POST-GESTALT DFL FICTIONS (part 5)

 THE BRASSO GHOST

Thanks to yesterday’s interesting young lady inviting me and four others into her well-seasoned engine room complex, a hub of engineering contained within the depths of the moored ‘My Friend’ ship, yes, thanks to her, a ghost story was prompted in me today. I’ve long been an admirer of Warhol, although most people laugh at me, but when I saw seemingly endless rows of Brasso canisters lined up in the engine room, one of which was upside down, I knew I had been right all along about my artistic tastes, if not my penchant for blank stories that were often encouraged by listening to John Cage music as a quelling of the chitter chatter around me! Even ghosts need their social interaction and the letting off of steam by mere exchanged gossip or, more emotionally, heartfelt explanations about their individual lives. And, looking around me, the green pistons and items of other heavy-duty leverage, too, seemed to mutter things to each other silently. The story told to us by the young lady involved an engine-room man whose obsession was such Brasso elbow grease, until some joker turned a single canister of it upside down amidst a neat row of them  and the assiduous man literally died of a broken symmetry from the breakdown of the rules that his OCD dictated…. unless I got the story wrong. Whatever the case, the brass plaque to his memory in the engine room remains highly polished day in and day out without anyone now polishing it! And that’s where I assumed a ghost must be at play, and if not the Brasso man’s ghost it was the ghost of sound that emanated as seeming music from the huge red funnels on the ship’s decks as aided and abetted by the old Dansette record players and Bakelite wirelesses and tireless reel-to-reels that peppered the place from the top deck’s wheel house to the very engine room where I forged future memories for my own ghost story today. A steerage in frissons with spooks as well as spanners in the pipelines. A  ghost that wandered the ether with sapphire styluses and  tapes that jingle-jangled to the clatter of ancient tambourine men.  It was there, in the ether, I eventually met the Brasso man face to face, and he smiled at my reference to pop art for the pirate pop ship that is our planet. And I smiled back at my new-found friend. I told him, as part of our emotional small-talk, that I had — unnoticed by the young lady and my four companions — turned the upside down canister the right way up.

***

THE ORLOP DECK

Humphrey Loader knew exactly what was meant by the orlop deck when he was ‘allowed’ to stow away on the Sixpenny Queen. The sailors he had been bevying with in a peninsula inn smuggled him aboard and then they pointed to the said deck as the site for his bivvy bag. He would not be comfortable, he was certain, but the thrum of the cables around him would keep him company at least. The destination of the ship would surely make his restless nights worthwhile. A destination that has no business in this narration. But the thing they forgot to tell Humphrey was the deck’s ghost, an overloop of rope still in the far corner being the means whereby it had ended its human days and become a darkly luminous spirit. Even if Humphrey had known about it, he would have shrugged his shoulders and simply hummed along with the thrumming cables and tried to sleep via such queer lullabies of the swaying deep.  

The ship had set sail a day ago, after he had been semi-introduced to the captain whose blind eye to such matters was obvious by the look on the latter’s face. Humphrey was glad that he was an acceptable cargo, if an illicit one. Humphrey heard the last cargo’s loading and lading before the engine room below him made any thrumming imperceptible within such machinery vibrations. He had assumed, by first impressions, that it was a sailing ship, but now realised that the first part of the journey at least was aided by an engine. The noises of pistons had at last faded into silence and the only interruption was the more staccato creaking of the rigging, sufficiently aloud to penetrate as far as the orlop.

He somehow began to feel he had stowed away as a Visitor from Porlock to abridge any narration of the Sixpenny Queen’s voyage across unmapped oceans towards a destination unknown to anyone who only read about the voyage here. That would have been a far more durable story than anything that can be told about Humphrey Loader whose fable seemed to become fatally foreshortened — on the second night aboard — by a sudden glance towards a certain shadow of a rope. An overlapping shadow that was cast by an equally unknown light glowing lambently within the otherwise dark deck’s dire drumming of suspense.

