First published 'Beyond The Moon' 1994
The building, once a skyrise block, now sprawled along the horizon. Its central manse prodded the clouds with the short temper of a bed-ridden schoolmistress, whilst its outhouses and stables crept window- and entrance-less from either side, curving gently to fulfil an ancient ambition of the shellac snake swallowing its own masonic tail.
Knowing at once that this was the only part of the city which had been made independent of reality during one of the Tangential Wars, Glock had clambered here through stilted, stunted avenues of trees. Being participants in the Second Suburban civilisation, the inhabitants were glued to screens, screens which reflected only fuller versions of themselves. He need not bother them. He took no pleasure in surprising the unsurprisable. Time travel was to them only second nature in the fictional worlds they now thought they lived through. Yet Glock remained a hero in search of his heroism, even if this particular area of history was merely a way-station for other less insignificant, more heroic times.
"Who are you?"
He was startled by the brightness in the abrupt feminine voice. Wishing that he had managed to be the first to bring the same question to bear, he surveyed the questioner's face: a wanton, pointed vixen-like animal with shirley-temple curls, and loins so thickly bushed, he wondered whether the voice had caused him to jump to conclusions.
"I am Glock," he answered. He would have added, "Glock, an Ulterior who has been commissioned by the Future to de-haunt that building", if he had not already learned the big lessons in life: say as little as possible: and don't tempt synchronicity. She looked unaccountably relieved.
He pointed to the conjoined crescent building, now etched in marquetry against the most stage-struck sunset he had ever seen. The edge of the sky was almost audible amid its various interfaces of tertiary colours. Not one single sun, but several, dipped together as a well-drilled chorus line, gradually silting into the dewy-eyed pastels and oils that this particular universe had seen fit to massage into its moving parts. These suns eventually came together as one, to take the curtain-call of night, their overall consistency fast changing from raw jam to wild honey. Finally, with a magnificent feat of prestidigitation, the now combined sun wore a black top hat which was courteously doffed for the final bow and, more quickly than Glock anticipated, became as big as the whole sky's bowl.
"Pretty, weren't it?"
He nodded. He had not wanted to enter the building during darkness but now it seemed there was no option. Other than untested options.
"You will come with me?" he stated, rather than asked.
"To help clean it?"
He nodded again, knowing what she meant.
She took his hand into her slenderly fingered paw and led him along an unmarked path. Her sparkling eyes told him that she could see better at night than him. His friends, who worked for the Future in the past, had obviously primed her and planted her here as his guide, and he was truly thankful for such sweet mercies.
The building had once been a large stately house. It was now unusual in one respect, something he had indeed already noticed but not sufficiently weighed. The side stables had no apertures of their own, which meant that they could only be reached via the main central manse itself. He imagined wicket gates leading from the grand entrance hallway into the bestrawn areas, where whatever unlikely beasts were reared did nuzzle and feed, hinnying gently to lull the other inhabitants towards sleep. The livestock was taken in and out via the ornate central doorway, since they had no stable doors to call their own. The marble staircases and costly parquetry must be peppered with their droppings. All surmise, yet surmise based on the Future's map of hindsight in his possession.
Glock had indeed learnt, before embarking on this mission, that he was due to reach a cross-section of reality which was entirely independent of history itself. Unscarred by the Tangential Wars, it was thus teeming with such refugees and dossers that could not bear the brunt of chronology. It supplied haven of hindsight, even, for those who could not gain purchase upon any credulity elsewhere: for those whose outlandish exteriors were denied existence within most healthy precincts of time, since nobody really wanted to believe in nightmares. It was Glock's job to visit such pockets of resistance and rid them of any wrong-headed creatures inhabiting them.
He had no illusions. He was not brave. Knowing that hindsight was fighting from his corner, how could he possibly be defeated? Furthermore, he had a few old school-tie contacts amid the corporate machinery of FUTURE (Fate's United Timekeepers & Ulterior Reality Erasers). .
"I've got a key."
He could have hugged her. She knew her lines very well.
The double-doors swung wide open even before she could insert the key. Things were working out almost too well (despite the inopportune sunset). He was cruising upon a clockwork of well-oiled domino ratchets.
They stepped amid the candleflames that might have been lit to welcome them. The stench inside was quite unbearable: a heady ripeness which they could almost see hanging in the waxlight like honeycombs rotted right through. The dynastic oil paintings queuing up the winding gone-with-the-wind staircase dripped with a phlegmy-green pigment, particularly from the mouths and snouts of the depicted subjects.
"How do we get to the stables?" he asked, ever eager to get on with the job in hand.
She darted towards an antechamber and, by the time he had caught up, he found her scrabbling in the maw of a tall fireplace. The lizard-skinned ashes, he could just see, were sticky, and some dead flames were clinging to her behind like boiled sweets. He had always imagined corpse-fire to be more like flowers. This was the first time he'd seen it. Hindsight had never been able to deal with such impossibilities as cold fire.
With a teeth-grinding noise, she removed the back of the engorged chimney. Giving him her tail to hold, he followed into what he now took to be the stables. There were snorts and snuffles from every quarter: lambent eyes played peeky-boo with each other: feelers tickled his face as if he were on an old-fashioned ghost funround. How was he to see in such darkness, how cope with the exorcism of mutant reality with merely the sense of touch at his disposal?
"Are we in the stables, now?" he whispered.
"No, these are where the pets are kept. The wildstock is further into the side sheds."
He knew for a fact that he was not here to obliterate household pets. But he was now unsure whether she had learnt her lines correctly. Unaccountably, he half-mistrusted her.
With no warning, even to himself, he took his Lewis-gun and sprayed a splatter of ectoplasmic pellets in all directions of the sane compass, willy-nilly. The gnawing purrs and drowsing undergrunts became squawks and squeals of outright terror. The eyes extinguished one by one, each with a gut-wrenching sob. The noise screeched on: it could almost be seen as great swathes of darkness billowing like black flames of shadow: then tattering: finally silence. It turned out, more by Fate than Future, that he had managed not to hit his guide. But he could tell from the yellow wells that were her eyes rising up before him, that she was stricken with unconscious grief.
He felt her tail tug him on. Now she was not speaking. A female stoniness had settled on their relationship ... at least for a while, he assumed. More by Luck than Judgement, they reached the outmost stables by daybreak, tired and hungry. A silvery light filtered through the cracks of the wooden walls.
"But there's nothing here ... "
Only straw and a small empty manger, he noticed.
As he spoke, he swung his arms in unison, like a love-shy schoolboy. She stared at him fixedly. Her cunning-looking features snickered. She tweedled her whiskery snout: the saucy minx needed her rump smacking, he thought. Abruptly, with a flash of her flanks, she leapt upon him, scrambled up his uniform (using the silver buttons as gains of purchase), wrapped him round the chest with her pulsing limbs and forced her snout into his mouth, with the fever of some passion he could not comprehend.
