the fact I thought I could actually listen to the gurgling stream.
I acquired the painting with the house and, luckily, the vendor did not add much to the asking price to cover it. She was a lady of advanced years retreating, she said, to her daughter's to while away the evening of her life and, so, had no room for such a large painting.
"You sure your daughter won't want it?" I asked mock-concernedly for I could not bear the idea that I might lose such a potential prize.
"No, dear, she's never been a lover of this particular painting."
***
When you live with someone for a long time, you begin to discover traits and quirks that you did not even begin to suspect during the earliest honeymoon days. It's only the test of time that will reveal if those changes (each one small in itself, but taken as a whole may well represent a complete sea change) can mature into something that you can continue to love and cherish or whether they are ingredients that will eventually turn the whole meal into a mess of stinking offal
As with a person, so with that painting.
The mother by the cottage door was in a patch of deepening shadow, I noticed. I could have sworn that when I first cast my eyes upon the canvas, the face had been lit up by the horizontal beams of the setting sun. But now the sun was vaguely further behind the trees, I thought. The girl's face was now infinitesimally nearer to the surface of the stream as if to catch her own reflection before the light finally faded. Her hoop was not a hoop at all! It appeared to be more like a brown snake, thicker on one side of the circle, thinner at the other, like an endless ingrowing whip. The red dots on her pinafore was some substance seeping from the flesh...
I must not give the wrong impression. It was only over a long period that such changes emerged. I would get up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep or because I had been fitfully dreaming of the eventual end result of the painting if I didn't do something about it. I would storm downstairs, only to be relieved to see that it was not as bad as I thought.
But it was always slightly different every time I looked at it. Until I could imagine that the vines of the frame were beginning to implicate co-existence with their cousin tendrils in the picture.
The girl became more aligned with the dark stream, more like an unwholesome, unnatural beast than a human, her flesh flowing as one with it.
The mother was nothing but a stain of darkness or had she gone in, shutting the door after her, despairing of her daughter ever returning from her twilight play?
And when the moon came out, I turned its face to the wall.
***
If anyone visits me (and the visits of my many friends who used to flock to my social events in my younger days had now begun to tail off, as they often do when you get older), but, if anyone did come, they would question me about the painting with its back to the room.
And I would tell them that it was none of their business! I would play the grand piano loudly to stop them hearing the gurgling tinnitus in my ears.
I fell in love with the picture as soon as I had entered the room. Strangely enough, it was the frame that first attracted me (because there were several other artefacts in its vicinity vying for my attention); it trailed golden vine leaves between studs of even deeper, finer gold. Evidently wood, but spiritually real gold. Gorgeous marginalia, true, but nothing compared .......
Once drawn into the actual canvas itself, I was enchanted by a little mid-Victorian girl playing by a stream, with a hoop leaning against her - but no way could she have bowled it across the rutted field towards the archetypal thatched cottage where her mother beckoned her to come in. A dusk scene, presumably, but above all its intrinsic charm was quite inexplicable: maybe it was the red flowers spotting the girl's pinafore or the twined green tendrils curling like eels from between her feet towards the mother or the fact I thought I could actually listen to the gurgling stream.
I acquired the painting with the house and, luckily, the vendor did not add much to the asking price to cover it. She was a lady of advanced years retreating, she said, to her daughter's to while away the evening of her life and, so, had no room for such a large painting.
"You sure your daughter won't want it?" I asked mock-concernedly for I could not bear the idea that I might lose such a potential prize.
"No, dear, she's never been a lover of this particular painting."
***
When you live with someone for a long time, you begin to discover traits and quirks that you did not even begin to suspect during the earliest honeymoon days. It's only the test of time that will reveal if those changes (each one small in itself, but taken as a whole may well represent a complete sea change) can mature into something that you can continue to love and cherish or whether they are ingredients that will eventually turn the whole meal into a mess of stinking offal
As with a person, so with that painting.
The mother by the cottage door was in a patch of deepening shadow, I noticed. I could have sworn that when I first cast my eyes upon the canvas, the face had been lit up by the horizontal beams of the setting sun. But now the sun was vaguely further behind the trees, I thought. The girl's face was now infinitesimally nearer to the surface of the stream as if to catch her own reflection before the light finally faded. Her hoop was not a hoop at all! It appeared to be more like a brown snake, thicker on one side of the circle, thinner at the other, like an endless ingrowing whip. The red dots on her pinafore was some substance seeping from the flesh...
I must not give the wrong impression. It was only over a long period that such changes emerged. I would get up in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep or because I had been fitfully dreaming of the eventual end result of the painting if I didn't do something about it. I would storm downstairs, only to be relieved to see that it was not as bad as I thought.
But it was always slightly different every time I looked at it. Until I could imagine that the vines of the frame were beginning to implicate co-existence with their cousin tendrils in the picture.
The girl became more aligned with the dark stream, more like an unwholesome, unnatural beast than a human, her flesh flowing as one with it.
The mother was nothing but a stain of darkness or had she gone in, shutting the door after her, despairing of her daughter ever returning from her twilight play?
And when the moon came out, I turned its face to the wall.
***
If anyone visits me (and the visits of my many friends who used to flock to my social events in my younger days had now begun to tail off, as they often do when you get older), but, if anyone did come, they would question me about the painting with its back to the room.
And I would tell them that it was none of their business! I would play the grand piano loudly to stop them hearing the gurgling tinnitus in my ears.
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