***

THE FRANGIPANE ESCAPADE

Adam’s angina was often painful and, therefore, the body doctor had supplied him with a newly invented pump that ‘simply’ needed to be attached to an inlet valve from his left elbow to help the symptoms. It looked like an old-fashioned  toothbrush that was used by Adam’s ancestors before means were found for them to floss and scale without the involvement of a hygienist. Why the elbow, one might have asked, without an isthmus already existing between arm and chest.  The pump was supposed to be greased at both ends with specially sugared almond cream before a careful dual insertion and was allowed to act as an artificial filter that bypassed the shoulder joint by such a bridge below it. A filter that worked in both directions of flow, accompanied by a grinding noise that was more associated with a dentist than any other health professional.  Why almond cream, one might have asked. But Adam assumed it was the well-known effect of almonds to lower blood sugar levels, to relieve blood pressure, and to bring cholesterol levels down. It was just that the blood pressure needed to be raised in some places and lowered in others, he guessed, as he listened to the sounds that severely set his teeth on edge. “A frangible plate D closes the end of barrel A, but blows out above a certain pressure to avoid bursting strain in the pump.” The instructions were unclear to him, and this is only one example sentence lifted from the leaflet typical of so many leaflets left inside medical treatment packaging that most patients were too impatient to read. Two-way filters always need a ‘frangible plate’ as a breakable baffle within it. Adam smiled. The pain had vanished. The whole procedure and its complications were sufficiently brain-numbing to disguise any terminal pains. A form of palliative care by confectionery easements. A pity about the figurative ague caused by a lifetime of tooth decay that endures as a form of pain to the very end.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Almond Blossom ‘as a fragile beauty’:

***

THE APPALACHIAN SUITE

Lee, a floating voter, is appalled by most of what happens these days. The craggy ridge that divides us, the seemingly endless ricochet of serial incidents that beggar belief. Who can possibly cross that ridge with unequivocal welcoming of each other, Lee wonders. Such wondering occurred to Lee while equipping the outer self with climbing gear galore. Once a wanderer of plateaux, now a wonderer at these so-called heights, Lee surveys the apparently neat graph-like rhythms of the range that, when closer up, would become an irregular ruggedness instead. How would Lee cope with such a land of misbegotten angles on the outer level and the hidden crevices on the inner? When appalled, people tend to believe they are indeed appalled. Lee was no different. Rage would literally take him across the rugged range. If there’d been less rage, Lee would have more likely failed at the first outcrop of impending cliff edge without even a sea to see. But such rage belied Lee’s encroaching age as well as an ability to cross the range that spread further in an arc before the aged eyes themselves. Floaters just bedevilled the perception, giving imagination full scope for dystopias to ferment. Pogroms at every corner disguised what was really going on beneath, as Lee even toppled into a pitfall between the peaks that were increasingly veiled by coils of mist and mystique. 

Floaters were eventually able to exist without the need of human eyesight to see them. Time progressed and musical suites of calmative coping became serially endemic but without anyone around to hear them. The mindless state of being appalled was no more. Only the visionary craft in the sky remained; they resembled the mountainous motes that once ghosted through aged eyes. Instead of revival, Lee’s body was only exhumed. But by whom?

***

THE DOG PATH

Following uphill dog paths, parting hazels, crossing thickets upright, they reached the ridge of the woods. From here, they could see out. The sun, striking down the slope of trees, glittered over the film of green-white buds: a gummy smell was drawn out in the warm afternoon haze.” — The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen)

“….she squeezed along the dog-paths with her heart in her mouth and a cold and horrible feeling she was going to find a dead cat. […] It was full of secret dog-paths threading between enormous tussocks of bramble, underneath the brambles there were hollow places like caves; there were hawthorns one could climb for a survey and, about the middle, a clump of elders gave out a stuffy sweetish smell.” — The Jungle (Elizabeth Bowen)

Doglegs are sharp bends in paths or in roads or tracks or even in rivers. Just like those tight corners in the Queensway zigzag slopes near where I live in Holland on Sea. A concertina by Stravinsky, I often thought. Played today on a French accordion.

When considering doglegs, I wonder whether dog-paths are today’s unsurprising accompaniment to El…Bowen’s endemic elbows? Elbows sit below my head-resting hands, each elbow being a tight bend in itself, or are both representatives of the tightening bands around my chest?

Intentions started this off as telling a story, but thanks to Nicolas Ashley, it’s become a new searchlight upon the fiction of Elizabeth Bowen, with which I have been preoccupied for much of my life, as many of my readers will attest. Yet this is a story I am determined to tell, becoming eventually as fictional as fiction itself. A story  with a happy ending when, after exploring the mazy jungle of dog-paths, I stagger into the weathered mansion where an aproned lady called Jane is preparing a silver-tiered carrier of cream cakes. The comforting tea is already infusing in the samovar with a sweetish aroma like confectionery that already seems to heal, by osmosis, any nettle stings I have gathered along the dog-paths.. And I am later sitting in the corner like an artificial invention of an intelligence that exists outside us all. Holding my chest as if suffering a severe attack of frangipane. I remember the particular overgrown dog path that, earlier today, led, as ever, to my named and now dying Yieldingtree with its twin doglegs, near the sea… Remembering my grandma, too, Alice Maude Whitear in Wonderland, born, just as Elizabeth Bowen was, in 1899. Resembling her, too.

I look up from my day-dreaming to see if Jane’s being mother vis à vis the tea pouring. And to see which bit was fiction, and which was real.