Glock, with an Ulterior's body, wielded a vast crosspult, one loaded with a chunky lump of frozen ghost-vaccine: sprung upon a band of elastic spiritfire - and several bodily hair-triggers ready-cocked. Whether he was snooked accidentally into judder-recoil or, whether, indeed, he himself tipped the balance in all conscious righteousness of motive, he did not, nor want to, know. Less by Fuck than Fudge, Glock's grapeshot ricocheted beyond reality's range and brought, if temporarily, cross-concertinas of event into play...
He placed her in the single manger, where she flopped lifelessly, the maw in her furry belly having flooded with what looked like raw jam. Reluctant tears gleaming in his dark eyes, he curled himself up in the straw nearby ... waiting, waiting, waiting for the Future to send another less human Glock to rescue him from these trammels of out-history.
Tenderly, he shuffled some straw over the were's body in the manger.
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.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Visages of Jade
First published 'Dreams & Nightmares' 1991
“Ask for me in my head,” said the doll to her mistress.
The girl tilted it and allowed the liquid to drip from the slowly blinking eyes.
Her toys ever spoke back to her, after she had already articulated their words in the mind’s eye. The doll’s name was Myrtle. The teddy Teddy. The Jack-in-the-box’s she’d forgotten. The rocking-home never had a name at the outset, which didn’t seem to matter today as the weather was so hot and she was spending most of her waking hours in the outside. The sky was so blue and the trees so green, she thought she was in a children’s picture book. A pop-up one, at that.
Rag harlequins and hand-puppet pierrots were stuffed into the toy cupboards of her memory...
Her elder sister was lounging upon the sunbed, the green perspex peaked hat making her face even greener and stranger than the colour of the grass, the skin down to the sharply pink nostrils dyed a hallowe’en mask.
The younger girl shook herself free of thoughts and returned to Myrtle. The doll was staring uselessly into the sky, for her mistress had left her in a position where the eyes could but open. A silver helium balloon, freshly released from a birthday party nearby, resembled a jet-liner shark, but with the waggling of its tether soon became a sperm...
It’s strange the way Myrtle thought, thought the girl.
She was able to hear the shrill voices from beyond the end of the orchard garden.
The chants of oranges and lemons made them seem outlandish: faceless children celebrating the turn of someone’s epoch. She wished it’d been possible to invite her.
The elder sister revolved on her spit, baking nicely in the over-ripe sun. The dark verdure had by now stained down the neck in ribbed smuts of seaweedy ozone.
The younger girl tried to budge, hoping in the end that someone would turn her face downwards into the grass, for the brightness hurt.
“Ask for me in my head,” said the doll to her mistress.
The girl tilted it and allowed the liquid to drip from the slowly blinking eyes.
Her toys ever spoke back to her, after she had already articulated their words in the mind’s eye. The doll’s name was Myrtle. The teddy Teddy. The Jack-in-the-box’s she’d forgotten. The rocking-home never had a name at the outset, which didn’t seem to matter today as the weather was so hot and she was spending most of her waking hours in the outside. The sky was so blue and the trees so green, she thought she was in a children’s picture book. A pop-up one, at that.
Rag harlequins and hand-puppet pierrots were stuffed into the toy cupboards of her memory...
Her elder sister was lounging upon the sunbed, the green perspex peaked hat making her face even greener and stranger than the colour of the grass, the skin down to the sharply pink nostrils dyed a hallowe’en mask.
The younger girl shook herself free of thoughts and returned to Myrtle. The doll was staring uselessly into the sky, for her mistress had left her in a position where the eyes could but open. A silver helium balloon, freshly released from a birthday party nearby, resembled a jet-liner shark, but with the waggling of its tether soon became a sperm...
It’s strange the way Myrtle thought, thought the girl.
She was able to hear the shrill voices from beyond the end of the orchard garden.
The chants of oranges and lemons made them seem outlandish: faceless children celebrating the turn of someone’s epoch. She wished it’d been possible to invite her.
The elder sister revolved on her spit, baking nicely in the over-ripe sun. The dark verdure had by now stained down the neck in ribbed smuts of seaweedy ozone.
The younger girl tried to budge, hoping in the end that someone would turn her face downwards into the grass, for the brightness hurt.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Look, Don't Touch
(published 'Not One Of Us' 1991)
William Fitzsimmons sat in the hamburger cafe, scrutinising the other customers bent double over their scratchings.
He speculated on the forces that had brought all these people, including himself, together at this single point in endless time. Why them? Why him? Why now? Why even why?
On the face of it, several people had arrived here to become inextricably mingled in this cheapskate, overlit, uncharacterful spot in the limitless universe. The number of other more deserving venues they could have chosen, for such an important conflux of destinies, was breathless.
William forked up a shy sliver of lightly fried egg and, chewing ruminatively, he tried to concoct a background for each of his companions in eating. But their identities at first escaped his grasp...
The dour-faced lady, with skewed spectacles, had been staring emptily into space, sporadically sipping at her cup of drink: the odd tinkle of less than best china picking itself out from the under-rumble of the cafe.
She sat straight opposite William ... but he was not the object of her gaze. It was something behind him, by the look of it. He turned quickly, only to find a reflection of the back of his neck in the wall mirror. He did not question it: nor the fact that he could no longer see the lady because his own image in the mirror was in the way. When he turned back, she had in fact gone; she had even cleared away the cup and saucer herself: a tidy mind, if even a vacant one, William mused. But surely she'd not had sufficient time to depart during that split second turn of his head.
He pictured her walking along the drab tawdry streets, umbrella unfurled against the endemic drizzle, her tears borrowing sparkles from the car lights. Her flat was a lonely place without her. It needed to be filled with a presence: to allow her meticulously arranged sticks of furniture to rally round and become more than just a soulless space of unassigned reality. For it was, at heart, a home.
She placed a small saucepan of milk on the back burner of the old-fashioned gas cooker: prepared to watch it swell into a mass of tiny cream-frothing bubbles for yet another drink. Almost erotic. But never consummated: she removed the saucepan just before its seething contents reached the boil and poured it sizzling upon coffee granules ... which in turn gave up their ghosts in running smears of brown.
William decided not to follow that train of thought to the conclusion which he feared he might reach. Instead, he turned his attention to another customer ... and this one did not look as if he were about to leave. Nor had the lady, for that matter.
The oval plate was piled up in front of the man with three burgers in their baps, tips of half-raw onion poking out from the sides like tiny children's lisping tongues.
The man had once been a father, but had killed such creatures who had made him such. There HAD been blood on his hands. William could see it also in the man's redshot eyes: evidently couldn't sleep because of the thoughts: those haunting thoughts which, real or otherwise, had used the man's mind as their own.
The man removed the lid of each bap and audibly squirted tomato sauce upon the wrinkled brown flannels within. Then, taking a knife, kindly provided by those that ran the cafe, he surgically separated a large wadge of "meat" and bap from the rest, speared it with the selfsame knife, opened his mouth as wide as it would go, showing a flap of the body which should be heard rather than seen, and enveloped the morsel in folds of munching flesh.