“Or, was the elder masking a secret gateway, outlet of a precipitous brambled dog-path to the river? […] Maud made her sedate way up to the house by the track used by the water-cart; not for her were dog-paths down one of which Jane had made her ecstatic descent. Instinct had not lied: tea was on the table.” — A World of Love (Elizabeth Bowen)

My gestalt reviews of all stories and novel chapters of Elizabeth Bowen : https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/

DFL POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (Part 4)

 THE PERIWINKLE WATERFLOWER

It usually grew near — or even in — waterfalls. Mainly near, because it didn’t endure long enough to be seen when actually budding in such downward rushes. Why am I so concerned to impart this information? I told Sally why, but she’s too shy to tell others in case they engage her in conversation. Maybe it was her size that made her self-conscious. Or the flecks affecting her skin. So I thought I’d better write at least some of this down before my knowledge of matters would be lost.  Periwinkle is a colour between blue and purple as well as an item of nature study in itself. Bless its heart. Brings out a smile when I think of it, especially as a colour that Sally often wears as the colour of speckled designs in her frocks. She often called it lavender, not periwinkle. But I insisted on my terminology. And she gurned in assent, and she now calls it periwinkle. Here, though, in the main, I use the word as an adjective of colour, not as a noun representing a non-invasive plant common to our lands, waterfalls or not.

Sally, a wallflower? Well, true, I first encountered her sitting at the side of a dance floor watching the various couples sweeping by her in ostentatious waltzing motions. Her best frock, evidently, but nobody noticed.  Except me. And I engaged her in conversation, because I had been too long idling in the shadows or sidelines, nursing a half drunk half a bitter in a dimpled glass. I sat one seat away in a whole row of otherwise empty seats, and set in motion my only chat-up line. Sorry, that sounds a bit of a crude expression, as I only wanted to bring a smile to her face, with no other intentions present in my mind. Ice-breaker is better than chat-up line. I might rewrite all this. But it is important to get it straight first-off, my frame of mind changing by the moment. All needs to be conveyed as part of what I initially called the Periwinkle Waterflower. Nothing can shift that, as I somehow believe myself to be the only one that survived the ice age that followed the planetary exodus ironically caused by constant invasive heatwaves. At least it is known that human life survived. Or at least whoever wrote this survived.

I look down as if into a mirror of lavender-tinged water and see, below it, seeming sheets of frozen freckles end to end, very twinkly with dimples and woken stars eager to become suns. And I smile at my own perverse misnomers simply written down to mislead you towards a denial that words and any who read them will inevitably vanish. And, like a newly launched galleon, I watch her sally forth, in blue, upon the universal dance floor of an even bluer sky. Large enough to allow mere mortals to see. Bless her heart.

***

SHALLOW WATERS RUN DEEP

Not sure Sarah’s friend Huck Finn got this common saying right, but it was good enough for Sarah. It made a sort of oblique sense, not as clear-cut as the ‘still waters’ version, but with a pervasive wisdom that reached truths otherwise unfathomed. Huck was much like that himself, with open signs of simplicity and a down-to-earth nature; he was old enough to not only suffer this nickname on everyone’s lips when meeting him but also to take credit for digging deeper than most other souls were able to manage. To the third level if not the fourth. It was as if his awkward turns of phrase were part of a birthright as an ‘oracle’ who had earned such a word to describe him through many years of a life walking the common ground so  close to it as to be, yes, ‘down to earth’.  Not only oracle, but also uncle to Sarah, thus avuncular enough to be a trusted friend, too. ‘Mon oncle,’ she quipped in honour of  the Jacques Tati film with that title, and they both laughed at memories of going to the cinema in France to see this film not long after it was first made, a fact that also gave a clue as to Sarah’s actual age which somewhat belied her young looks. And this prose description of them grows deeper on the page if not its inner meaning which remained as shallow as it seemed, with no real point other than to help the words flow  towards a premature or inconclusive ending, extending higher and higher above and lower and lower below the mark or point of where a few may have stopped after reaching it. Until the narration reached the seemingly lowest level, if the seabed can be thus called as a base so grounded that it seemed an unquestionable ending. Huck could be vaguely discerned to be moon-walking holding the hand of his adopted niece. Both smiling that someone had been kind enough to create them and make them live. Until the limit of lines, as levels or marks, reached the point where they had been left above while things rambled on quite a long way below even that, after everything should have finished beyond the very final plimsoll mark of what can only be called a second seabed. Rambled and meandered amidst the lower depths whereto even Jules Verne never sent his Captain Nemo. But the place certainly existed then, where the sea creatures grew wilder, more colourful and were quite unknown to science and impervious to logic. At a third level where only those privileged enough could even imagine existing. Verne was French, too, like Tati. Unlike Twain. One wonders whether Verne used binoculars. It remains certain, though, the two authors were almost exact contemporaries. Tati was ever away on a time-share holiday, so he probably didn’t count. All three of them wore a monocle. Some of this is still true.

“Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.” – The Tempest

***

WHIFFLING THROUGH THE BROAD LEAVES

Oh, M.R. James had it right, but that does not prevent our wandering into the byways of the boy who was given a shilling instead of a sixpence and the creature created from linen sheets that rose on the bed next to the bed where we slept. And what happened to us afterwards? If you have not read the source work, please don’t count yourself one of us! You can sidle off with just a sixpence. And count yourself lucky. No more loud creating by the likes of you. Even sounding out as a form  of creating-like-hell  should not be sharp and sibilant with plosives, but softened with fricatives, to allow gentler spirits to follow us from the otherwise deserted beach that was grey and striated with groynes. When does a shriek grow blunted enough to become an understated groan?

The book had broad leaves, one of those large-size omnibuses of ghost stories, yet this one was strangely without any illustration. So why such small print upon its coffee table proportions? My head was often ‘lost in the clouds’ or ‘slow on the uptake’ that members of my family told me to ‘wake up and smell the coffee.’ This book taught me that those who ‘whiffle through the broad leaves’ are very much akin to such an uptake of the slow wit, with any knowingness in its wake. I have spent most of my life thus ‘whiffling through the broad leaves’. Whiffling like the sound of bicycle wheels on hardened sand. And I guess we all are whiffling like this to some extent. Pleased with half a crown, because  that is better than no crown at all.

The ghostly bed linen yawned, and held out a hemmed edge scrunched up like  a hand open-palmed for a gratuity. Any coin would suffice for it to bite through. Milled along its circular edge or not. A book’s pages are initially just another form of white sheets. Oh, M.R. James, in person, points at me for several sullen hours and then puts this finger into his stifling white collar. A collar not circling the neck but broadened into a dangling bow on his chest. Ah, the wide margins so empty deadly blank they are. Oh, the sounds of pages riffling are so soft, silence imitates them if only with bravado. Which of us will become sharper in uptake to haunt him? Nobody answers except the sea. And I remember I spent most of my early years with a print of Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ on the wall above my bed.

***

A BECKONING FROM THE FOREFATHERS

The King of All Points of the Compass relaxed back into his seat after receiving the expected phone call, and knew he had been given yet another temporary reprieve with regard to his health and longevity. This one, in itself, was good news, but soon enough there would be another phone call he would need to await with anxious expectation, and so it continued into the always unknown number of futures that criss-crossed beyond anyone’s scrutiny. Even his own. 

The ‘all points’ in his title ironically encompassed only a finite number of event-symptoms in whatever future it was that chose to become pre-eminent. A human being was a small mite compared to this vast complex clock-tower as a metaphorical symbol, much of which required renovation. He smiled at the irony. Inanity was always preferable to insanity, if not irony.

He needed, after gathering his thoughts, to rise from his seat and inform the Squeaky Queen about the phone call but she was in another part of the turreted  mansion. He had to avoid the part where the roof had collapsed overnight, a fact making him negotiate the already busy kitchen area.  Many chefs and cook apprentices acknowledged his passage between the hobs and ovens by bowing, then towing themselves back to the tasks of plucking and gutting. 

He threaded through an attic area he never knew existed until today.  He sensed he was on the right track, however, as he heard the bony meeting of joints that, these days, were more like creaks than squeaks. Still, he and the Queen had come through all manner of heavens and hells, and again he smiled at the irony of life. And that included the vista of the sky that even penetrated as far as the cellar to which part of the mansion he had been diverted by ever-changing circumstances. Attics and cellars seemed often on the move, changing their identities at a whim.

The Squeaky Queen was eventually reached at the point where all directions multisected. Where all clock-hands, too, merged as one in a vast fountain of bricks. Cook-hands, too. Then, the couple knelt in obeisance to the invisible forefathers who beckoned forth the couples’s bi-directional prayers so that where these prayers precisely crossed each other in the ether a new future was sectioned. Thus, inanities were hospitalised if not, ironically, the roofs.

***

GUSSETS FOR GHOSTS

Charmed by the gossamer of dream, Kate fumbled to the  side for the discarded nylons, tucked between the under-sheet and the mattress. Who cared about the ladders? Why worry about the denier or size? They were magical ones that eased her from waking into sleep then back again, via dream. They were nylons for the arms, not the legs, after all. A new fashion style that had replaced high-fashion gloves in the ranks of society. Still, these stockings were just as vulnerable, it seemed, as the more common ones for the legs. Perhaps, even more so. Arms were involved in all manner of tasks that legs were never privy to. Certain jobs that rich folk needed to do for themselves, and cooking as well as shaking hands with others. Not to mention the unmentionables that were otherwise more appropriate during discussion held privately for hidden areas of the human shape. They all had their own form of bespoke coverage by ulterior versions of gloves and stockings, some intricately fitting interstices that even Kate obviated. 

She rose from the bed at last, with the morning already pushing hard into the afternoon. Time to open a new packet of arm slicks, so lightweight she hardly expected them to have transposed from dream into reality without growing coarser. Once opening the packet, she needed to acknowledge the time deadline of pulling them onto her arms.  A few seconds too late and they would clog upon the elbows and sit awry in scrawny wrinkles…

Kate heard a loud ‘tut! tut!’ as she awoke sufficiently to have her own volition. But this was the noise of the sheathes tearing; it was not her new-found voice complaining at her own clumsiness. Soon there may be next to nothing at all between where her arms joined the body.

“She bowed her head, acceptingly, then folded her arms, consoling the elbows.” — Elizabeth Bowen

DFL POST-GESTALT FICTIONS - part 3

 THE MACARONI PEOPLE

The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’  — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.

Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had  a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!) 

Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets.  Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!

***

THE LITHOGRAPH

It was difficult for Don to judge whether it configured a single face or two human figures standing up in a boat ready to dive into the sea. Whatever the case, by evidence of its feel to Don’s fingers, he sensed it was a lithograph not a print. More suitable for a vibrant ghost story than an exercise in surface pareidolia.  The meaning of the ‘p’ word just used by Don  — opaque to many — was a portal to an inner depth below the surface, indeed a visualisation towards shapes of new meaning.

He shook his head. Whom was he talking to or writing for when expressing the above words? He placed in his mind’s eye a face of a stranger, a plain but strangely attractive female face, and the rest of his thoughts were addressed to that person whoever she was. Already, he somehow knew her and he believed that she knew him. Was she connected to the face he had first visualised in the near-abstract lithograph or maybe the two figures in the boat were connected to this woman in some story plot he had yet to be told by another person or by himself. The next question for Don was to wonder why he was referring to himself in the third person singular.

“Don, what’s the matter?”

The voice had not objectively come out of the blue. Equally, Don had completely forgotten that he was unalone in the cellar room, where candlelight struggled with the draughts from what he remembered as the coal bunker’s door to the outside. Thus he was duly startled by the sudden non-arrival of a ‘visitor from Porlock’. Non-arrival because the visitor had been present all along.  

Don felt the surface of the lithograph again, as if giving himself time to dwell on what his answer should be. This action served to give his hand something to do instead of staring blankly into the other’s eyes. A reason for delay, to explain his stony silence, while seeking his answer amidst the aged undulations of the lithograph’s design and its ink’s mineral contents. Some of the random scratches of wear and tear seemed part of the design that he had tried to fathom by a combination of an independent pareidolia and  the whimsy of a ghost story he had simultaneously told himself. Scored lines on dark draughty walls, he somehow thought. Light that was managed by means other than candles.

“Nothing is the matter, my dear.” 

Although it was his answer, he realised it wasn’t his own voice. Nor were the voice’s words ones he even understood. The voice and the  words were more ancient than that, even neolithic. And the watery wavery light fell into a strangely strange darkness.

***

ANYTHING GOES, ANYTHING BUT

It was called Deep River, but it was anything but.
With a nightwatchman’s house little more than a hut,
A township where simply anything went,
And that meant its days of Truth and Consent.
And today much goes, simply everything goes,
And jolly townsfolk strode in espadrilles and finest hose.
But a rogue element set alight the night hutch house
And turned this jolly verse into unscanned and unrhymed prose.

You see, inland Deep River had a dry dock as its central point, to which no deep river led. Indeed, no river at all. This made no sense without a strong element of truth and consent. The fact that a huge ocean liner sat between the huge plinths of the dock’s work area, swarming with working hands, and proving that mind over matter actually served its purpose while the economies of scale in Deep River gave much to do for the mischief makers to be scorched free of their mischief and who might have otherwise torched the night hutch first. Busy hands keep contented minds, many claimed, keeping such hands themselves from being nasty hands. Yet, at least one rogue always existed in every community and this particular rogue thought that the nightwatchman had scored with his wife in the eponymous house that now lay in ashes near the dry dock. Not many ashes as it was still ever the remains of a hut or night hutch, not a night house at all. Just a few wispy flakes of ash beneath the towering dock. Never to be noticed unless someone remembered what such ashes once were. Since then, everything went. Even consensus became a mistaken rabbit hole into which truth vanished forever. Sill waters never run deep, never run even shallow. Metaphors mere empty hoses to hose down hulls or wheelhouses. At best, footwear as casually buckled flats not deep-shod shoes at all. 