William could now hardly see the man's mouth: the lips were tantamount to a meagre rind of skin and the slit between them closed up like a healing scar. The cheeks bloated in and out. The eyes bulged, pricks of blood at their corners...
William turned away. He could bear it no longer. Staring hopefully at his own plateful as a source of comfort, the coiled frankfurter, with notches cut out along its length, looked almost akin to a diseased body part. In front of his eyes, it begun to unbend, eventually shifting a fresh tomato- half nearer to the edge of the plate. The tiny mound of softened onions weltered.
He could not endure eating any more. So, he looked towards the corner where he had not noticed before a young woman in a smart mackintosh sitting reflected by the interface of two wall mirrors. With a certain amount of relief, he convinced himself she was a nice person. The face was open and innocent, as well as disarmingly pretty, as she returned his glance. Was that a hint of a smile upon those carefully red-painted lips? The eyes, even from this distance, he could discern, were delicate birds' eggshells. The nose completed the inscrutable picture of Mona Lisa's second cousin, with an even more beautiful sister-in-sheen either side of her.
William had fallen in love with her even before setting eyes upon the young woman. It was as if Fate had once given him an advance glimpse, in a dream so readily forgotten as remembered, a memory never experienced until now.
The subtle mutual recognition lasted only for a second or two ... before a sharp-suited gent with a huge neck sat down between them. She spoke to the man as if she knew him and had been expecting his arrival Now, there was no doubting the quality of the smile.
William collapsed in upon himself. What he had previously managed to eat turned uneasily in his stomach, the various odds and ends melding as the chutney fermented.
It was getting late. The other customers had been leaving the cafe in dribs and drabs, without him really noticing. Whatever the rubbing together of various destinies had served to accomplish, it had not prevented any of them from extricating themselves from William's web and taking up their lives from where they'd left off before entering the hamburger cafe.
His last tale, evidently, was to be spun around the only customer he really knew to the bottom.
He pictured himself ambling through the same curtain of drizzle behind which the dour-faced lady had already disappeared. Then, fumbling for his keys which always turned up in the last pocket that he searched: inserting each key into the complicated lock system with which his wife had insisted burdening the flimsy front door: entering the gloomy hall where the dead bulb still faced downward from the dangling flex: keeping watch upon the steep stairs for a sign of anybody or anything waiting to cross down past him as he climbed up: finally, shaking himself free from the drag of the overcoat which, in turn, collapsed to the dowdy linoleum with the whimper of a huge drowned dog.
He saw the bodies of his wife and children lying side by side in the marital bed, their endlessly sluggish blood filling all the crevices under the floorboards: eager to start the sprinkler system that his wife had always wanted. He sniffed. No sign of that smoke needed to hide the ripe sweet savour of bodies too long dead. The fire he had left smouldering on purpose had burnt itself out before catching. The hamburger cafe smelled more like a crematory, in its own way: more like a charnel house than even a charnel house.
William Fitzsimmons came back to himself in the cafe. He had in fact never been a father nor a husband, neither loving nor loved ... with nobody so close to him that he could muster sufficent hatred to slaughter them. The loneliness was more than he could bear.
He may have to kill himself, as some kind of consolation prize in the league of passions.
There may have been no need, of course, if, soon afterwards, all the customers in the hamburger cafe on that particular evening, including him, died in severe pain of complications derived from food poison.
But no such luck, good OR bad, would allow him a way out. Only the ability to wander the city streets, staring at God's children.
William Fitzsimmons sat in the hamburger cafe, scrutinising the other customers bent double over their scratchings.
He speculated on the forces that had brought all these people, including himself, together at this single point in endless time. Why them? Why him? Why now? Why even why?
On the face of it, several people had arrived here to become inextricably mingled in this cheapskate, overlit, uncharacterful spot in the limitless universe. The number of other more deserving venues they could have chosen, for such an important conflux of destinies, was breathless.
William forked up a shy sliver of lightly fried egg and, chewing ruminatively, he tried to concoct a background for each of his companions in eating. But their identities at first escaped his grasp...
The dour-faced lady, with skewed spectacles, had been staring emptily into space, sporadically sipping at her cup of drink: the odd tinkle of less than best china picking itself out from the under-rumble of the cafe.
She sat straight opposite William ... but he was not the object of her gaze. It was something behind him, by the look of it. He turned quickly, only to find a reflection of the back of his neck in the wall mirror. He did not question it: nor the fact that he could no longer see the lady because his own image in the mirror was in the way. When he turned back, she had in fact gone; she had even cleared away the cup and saucer herself: a tidy mind, if even a vacant one, William mused. But surely she'd not had sufficient time to depart during that split second turn of his head.
He pictured her walking along the drab tawdry streets, umbrella unfurled against the endemic drizzle, her tears borrowing sparkles from the car lights. Her flat was a lonely place without her. It needed to be filled with a presence: to allow her meticulously arranged sticks of furniture to rally round and become more than just a soulless space of unassigned reality. For it was, at heart, a home.
She placed a small saucepan of milk on the back burner of the old-fashioned gas cooker: prepared to watch it swell into a mass of tiny cream-frothing bubbles for yet another drink. Almost erotic. But never consummated: she removed the saucepan just before its seething contents reached the boil and poured it sizzling upon coffee granules ... which in turn gave up their ghosts in running smears of brown.
William decided not to follow that train of thought to the conclusion which he feared he might reach. Instead, he turned his attention to another customer ... and this one did not look as if he were about to leave. Nor had the lady, for that matter.
The oval plate was piled up in front of the man with three burgers in their baps, tips of half-raw onion poking out from the sides like tiny children's lisping tongues.
The man had once been a father, but had killed such creatures who had made him such. There HAD been blood on his hands. William could see it also in the man's redshot eyes: evidently couldn't sleep because of the thoughts: those haunting thoughts which, real or otherwise, had used the man's mind as their own.
The man removed the lid of each bap and audibly squirted tomato sauce upon the wrinkled brown flannels within. Then, taking a knife, kindly provided by those that ran the cafe, he surgically separated a large wadge of "meat" and bap from the rest, speared it with the selfsame knife, opened his mouth as wide as it would go, showing a flap of the body which should be heard rather than seen, and enveloped the morsel in folds of munching flesh.
William could now hardly see the man's mouth: the lips were tantamount to a meagre rind of skin and the slit between them closed up like a healing scar. The cheeks bloated in and out. The eyes bulged, pricks of blood at their corners...
William turned away. He could bear it no longer. Staring hopefully at his own plateful as a source of comfort, the coiled frankfurter, with notches cut out along its length, looked almost akin to a diseased body part. In front of his eyes, it begun to unbend, eventually shifting a fresh tomato- half nearer to the edge of the plate. The tiny mound of softened onions weltered.
He could not endure eating any more. So, he looked towards the corner where he had not noticed before a young woman in a smart mackintosh sitting reflected by the interface of two wall mirrors. With a certain amount of relief, he convinced himself she was a nice person. The face was open and innocent, as well as disarmingly pretty, as she returned his glance. Was that a hint of a smile upon those carefully red-painted lips? The eyes, even from this distance, he could discern, were delicate birds' eggshells. The nose completed the inscrutable picture of Mona Lisa's second cousin, with an even more beautiful sister-in-sheen either side of her.
William had fallen in love with her even before setting eyes upon the young woman. It was as if Fate had once given him an advance glimpse, in a dream so readily forgotten as remembered, a memory never experienced until now.
The subtle mutual recognition lasted only for a second or two ... before a sharp-suited gent with a huge neck sat down between them. She spoke to the man as if she knew him and had been expecting his arrival Now, there was no doubting the quality of the smile.
William collapsed in upon himself. What he had previously managed to eat turned uneasily in his stomach, the various odds and ends melding as the chutney fermented.
It was getting late. The other customers had been leaving the cafe in dribs and drabs, without him really noticing. Whatever the rubbing together of various destinies had served to accomplish, it had not prevented any of them from extricating themselves from William's web and taking up their lives from where they'd left off before entering the hamburger cafe.
His last tale, evidently, was to be spun around the only customer he really knew to the bottom.
He pictured himself ambling through the same curtain of drizzle behind which the dour-faced lady had already disappeared. Then, fumbling for his keys which always turned up in the last pocket that he searched: inserting each key into the complicated lock system with which his wife had insisted burdening the flimsy front door: entering the gloomy hall where the dead bulb still faced downward from the dangling flex: keeping watch upon the steep stairs for a sign of anybody or anything waiting to cross down past him as he climbed up: finally, shaking himself free from the drag of the overcoat which, in turn, collapsed to the dowdy linoleum with the whimper of a huge drowned dog.
He saw the bodies of his wife and children lying side by side in the marital bed, their endlessly sluggish blood filling all the crevices under the floorboards: eager to start the sprinkler system that his wife had always wanted. He sniffed. No sign of that smoke needed to hide the ripe sweet savour of bodies too long dead. The fire he had left smouldering on purpose had burnt itself out before catching. The hamburger cafe smelled more like a crematory, in its own way: more like a charnel house than even a charnel house.
William Fitzsimmons came back to himself in the cafe. He had in fact never been a father nor a husband, neither loving nor loved ... with nobody so close to him that he could muster sufficent hatred to slaughter them. The loneliness was more than he could bear.
He may have to kill himself, as some kind of consolation prize in the league of passions.
There may have been no need, of course, if, soon afterwards, all the customers in the hamburger cafe on that particular evening, including him, died in severe pain of complications derived from food poison.
But no such luck, good OR bad, would allow him a way out. Only the ability to wander the city streets, staring at God's children.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Ancient Ponds
(published 'Dementia 13')
The moment Doug entered the room, he knew something was eating under the table. It was the sound of chomping and licking of lips...
The flat had not been tenanted for long and, as far as he was aware, he was the first person to rent its newly furnished conversion. The fact that it was an old house was belied by the dogs' dinner appointments and Art Nouveau decor of his living area. From the window he could see that the garden remained peppered with the stagnant pools of an unusually wet summer. He had often thrown his used tea bags from his kitchenette - in his mind, scoring according to which pool he managed to hit. The waste disposal unit was not good enough for Doug.
He scowled. The lease said 'No Pets', well, in so many words... and here was something or other having found its way into the living quarters...presumably from some other part of the large rambling house. Perhaps, the new tenant in the converted attic, whose arrival was indicated by a removal van stationed outside when Doug had gone off to work, had smuggled in an unknown animal.
Various thoughts fleeted through Doug's mind, as he stooped to investigate: why the removal men left odd items on the pavement, such as a piano stool and a magazine rack (whilst they went off for breakfast?); the old woman waving from her front plot, one of those downward movements of the hand that expressed exasperation at the sort of things that go on these days and the calibre of people coming to live in the area; why she should strike up even a nodding acquaintance with Doug, seeing that he was a recent arrival in the area himself.
His hands rested like splayed spiders in front of his knees, as he bent his head beneath the tassels of the tablecloth.
Doug had been brought up by sunday schoolteacher parents in a peripheral area of London which only got into the A to Z by the skin of its teeth.
He never liked animals then. He had been under no illusions as to their parasitic ambitions, even as a small child...their wheedling, whiskered faces... filling laps like warm liquid, their tea-brown eyes raised in self-seeking pity.
If the grown-ups were not watching, Doug would sooner strangle than stroke their glossy pelts. Or boil them for stew. He imagined their upturned weltering faces rearing on shafts of seething gruel, mouthing a silent pain. Chile Con Carne often had bits in it that one could turn into tiny faces, just with a little effort of the imagination. He would often stare into his hymn-singing mother's cooking bowls, forming nightmares for his dreams.
He snapped out of it.
The past is just another dream.
He shook his head vigorously... trying to clear the brain of fuzziness. He blinked his eyes to clear them of the overlarge lashes. But they were attached to something other than moveable skin.
He looked down: a large bone conjured the tatterdemalion of residual flesh...as he sank his jaws closer to the knuckle.
The old woman from across the way wandered over to fish the ancient ponds. Witnessed only by the new tenant in the attic, with tea-brown eyes.
The last thing Doug ate was his own tail.
The moment Doug entered the room, he knew something was eating under the table. It was the sound of chomping and licking of lips...
The flat had not been tenanted for long and, as far as he was aware, he was the first person to rent its newly furnished conversion. The fact that it was an old house was belied by the dogs' dinner appointments and Art Nouveau decor of his living area. From the window he could see that the garden remained peppered with the stagnant pools of an unusually wet summer. He had often thrown his used tea bags from his kitchenette - in his mind, scoring according to which pool he managed to hit. The waste disposal unit was not good enough for Doug.
He scowled. The lease said 'No Pets', well, in so many words... and here was something or other having found its way into the living quarters...presumably from some other part of the large rambling house. Perhaps, the new tenant in the converted attic, whose arrival was indicated by a removal van stationed outside when Doug had gone off to work, had smuggled in an unknown animal.
Various thoughts fleeted through Doug's mind, as he stooped to investigate: why the removal men left odd items on the pavement, such as a piano stool and a magazine rack (whilst they went off for breakfast?); the old woman waving from her front plot, one of those downward movements of the hand that expressed exasperation at the sort of things that go on these days and the calibre of people coming to live in the area; why she should strike up even a nodding acquaintance with Doug, seeing that he was a recent arrival in the area himself.
His hands rested like splayed spiders in front of his knees, as he bent his head beneath the tassels of the tablecloth.
Doug had been brought up by sunday schoolteacher parents in a peripheral area of London which only got into the A to Z by the skin of its teeth.
He never liked animals then. He had been under no illusions as to their parasitic ambitions, even as a small child...their wheedling, whiskered faces... filling laps like warm liquid, their tea-brown eyes raised in self-seeking pity.