Deep River was anything but what it wasn’t most.
The Night House the mere shimmer of a watery ghost.
And vast shapes come and go nightly from the dockside struts,
No-one woken to see them coming and going like tiny buts.

***

HOLD YOUR HORSES

Not that Boss Jenner knew anything about horses. He had never been near a horse, let alone groomed or ridden one. Yet, his favourite expression when facing someone who appeared to be acting impulsively was ‘hold your horses’ and then go on to explain why such metaphorical horses should thus be held. 

Imagine a situation, therefore, where Boss Jenner encountered a horse in real life completely beyond the context of what had transpired before such an encounter. Out of the blue, quite unpremeditated, he lurched  forward with his head, or his nose did if not the rest of his head. More a leaning motion than the presumed lurching, in hindsight. He could not believe his eyes as he caught sidewise his own reflection in what he later found out to be a Horse Mirror that was once common in certain areas of time when grooming. The nose was slowly stretching like a piece of abstract art worthy of preserving, had that been possible in those days. There was then no easy way of making permanent records of what one was constantly seeing moment by moment, as there was today. A series of static or stable images for posterity, either to incriminate felons or to award heroes. Even to make fine art from finding captures of the momentary and potentially momentous, a valued few of which clinchings or clickings could possibly be called monumental. Boss Jenner was ever to be part of such a framed cluster of splintered realities. One clinching in particular was being head to head with a horse, to the nature of which horse he had yet not been able to acclimatise himself. In racecourse parlance about close finishes, indeed, against the odds, a long head short of a nose.  

The stabilised pen is still poised enough to write more, had this not fallen short of a never-ending horror story, instead of a fleeting ghost story as it now teeters upon becoming. Even a novel given, in hindsight, the now arbitrary but apparently careful choice of the protagonist’s name of Boss Jenner, a name  that might have been intended for a novel stretched over time from start to finish. Fiction horseplay, it could be called. At optimum, a form of horse-trading between the art genres of literature and modern painting, but hopefully better than both, should time be allowed to quell  any wanton impulses by whoever wrote this.

***

WATCH FROM THE START

The invitation seemed more tempting than ‘Watch Live’.  Best to get at least a glimpse of the whole context in order to enjoy the middle and end. Hannah remembered the old days when cinemas regularly had continuous performances and one could enter and leave at whatever stage of the various screenplay storylines had been reached. It did not seem to matter, and, if Hannah agreed with my own views on this matter, one’s enjoyment and comprehension was not affected, in fact the middle-to-middle of some films was preferable to a beginning-to-end. Perhaps they once made films differently, fully expecting alternative timeloops in the audiences watching them.

In later years, with the arrival of VHS, I witnessed Hannah experimenting with the altering of the tapes so that she could watch old cinema  films backwards. Whether that soon became easier with DVDs was a moot point because, by then, she had ceased finding backwards viewing a novelty to cherish, but the act of reflecting the circling sun upon a coloured surface of unintended colours was an audacious eccentricity to wave in the face of prescribed tradition, and Hannah indulged such a sense of new things happening every day  to the extent of deliberately choosing to avoid internet streaming ab initio so she could end her life with something even newer. She created me. Complete with my own real memories of the past.

***

VIRGINIA CREEPER

Always wash your hands when preparing stuff for the kitchen oven; you don’t know what might have crept upon them. I sensed the Virginia Creeper was parthenogenetic and I had no duty to explain what I meant. I just knew it seemed to come from nowhere because it was not officially native to where I lived. And that it commonly climbed old buildings and some tall trees with its customary glow of redness in its leaves. I put out of my mind that it was poisonously inimical if one was careless with handling it and didn’t wash one’s hands thoroughly. No holds barred, my meanings are well hidden. No condescending to those who may read this tract purely in order to read the dubious existence of ghosts into every space between its printed lines. Even the sound of its words carried messages beyond their semantics.  If it is too hot in the kitchen, nobody is preventing you from leaving. The oven needs to be hot so as to do its job. And indeed the creeper is climbing in profusion across the mansion walls towards the roof like a veritable conflagration. The finale of a horror film or an arson committed for insurance purposes? No it was all part and parcel of Mimi’s attempts to explain the nature of the ghosts that creep along with the creeper. Subtle ways of imparting them into tenuousness from nowhere, like virgin births or accidental prompts for artificial intelligence, without, at the same time, having to be explicit. To be plain about them would make the ghosts vanish, and she wished to encourage them, even to the extent of using these attenuations as a means towards the ends of helping her with existential angsts about other impending terrors that were far worse than ghosts. Ghosts at least had some ‘promise’ embedded in their existence, a proof of an after-life if you need me to be plain and simple. Mimi on the other hand felt no such qualms, dressed in her red hat and purple clothes that she used for socialising with like-minded people. Redness always climbs to the top, she thought, except if it’s one’s birthday; she smiled at the thought. She hired me to translate into plainness her endeavours in subtlety so that she could get her point across, and, so, I masqueraded, hidden in even plainer sight, as it were, dressed like a Morris dancer, my head decked in red leaves with wooden batons to beat upon other dancers’ wooden batons as we made arcane patterns upon the lawns and struck rhythmic noises in even closer vicinity with Mimi’s mansion’s vision of a burnt-out shell. I hope you get out of the kitchen in time. Forget the hands.

Five new DFL fiction pieces (2)

 RUNWAY

Del Shannon inserted the A into the title before he sang his song and, once sung, sung again. And as Phoebe remembered the grooves of the disc flattening onto the revolving mat having fallen from the height of the autochanger’s elbow, she already hummed the organ’s solo interlude. Phoebe herself was the ultimate runaway, she felt, as she watched a simulation of an aircraft on the screen, a futuristic vehicle about to leave its own earthen grooves for the open skies. She threw herself open to the projection of self into a cockpit specially designed for those pilots who had not been taught how to control the dashboard properly. To be responsible for those souls aboard was a thought too far, as she shrunk back into her head, but any means of dispersal or, as they said in other places, diaspora, justified the ends. A dying planet was a dying planet, no getting away from it, she thought.

As the runway eventually formed its own vanishing-point perspective, she visualised rail tracks on either side, between which the river of airflows slowly became thermals and eventually buoyancy. But the rail tracks were real even if she wasn’t. There was a drag she couldn’t account for, and she remembered the crowds that had crammed into the seats in the hull behind her. Small boats were as nothing to this now spluttering beast she needed to tame. Time to withdraw from the simulation, before she found herself trapped. Shrieks behind her echoing  the constant “Why… why-why-why-why-why” of the engines.

Phoebe examined the autochange arm closely and imagined it as a close-up photograph of something artistically unrecognisable. Its bent elbow was now blurred like an unsightly floater in the eye, becoming a configuration much like an A. And the music was the all screaming, all shrieking organ solo and no singing.

***

WHEN THE DOGS HAVE GONE

The flower shop was not called a florist for some reason. The meat shop was euphemistically just that, although men in aprons with axes worked brutally in the back room. The medicine shop had large wholly decorative bottles of coloured liquid in its front window. The clothes shop boasted still-life mannequins galore. The seaside town of Tantton seemed neither in the past nor in the future. And its learning place ever thrived with fresh little ones to stock its desks. And other people arrived from outside called day trippers who still fell over themselves to come and see Tanntton’s sights. A shame most of them, though, arrived accompanied by awful barking shapes on temporary leads. 

The Tantton man called Arthur, who ran a food collection place he playfully called Chish and Fips, was ever busy with newspaper packages that seeped sour drips of salty brine. He even had special smaller portions for any visiting pets. But these were bigger than those packages offered for the little people more loosely towed in the wake of any longer strides. It was the way that Arthur spoke the words ‘the little people’ with a heavy Celtic lilt that made the holiday portals seem wider. He knew what he meant, and so, by sheer instinct, did many of his visiting customers. Those small fry called by that lilting expression, though, were often treated second class to the pets themselves, especially the now leaderless pets that kept on barking and dodging in and out of the Tantton residents’ feet! Residents who considered it likely that, in the various inland towns whence the trippers came, such ‘little people’ were few and far between, thus leaving  many of the desks quite bare. Inkwells empty, too.

Arthur relaxed as dusk settled and the trippers with their yappers had already boarded charabancs out of Tantton. He whistled as he locked up the door of Chish and Fips. He walked the silent streets.  He heard the distant cracking of bones in the meat shop even when those who worked there should have by now gone home, too. Such cracking often went on well past midnight. The flower shop was still open however, staffed by the apothecary who was moonlighting. Arthur decided to drop in and buy a posy for his dear patient wife. And a bottle of something or other that he claimed  was medicinal.

***

PICKLED FENNEL

I once heard this was a recipe from the French Revolution, but I could never confirm the authenticity of the reference. Such a crunchy thing seemed like anathema to me, anyway. A theme to be obviated by any means possible for fear of what it may lead either by real ascertainable connections or the capricious means of word association. 

Whichever way it was, the thoughts such algorithms evoked soon became a situation more fearful than a frayed ceiling confronting the lady who slept under it — fearing the ceiling’s flawed whiteness might be an actual ghost that she knew at heart could never exist. The click of knitting needles or what sounded to be a click of knitting needles from the opposite side of the otherwise empty bedroom did not help her trying to fall asleep. She was the sort of person who often stayed awake — not to count any sheep whence the knitting wool derived — but to count anxieties and, yes, fears.