If the grown-ups were not watching, Doug would sooner strangle than stroke their glossy pelts. Or boil them for stew. He imagined their upturned weltering faces rearing on shafts of seething gruel, mouthing a silent pain. Chile Con Carne often had bits in it that one could turn into tiny faces, just with a little effort of the imagination. He would often stare into his hymn-singing mother's cooking bowls, forming nightmares for his dreams.
He snapped out of it.
The past is just another dream.
He shook his head vigorously... trying to clear the brain of fuzziness. He blinked his eyes to clear them of the overlarge lashes. But they were attached to something other than moveable skin.
He looked down: a large bone conjured the tatterdemalion of residual flesh...as he sank his jaws closer to the knuckle.
The old woman from across the way wandered over to fish the ancient ponds. Witnessed only by the new tenant in the attic, with tea-brown eyes.
The last thing Doug ate was his own tail.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Craters of Gills
Published 'Year 2000' 1994
Isabel herself swung an axe at a mighty bole. The sun lifted in unseasonable speed above the other shaggy trees, stage-lighting the forest-clearing in readiness perhaps for the grand re-entrance of a hero-buckler. Her voice picked out heart-felt ditties - ditties from those shanty song-cycles often forced out between oldster's crooning lips in despairing lullabyes, at dead of night when the deep pan moon floated into antique windows.
She kept a weather eye on the inn, where Mad Madge would even now be speaking half-truths to nobody but the ghosts. Then, wiping her face with the bottom of her blouse, Isabel turned in the other direction to see whether the ferry across the river was back in action. Old Ferdinand had been poorly for some days, so the cargo-stacks queued along both banks further than she could ever remember those henges to stretch. But most important of all, there was one area she scanned with more anxiety than the rest - the forest path along which her beau Claude had earlier departed with the earthenware jug. She hoped he would soon return it, brimful with the sweet coolness of golden spring wine.
Not long since dawn - even so, the giant silver welkin-fish which emerged opposite the sun were surprising for their punctuality. These were the carving mysteries of the heavens above, which Isabel had never questioned because, like the sun itself, they were simply always there. Her ancient parents, despite the blind spot of their lives between childhood and old age, said these smooth-lined fish had always brooded in the sky's heartlands, visiting Earthen by-ways within certain tolerances of timing. The plumes of fire from tails and gills were the strangest ingredients of welkin-fish flight. Isabel would often place her hand in mock salute above her big brown eyes, thus shading them from the glare, whilst keeping watch on those she suspected kept watch on her.
Today, again, she dabbed her watering eyes with the end of her blouse, fleetingly revealing the underswell of young breasts. At the back of her mind, she was intrigued and amused by the contrast between the ferry on its rust-cranking cross-river chain and the sleek silver creatures frictionlessly forging the sky.
Claude was longer than usual making my anticipated entrance and the grain of the wood seemed set against her strokes. Her skirt fell about her legs as if it had a sculptor's will of its own, the complex pleats changing like a map in motion above the pretty ankles. She was bare of feet, long since transformed by weathering into the appearance of fine-textured wood themselves. The other men who shifted around between fresh-cloven boles had only eyes for her, deeply jealous of Claude’s place in her soul. None noticed the hovering of one particular welkin-fish, in a proximity of which history had never spoken, even in the books which none now ever opened for fear of the pages being found welded together like spongy wood. The fact that none could read or write was another, secondary, factor.
The glinting underside passed over her head and then roofed the river. Even Old Ferdinand could be seen emerging from his hut, face raised at an impossible angle, curved fingers crabbing at the back of his neck. His ferry was the only way to cross - and his croaking words could be vaguely heard despite the roaring fires which cindered the tree-lines on the opposite bank. Mad Madge tottered from the inn, her drink slopping out of the tureen in her hand. She waved a fist at the intruder, her words, too, heard, but misheard, beneath the seething of the other welkin-fish even now settling upon the river's wide kiss.
Where was Claude? Isabel accepted everything in life, but not my absence. Adventures were pleasurable risks - whenever he was about to calm the nerves and stroke the nape. But, now, all was coming apart in her hands, fingers in snail shells to her smarting eyes. This squeezed prison of sight could thus discern pointed faces at the holes neatly arranged along the silver flank. Never even thinking that, one day, she, of all people, would be called upon to write new history books, the moment passed without her truly realising its importance. The humming monsters soared again into the sky, their plumes of fire eventually forming a corona of tails around the story-book sun.
After hours into days into bigger units of time than could be countenaced by brief existences such as Isabel, Claude’s body was eventually discovered near the spring. Her tears had already dried in advance of real sorrow's proof source and inner pain. She knelt beside the man she loved. Claude, was it? Wiping a sprig of hair from the tearless sweat, she kissed his dislocated lips with a passion that could only dig her deeper towards his mollusc soul. Claude had believed that the spring's golden flush held wondrous qualities of mind-change and, thus, it was his favourite haunt. His face was quite beyond recognition, but his buckled skins, freshly sliced each morning from dew-damp boles, were still clinging to his thews. His bone-case had become one with rank decay, however, my eyes blindshot and his inner carcass a taxidermist's false start.
Isabel married Claude, as had been planned, the corpse being supported (by the best) on limp limbs at the woodside altar. He was then placed to rest in the marriage cot, whereby for the years ahead, Mad Madge would help Isabel with the regular ablutions and worship of the human-soaked quagmire. As the age-blotched moon dipped to peep beneath the eaves, the two women crooned shanties, eager for the renewal of the river's rusty cranking - where Isabel never again chose to venture.
Not being able to read nor form words, her previously overheard recitations from the old books she had made to Mad Madge had merely been ad hoc pretence. Thus, the new history assigned to Isabel remained unwritten - even though the neatly slivered wood paper had been specially supplied for so doing by the forest workers who loved her. But the history was written, eventually - that is, when I, child of Isabel, spawned from my father's prolonged rigor-mortis on the wedding night, grew up and taught myself to write out her lullabies.
The silver welkin-fish have not returned, no doubt blaming the sky for an earth they now cannot surfly. Yet, at dead of night, ancient moons tend to ghost their way overhead into my dreams, with dead-pan eyes and , yes, craters of gills.
Isabel herself swung an axe at a mighty bole. The sun lifted in unseasonable speed above the other shaggy trees, stage-lighting the forest-clearing in readiness perhaps for the grand re-entrance of a hero-buckler. Her voice picked out heart-felt ditties - ditties from those shanty song-cycles often forced out between oldster's crooning lips in despairing lullabyes, at dead of night when the deep pan moon floated into antique windows.
She kept a weather eye on the inn, where Mad Madge would even now be speaking half-truths to nobody but the ghosts. Then, wiping her face with the bottom of her blouse, Isabel turned in the other direction to see whether the ferry across the river was back in action. Old Ferdinand had been poorly for some days, so the cargo-stacks queued along both banks further than she could ever remember those henges to stretch. But most important of all, there was one area she scanned with more anxiety than the rest - the forest path along which her beau Claude had earlier departed with the earthenware jug. She hoped he would soon return it, brimful with the sweet coolness of golden spring wine.