There were commonly two kinds of knitting wool — morling and shorling wool, harvested respectively from dead sheep and live sheep. Respectfully done in either instance, she hoped. Half awake, half asleep, her thoughts became affected by both states in overlap, as she returned to the opening theme of pickled fennel. In her mind’s eye, meanwhile, she wound any wool-gathering into a tight ball of it from wide spools of wool, as she once did at the knees of her grandmother, a great knitter as well as a seamstress with a Singer machine. A woman now too old to be alive, having been born in 1899, long after the French Revolution, true, but before algorithms were invented for knitting patterns to be available on line in advance of reaching the needles. Jab jab jab went a smaller needle to the sound of feet on an ancient rusted treadle. The ash growing longer and longer on the cigarette in her mouth, as the old woman fed the material through with her fingers.

But that made no sense of the opening theme. Any coda needed a more difficult unravelling of the movements in the room around her so as to arrive back at the start. Some said ‘ravel’ and ‘unravel’ had the same meaning, but she had never understood that. Her mouth was now untidily crunchy with a strange spicy substance not unlike old chew-baccy. The Queen of Hearts smiled.

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would.” – Alice in Wonderland

***

THE RETURN OF THE ROVERS

Corrie turned to her bestie and smiled. They were both needlewomen from the top drawer of hand-sewing. Skilful in the patches of make-do-and-mend for kids, more artistic embroidery and optimal vents in men’s tailored suits. But best of all they loved combining general knitting with their own psychological propensity towards cross-stitch. Quilting was still a no-no, though. But never say quit! Indeed, never say never, which makes a mockery of the first never!

The second lady stared across the room at Corrie and wondered why she never called her by her name. Maybe she feared getting the name of presidents mixed up. An in-joke that would soon grow stale. She could not possibly countenance the fact that a bestie like Corrie didn’t actually know her name. They had gone to school together, after all. But the mind in advancing age can play many tricks. Like the difference between stray cottonthreads and teased-out straggles and frayed edges and hung rovings. Those fiddly endings that often make a finished work so utterly un-neat. She often picked through remnants just to get them ready for Corrie and herself to make-do-and-mend  as well as to optimise into finer handiwork. She pulled at the tantalising tassels and tortuous tags. Her teeth bit and tugged at resistant ravels and those everpresent rovings. The latter seemed to spread as soon as look at them, moving like ladders did in nylon stockings, except here such ladders left their rungs behind like impediments in otherwise smooth skeins. Rovings become intrepid rovers.

As the clock struck suppertime, Corrie replaced her needles in the drawer marked seven. Her bestie’s needles lived at number nine. Next door neighbours, after all these years of so-so relations with each other as besties often have. But most of the time, by many a trick or treat, they got on. Their husbands, dressed in cast-offs,  waited for them at home. They had sat anxiously in threadbare armchairs for many years dreading the respective ghosts of their erstwhile widows to turn up their trousers again. The return of the rovers as ravelled in frayed sheets.

***

THE MACARONI PEOPLE

The Macaroni People did exist in fashionable eighteenth century history, but enough of them! You can look them up. This single mention is more than enough. I want to talk about the Macaroni People today or, as some call them, the Macaroni Madness, even the Macaroni Miracle, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Elbow Pasta’  — look this up, too! — is a form of Macaroni. Yet, when, in these days, politicians tend to be straight up and down, or soft in the middle, either divisive or all-embracing, it’s important to get terminology right. Covered in cheese. Or with sugar and raisins, as a more wiggly form of the rice pud one was given in the old school canteen. Macmillan was prime minister then. And he said we never had it so good. Well, I begged to differ. Now I begin to agree.

Only last night I was visited by figures on wobbly stilts and they sported what I can only call macaroons as heads. In the days of the Lyon’s Corner House, such cakes were part of the choice on silver tiered cakestands that stood among the teapot and teacups, when listening to the Max Jaffa ensemble in the corner of the room, a corner with a small c. A house made of corners, and cream cornets as companions for the macaroons. The architecture outside had  a frontage of leering mascarons (look the latter up on Wikipedia!) 

Indeed, Lyons without lions, just rows of gurning masks. And the Macaroni Medley played on mandolins for the teatime customers to swoon at. The clink of cup and saucer just one ingredient to accompany the arrival on stage of living mannequins upon taller, sturdier stilts, more like uncooked spaghetti than al dente manicotti. The scrape of chalk on some hidden blackboard made me think of the school canteen again, and the miniature dumplings that were often as hard as bullets.  Treacle tart was only just around the corner. Daydreaming with a small d is never the same as being back in the Good Old Days for real. Towards the end of my life, I often soar with my eyes into the sky to see the true epiphany of Macaroni Madness as the shapes of people wavering like shadows with loose olecranons, miraculously as high as the clouds are. Look up at them!