Not long since dawn - even so, the giant silver welkin-fish which emerged opposite the sun were surprising for their punctuality. These were the carving mysteries of the heavens above, which Isabel had never questioned because, like the sun itself, they were simply always there. Her ancient parents, despite the blind spot of their lives between childhood and old age, said these smooth-lined fish had always brooded in the sky's heartlands, visiting Earthen by-ways within certain tolerances of timing. The plumes of fire from tails and gills were the strangest ingredients of welkin-fish flight. Isabel would often place her hand in mock salute above her big brown eyes, thus shading them from the glare, whilst keeping watch on those she suspected kept watch on her.
Today, again, she dabbed her watering eyes with the end of her blouse, fleetingly revealing the underswell of young breasts. At the back of her mind, she was intrigued and amused by the contrast between the ferry on its rust-cranking cross-river chain and the sleek silver creatures frictionlessly forging the sky.
Claude was longer than usual making my anticipated entrance and the grain of the wood seemed set against her strokes. Her skirt fell about her legs as if it had a sculptor's will of its own, the complex pleats changing like a map in motion above the pretty ankles. She was bare of feet, long since transformed by weathering into the appearance of fine-textured wood themselves. The other men who shifted around between fresh-cloven boles had only eyes for her, deeply jealous of Claude’s place in her soul. None noticed the hovering of one particular welkin-fish, in a proximity of which history had never spoken, even in the books which none now ever opened for fear of the pages being found welded together like spongy wood. The fact that none could read or write was another, secondary, factor.
The glinting underside passed over her head and then roofed the river. Even Old Ferdinand could be seen emerging from his hut, face raised at an impossible angle, curved fingers crabbing at the back of his neck. His ferry was the only way to cross - and his croaking words could be vaguely heard despite the roaring fires which cindered the tree-lines on the opposite bank. Mad Madge tottered from the inn, her drink slopping out of the tureen in her hand. She waved a fist at the intruder, her words, too, heard, but misheard, beneath the seething of the other welkin-fish even now settling upon the river's wide kiss.
Where was Claude? Isabel accepted everything in life, but not my absence. Adventures were pleasurable risks - whenever he was about to calm the nerves and stroke the nape. But, now, all was coming apart in her hands, fingers in snail shells to her smarting eyes. This squeezed prison of sight could thus discern pointed faces at the holes neatly arranged along the silver flank. Never even thinking that, one day, she, of all people, would be called upon to write new history books, the moment passed without her truly realising its importance. The humming monsters soared again into the sky, their plumes of fire eventually forming a corona of tails around the story-book sun.
After hours into days into bigger units of time than could be countenaced by brief existences such as Isabel, Claude’s body was eventually discovered near the spring. Her tears had already dried in advance of real sorrow's proof source and inner pain. She knelt beside the man she loved. Claude, was it? Wiping a sprig of hair from the tearless sweat, she kissed his dislocated lips with a passion that could only dig her deeper towards his mollusc soul. Claude had believed that the spring's golden flush held wondrous qualities of mind-change and, thus, it was his favourite haunt. His face was quite beyond recognition, but his buckled skins, freshly sliced each morning from dew-damp boles, were still clinging to his thews. His bone-case had become one with rank decay, however, my eyes blindshot and his inner carcass a taxidermist's false start.
Isabel married Claude, as had been planned, the corpse being supported (by the best) on limp limbs at the woodside altar. He was then placed to rest in the marriage cot, whereby for the years ahead, Mad Madge would help Isabel with the regular ablutions and worship of the human-soaked quagmire. As the age-blotched moon dipped to peep beneath the eaves, the two women crooned shanties, eager for the renewal of the river's rusty cranking - where Isabel never again chose to venture.
Not being able to read nor form words, her previously overheard recitations from the old books she had made to Mad Madge had merely been ad hoc pretence. Thus, the new history assigned to Isabel remained unwritten - even though the neatly slivered wood paper had been specially supplied for so doing by the forest workers who loved her. But the history was written, eventually - that is, when I, child of Isabel, spawned from my father's prolonged rigor-mortis on the wedding night, grew up and taught myself to write out her lullabies.
The silver welkin-fish have not returned, no doubt blaming the sky for an earth they now cannot surfly. Yet, at dead of night, ancient moons tend to ghost their way overhead into my dreams, with dead-pan eyes and , yes, craters of gills.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Pansy Pie
(published 'Cloth Ears' 1990)
There was a little girl, not much older than twelve, I guess, in a red dress, who came to my attention when I was selling cat’s meatfrom pub to pub for their bar food.
She skipped up to me and asked:
“What have you got in yer cart, mister?”
“I’ve got fat pipings of meat scraped from me ol Mum’s innards,” I joked.
She giggled an “Ooooh!” but, not really seeing why it was funny, questioned me again: “How much it cost, eh, mister? I’ve got a pretty shiny farthing in my pinny - is that ‘nuff for a tasty chewy bit?”
“It’s nowt a pound! But less of your questions, young missy. What your name then?”
“Pansy.”
“Pansy Floppy-Pants??”
“No,” she screeched in uncontroll¬able mirth, “Pansy PIE.”
“Pansy Pie?” It was my turn to laugh - for this name suited her down to the ground. Her face was as round as an apple pie, with a large spam forehead and eyes like large brown meatballs in lashings of milk.
I began to like this little mooncalf, despite her cheek. I decided o pull her leg.
“Who cut yer hair like that - your dentist!? Who set out yer teeth like broken fence-posts - the hairdresser, I suppose!”
She did not laugh.
She dipped her hand into the bottom of my cart and pulled out a particularly stringy clutch of valves from my mother’s lower endings. She also picked carefully into my tray of gnawing bones and positioning them carefully amid the other mess in her hand, she held it all up across her face.
“Is that any better?” she said, quite seriously.
A tear welled at the corner of my eye, for the pity of it all. I scuttled off to the next pub on my roster.
But she followed me, that little scare-flesh, through the encroaching murk of an early dusk.
My eyes flowed with something I could not explain. I turned round and looked at the dear Medusa of my heart - and realised that with no doubt I had fallen in love with her dripping mask.
*
Matthew Shakewell, the landlord, shook my hand as I arrived athe Jackass Penguin bar.
“Hi, Blasphemy!” he said to me, “how’s things? Got some juicy meatenings for my hungry microwave? It’s jawing on a wadge of used pork scratchings at the moment. It needs a lump of your choice cuts to suck…” He laughed.
I put my hand into my seeping canvas bag and pulled out the tenderest, pinkest steaklets. Shakewell whistled between his teeth and paid me a wow of a gratuity, which I immediately returned to him in exchange for a pint of the very best and a shovelful of scratchings.
I then sat in the corner and slowly sipped at my drink. But when I happened to look into the surface of the liquid, I did not see the reflection of my own face but the imploring eyes of my lamented mother. And whan I looked up at Shakewell’s humming microwave, I caught a fleeting image of the wide, white poppy face of sweet Pansy Pie, somehow desperately trying to tell me something with her haunting eyes.
There was a little girl, not much older than twelve, I guess, in a red dress, who came to my attention when I was selling cat’s meatfrom pub to pub for their bar food.
She skipped up to me and asked:
“What have you got in yer cart, mister?”
“I’ve got fat pipings of meat scraped from me ol Mum’s innards,” I joked.
She giggled an “Ooooh!” but, not really seeing why it was funny, questioned me again: “How much it cost, eh, mister? I’ve got a pretty shiny farthing in my pinny - is that ‘nuff for a tasty chewy bit?”
“It’s nowt a pound! But less of your questions, young missy. What your name then?”
“Pansy.”
“Pansy Floppy-Pants??”
“No,” she screeched in uncontroll¬able mirth, “Pansy PIE.”
“Pansy Pie?” It was my turn to laugh - for this name suited her down to the ground. Her face was as round as an apple pie, with a large spam forehead and eyes like large brown meatballs in lashings of milk.
I began to like this little mooncalf, despite her cheek. I decided o pull her leg.
“Who cut yer hair like that - your dentist!? Who set out yer teeth like broken fence-posts - the hairdresser, I suppose!”
She did not laugh.
She dipped her hand into the bottom of my cart and pulled out a particularly stringy clutch of valves from my mother’s lower endings. She also picked carefully into my tray of gnawing bones and positioning them carefully amid the other mess in her hand, she held it all up across her face.
“Is that any better?” she said, quite seriously.
A tear welled at the corner of my eye, for the pity of it all. I scuttled off to the next pub on my roster.
But she followed me, that little scare-flesh, through the encroaching murk of an early dusk.
My eyes flowed with something I could not explain. I turned round and looked at the dear Medusa of my heart - and realised that with no doubt I had fallen in love with her dripping mask.
*
Matthew Shakewell, the landlord, shook my hand as I arrived athe Jackass Penguin bar.
“Hi, Blasphemy!” he said to me, “how’s things? Got some juicy meatenings for my hungry microwave? It’s jawing on a wadge of used pork scratchings at the moment. It needs a lump of your choice cuts to suck…” He laughed.
I put my hand into my seeping canvas bag and pulled out the tenderest, pinkest steaklets. Shakewell whistled between his teeth and paid me a wow of a gratuity, which I immediately returned to him in exchange for a pint of the very best and a shovelful of scratchings.
I then sat in the corner and slowly sipped at my drink. But when I happened to look into the surface of the liquid, I did not see the reflection of my own face but the imploring eyes of my lamented mother. And whan I looked up at Shakewell’s humming microwave, I caught a fleeting image of the wide, white poppy face of sweet Pansy Pie, somehow desperately trying to tell me something with her haunting eyes.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Done To A Turn
(published 'Dark Matter' 1999)
The parlour’s silence (if a place could be silent as opposed to the things in it) was broken only by the coal embers speaking in crumbling and hissing. A flame’s lick had the last word, before darkness wedded itself to the parlour’s silence and became a ghost of something that hadn’t even lived.
Only two hours earlier, the place had been full of family life. The children had squabbled over the best position by the fire, the high-collared woman remonstrating with a boy who was the worst offender - that the heat did reach the couch if only he would try it. Not believing even his mother, the little scamp pushed his sobbing twin sister into the empty coal scuttle and hunched himself closer to the fire. The older twins were rather scathing of the younger ones and squatted on both sides of their father’s wing armchair… he, who, in turn, drew long wreaths of a cigar into his lungs and puffed them out again, as if there were nobody else in the parlour - unread book resting on his knee, eyes glazed...
Lizbie sat in the opposite armchair, shivering a little. As she was the middle child, she was accustomed to being left out of most games by the four others. After their mother had left the room, Lizbie decided to entice the others into a game of Dares. She really wanted to play Blind Man’s Bluff, but It was not yet Christmassy enough for that. In any event, the last time they had such a rumpus, blindness became too close to fact for comfort and Mother sent them all to bed early without a candle, as a punishment for not using a blindfold nor even eyelids.
Charades was a possibility, or even Postman’s Knock or Sardines, since make-believe was that family’s forte and they never had real toys, you see, or even Christmas presents. Yet life was far too real for miming and everything seemed to end in unspeakable forfeits.
“I dare you to play Dares,” piped up Lizbie, taking a sudden advantage of a lull. The younger twins were staring icily at each other in the Eyeball game (where the ultimate forfeit was said to be an exploding head if you were the first one to blink), whilst the older ones played Cat’s Cradle with Mother’s wool across their Scroogish father’s lap; the fire had settled to the point of optimum heat. Father’s eyes were now closed, the cigar smoke uncoiling in fairy words above his shiny pate. The other children, by their lack of response, indicated passive acquiescence to the game of Dares. The parlour drew quiet.
“OK, I’ll start off...” said Lizbie.
“Why you? The first one to roll a six should go first.”
Lizbie ignored the interruption and pointed to the girl in the scuttle. “I dare you to... put your hand as close to the fire as it’ll make a scorch-mark on it.”
The girl, without demur, as if Dares possessed a form of religious sanctity, clambered from the scuttle and made her way to the fire, using knees as feet, her small run-up of a frock riding upon white thighs. Tentatively, she edged her clenched fist as near to the glowing coals as thought possible
“Cowardy, cowardy, cornflower custard,” chanted Lizbie.
The fist edged even nearer.
The older twins had by now entangled their father in the machinations of their Cat’s Cradle game, like a fly in a web. He did not seem to care: a very pliable father.
As there reeked cooked flesh, Mother returned with the trayful of Royal Tea. Crumpets done to a turn, so thickly buttered, they swam on the plate. Dainty triangular canapes, each with an anchovy perched for swallowing. A silver teapot dressed in its cozy finery. A tier of various cakes, each one so full of itself, it dripped its innards upon the one beneath. And finally, a tandoori hand, on a bed of pilau rice, each finger smoking like a cigar...
During the wend of night, there were only stone eyes. The man’s ghost In the shape of stale smoke spoke silently about the agony of its erstwhile body’s searing lungs. And the parlour rasped its chimney-throat clear of last century’s Santa Claus - who had once dared to stay there forever.
The parlour’s silence (if a place could be silent as opposed to the things in it) was broken only by the coal embers speaking in crumbling and hissing. A flame’s lick had the last word, before darkness wedded itself to the parlour’s silence and became a ghost of something that hadn’t even lived.
Only two hours earlier, the place had been full of family life. The children had squabbled over the best position by the fire, the high-collared woman remonstrating with a boy who was the worst offender - that the heat did reach the couch if only he would try it. Not believing even his mother, the little scamp pushed his sobbing twin sister into the empty coal scuttle and hunched himself closer to the fire. The older twins were rather scathing of the younger ones and squatted on both sides of their father’s wing armchair… he, who, in turn, drew long wreaths of a cigar into his lungs and puffed them out again, as if there were nobody else in the parlour - unread book resting on his knee, eyes glazed...
Lizbie sat in the opposite armchair, shivering a little. As she was the middle child, she was accustomed to being left out of most games by the four others. After their mother had left the room, Lizbie decided to entice the others into a game of Dares. She really wanted to play Blind Man’s Bluff, but It was not yet Christmassy enough for that. In any event, the last time they had such a rumpus, blindness became too close to fact for comfort and Mother sent them all to bed early without a candle, as a punishment for not using a blindfold nor even eyelids.
Charades was a possibility, or even Postman’s Knock or Sardines, since make-believe was that family’s forte and they never had real toys, you see, or even Christmas presents. Yet life was far too real for miming and everything seemed to end in unspeakable forfeits.
“I dare you to play Dares,” piped up Lizbie, taking a sudden advantage of a lull. The younger twins were staring icily at each other in the Eyeball game (where the ultimate forfeit was said to be an exploding head if you were the first one to blink), whilst the older ones played Cat’s Cradle with Mother’s wool across their Scroogish father’s lap; the fire had settled to the point of optimum heat. Father’s eyes were now closed, the cigar smoke uncoiling in fairy words above his shiny pate. The other children, by their lack of response, indicated passive acquiescence to the game of Dares. The parlour drew quiet.
“OK, I’ll start off...” said Lizbie.
“Why you? The first one to roll a six should go first.”
Lizbie ignored the interruption and pointed to the girl in the scuttle. “I dare you to... put your hand as close to the fire as it’ll make a scorch-mark on it.”
The girl, without demur, as if Dares possessed a form of religious sanctity, clambered from the scuttle and made her way to the fire, using knees as feet, her small run-up of a frock riding upon white thighs. Tentatively, she edged her clenched fist as near to the glowing coals as thought possible
“Cowardy, cowardy, cornflower custard,” chanted Lizbie.
The fist edged even nearer.
The older twins had by now entangled their father in the machinations of their Cat’s Cradle game, like a fly in a web. He did not seem to care: a very pliable father.
As there reeked cooked flesh, Mother returned with the trayful of Royal Tea. Crumpets done to a turn, so thickly buttered, they swam on the plate. Dainty triangular canapes, each with an anchovy perched for swallowing. A silver teapot dressed in its cozy finery. A tier of various cakes, each one so full of itself, it dripped its innards upon the one beneath. And finally, a tandoori hand, on a bed of pilau rice, each finger smoking like a cigar...
During the wend of night, there were only stone eyes. The man’s ghost In the shape of stale smoke spoke silently about the agony of its erstwhile body’s searing lungs. And the parlour rasped its chimney-throat clear of last century’s Santa Claus - who had once dared to stay there forever.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The Hoop (5)
Written today and first published here
She was a Victorian lady turned by the designer museum into a model of the 21st century, with anachronistic props such as swish half-moon eye-shades that she sported on her nose and an over-large plastic hoop that she tried – in an ungainly pose – to spin around her bustle-skirted middle.
“Stand there!” shouted the queue-guide, as he paraded a small party of adults in jeans and T-shirts past the Victorian lady’s clumsy attempts to be both herself and a model of a modernity that she did not yet understand – hence these mis-choreographed cavortings labelled: “Welcome the missing back”.
The self-conscious audience stood ‘there’ as instructed and looked up at the epitome of an art ‘happening’ or ‘installation’: the biggest selling-point of which was that the lady was a real Victorian, still wearing the clothes she was wearing when snatched by a latter-day Time Machine and planted here today. Her spoken English was so quaint that it needed translation. With no evidence to the contrary, nobody had before realised that people must have used phonetics differently then.
Suddenly, unseen by the queue-guide and the rest of the audience-party, a little girl (just woken from bed judging by her appearance) passed along the edge of the gallery slowly bowling a hoop – a hoop smaller than the Victorian lady’s and made of wood.
The Victorian lady alone spotted this small plaintive figure and shouted with enormous passion a few sounds that could be configured into: “Petite Madeleine!”
And with an unlikely Proustian grasp of the Portuguese language shaped into an alien tongue, memories flooded back all skewed and warped. A Time Machine was evidently not a very efficient method to heal injustice or pardon guilt or secure innocence or order the correct course of events. Time Machines were the cause of their own non-existence. Once you had sufficient scientific know-how to create one, you simply knew that you would never believe that one could be created at all because disbelief in Time Machines would be suddenly inbred rather than learnt. Self-evidently.
The small girl was no longer to be seen.
The gallery was quickly emptied by the queue-guide, leaving the Victorian lady 'installation' alone with dislodged shades revealing a real blood-smeared teardrop streaking the white of one eye from within the eyeball rather than from outside it. The saddest sight of all. Tears that didn’t need tear-ducts to become tears.
The over-large plastic hoop later fell to the empty floor and rolled towards where the small girl had seemed to have stood by the wall, but toppled over with an echoey clatter before reaching.
She was a Victorian lady turned by the designer museum into a model of the 21st century, with anachronistic props such as swish half-moon eye-shades that she sported on her nose and an over-large plastic hoop that she tried – in an ungainly pose – to spin around her bustle-skirted middle.
“Stand there!” shouted the queue-guide, as he paraded a small party of adults in jeans and T-shirts past the Victorian lady’s clumsy attempts to be both herself and a model of a modernity that she did not yet understand – hence these mis-choreographed cavortings labelled: “Welcome the missing back”.
The self-conscious audience stood ‘there’ as instructed and looked up at the epitome of an art ‘happening’ or ‘installation’: the biggest selling-point of which was that the lady was a real Victorian, still wearing the clothes she was wearing when snatched by a latter-day Time Machine and planted here today. Her spoken English was so quaint that it needed translation. With no evidence to the contrary, nobody had before realised that people must have used phonetics differently then.
Suddenly, unseen by the queue-guide and the rest of the audience-party, a little girl (just woken from bed judging by her appearance) passed along the edge of the gallery slowly bowling a hoop – a hoop smaller than the Victorian lady’s and made of wood.
The Victorian lady alone spotted this small plaintive figure and shouted with enormous passion a few sounds that could be configured into: “Petite Madeleine!”
And with an unlikely Proustian grasp of the Portuguese language shaped into an alien tongue, memories flooded back all skewed and warped. A Time Machine was evidently not a very efficient method to heal injustice or pardon guilt or secure innocence or order the correct course of events. Time Machines were the cause of their own non-existence. Once you had sufficient scientific know-how to create one, you simply knew that you would never believe that one could be created at all because disbelief in Time Machines would be suddenly inbred rather than learnt. Self-evidently.
The small girl was no longer to be seen.
The gallery was quickly emptied by the queue-guide, leaving the Victorian lady 'installation' alone with dislodged shades revealing a real blood-smeared teardrop streaking the white of one eye from within the eyeball rather than from outside it. The saddest sight of all. Tears that didn’t need tear-ducts to become tears.
The over-large plastic hoop later fell to the empty floor and rolled towards where the small girl had seemed to have stood by the wall, but toppled over with an echoey clatter before reaching.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
By The Bootstraps
(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.
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.
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....
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)