The babies crying did not upset Mike but he was slightly perturbed that some had handcuffs on.
They had been left in rusty prams which looked as if they hadn't been pushed anywhere for centuries. The wheels were splayed, the springs choked with corrosion and the harnesses spitting bullet-hard pellets from the hanging rattles with every gust of the wind. There must have been at least a hundred prams, turned in all cock-eyed directions, the inhabitants wailing fit for a thousand prams. Mike knew it was a baby's lot in life to cry, but this was taking things too far.
****
The view through the cockpit window – as the vast Circular-Saw penetrated the cavity-walls of Inner Earth – was not so much a panorama of the reality beyond the window but of a moment of strobe-history that the pilot who peered through the window was undergoing as he instinctively tussled with the controls.
His dream of strobe-history showed twin Earths that were on a collision course – through the wide vista of his vision. Instead of creating a huge explosion, they blended or merged in the same way that, once upon a time, the legendary man-city, having begun to bury itself beyond its own foundations, eventually encountered another city with initial splintering ricochets of architecture and hard core but then blended with it – thus making two places the same place but different.
The pilot of the Saw quickly regathered his present moment uncorrupted by any dream of strobe-history just in time to address the situation of a Drill making towards him aggressively from the left of North Monday.
****
Mike turned to Susan who had fallen asleep next to him in the bed – before the dream of prams had started. "Let's get out of this one and quick," he mouthed so that she could lip-read, since he knew she was deaf in dreams, if not in real life. In many ways, she looked prettier than when she was awake. He wondered if she misunderstood, since her answer was a smile and a tug on his hand towards one of the prams. She was evidently feeling broody. And the baby she eventually chose possessed a head that was as wrinkled as an old man's with one huge ear. Its wrists were far too thin for it to keep the handcuffs on. But Mike knew fresh-born babies were often ugly and deformed, only later to grow into normal human beings.
Suddenly, Mike felt himself within the boiled beetroot skull of the baby – looking up at two strangers who were mooning down at him and cooing silently. The woman offered him her bare breast to suckle – and he dozed into a dream within a dream, or a dream's dream where a prevailing truth and reality seemed to return...
Mike as an old man recalled the boy he used to be, clambering over the corrugated roofs, in search of what was known in the games as "Angevin trove". Most of the other boys who chased giant butterflies and shy bumblebees with him along the topmost garden walls had all since died. However, now an old man, he did live with someone most of the time, a dowager lady called Edith: a tea-drinking, untalkative individual, in wide skirts. But as much as the old man prattled on about the residue of his past life, Edith merely nodded and sipped and stared. The stares were as blank as the turned down TV – where images flickered and pursued each other across the screen, from the past to the future, via the never never of the present.
The old man used to scale the roofs of the ancient home town, questing for wild Angevin (a myth generated by boy talk) and also seeking a maiden called Sudra who had spoken to him in his dreams, saying she lived behind the huge chimneystack – from whichever way you approached it. The other boys would humour Mike and say that they had actually seen her themselves, with feathers growing down her back and untamed legs like shaped cream-butter – the face with a complexion born of flames. She was for Mike to discover, one endless summer's day towards the end of his boyhood. He would have to surprise her, as she played hide and seek around the stack.
Creeping along the roof, legs astride the ridge-peak, he held out his Box Brownie camera like a gift. He developed it at night, but all he could see on the print was a blur like a bird-winged slug with soot smuts for eyes. Now an old man, he smiled as he stared at ‘Big Brother’ on the TV, his eyes smarting and clouded with expended time. The screen always bore the same blur, inching bigger with the days, but he really loved the endless protagonisms in which the mysterious Sudra featured. Each sip of his tea had no more volume than a teardrop. His companion would soon have nobody to whom to listen, as he was about to go up on the roof, by first standing precariously in his wheelchair – which was looking more and more like a baby's pram of giant proportions...
There were not a hundred prams. Perhaps there were not two hundred. Whatever the count, Mike knew he was in one of them and he began to search each one methodically. Susan was not so painstaking, sitting on a nearby bank of wasteground and knitting jingle-jangly bootees. Eventually, he found a pram with a baby so small, its whole body was on the pillow. It squeaked like a tiny bird. He leaned against the pushbar, but the rust was hard and fast along the axle and the pram sounded like an old man choking upon quickly hardening phlegm. Mike looked at his own hands – covered in brown stains, freshly off the encrusted pushbar. He winced, as chemicals stung a small sore.
"Come here!" he waved to Susan. And she waved back...
The new dream was a tapestry, woven and woven about with other dreams, none of which promised an end of the senseless seamless pattern. He dreamed of ‘little nervous people’ who spent their lives looking for their own identities and alter-nemos.
He also dreamed of wondering why he was cursed with a giant's body, possessing a mind as powerful as the muscles it controlled. He lived in a derelict cavé, beyond some dunes and didn't want to meet anybody. And, despite the accusations, he did not wield sorcery by choice, nor siren-swords by any dint of blood thirst. He was merely a self and nothing could take that away.
His first memory was of seeking his mother's body, which had crawled away from its produce rather than die in sight of the one she had just borne. He failed – as he still failed.
There were thick-skinned bird-selves said to live over the hills. He had read, among the books that he had found about him, of many creatures, monstrous and delightful alike, including such as himself. But those that angered him more than any other were ones with egos far too big for their bodies, nauseating little irks whose skins would sooner burst like over-ripe plums than try to keep their minds within bounds.
At last, his own temper cracked. He unscabbarded his broadest siren-sword. He scavenged for sorcerous spells in dusty corners of his home, finding a clutch of them, clucking, rooted in the night soil under his clapped-out truckle bed. He donned the skins of beasts of prey that had come to his clearing in the forest to die of old age and, with a final glance at the place that had been his home for a lifetime, he strode off towards what the books called Sea.
The dunes changed colours with the days. His heart changed too. And he dropped the siren-sword in an unmarked spot, for fear that he might eventually use it. He kept spells about him in every pocket, since he began to fear for his own safety rather than for that of those he threatened. At long last, he emerged from the forests and knew he would never return to his home, for the journey had taken the rest of his life.
The roar of Sea, the tang of fucus, the scream of diseased gull – he knelt, head resting on the sand in pain and, strangely, relief. After many hours, he looked up and, in the yellow twilight which lay across the cream-topped waves like a sumptuous carpet, he saw the distant rigging of schooners on angevin-trove trails. From his pockets he took the embodied spells he'd toted. Their skins were, by now, thickening, faces growing to a point, bird-elfin voices becoming squeaky and cruel. Suddenly more fearful, he crawled towards the sea where he could tell the smelly fish about the rest of his life...
The wasteland where the countless prams had been abandoned, Mike could see sloped down to a pitiful sea. Scrawny waves plopped in and out – where some of the babies that had escaped were now playing. One near toddler was spanking a sandcastle into shape, whilst another in horrendous diapers was spiking it with flags made from cotton buds. A third, far too old to be called a baby, was rolling about with a life-sized dolly. Mike took Susan’s hand, and pointed towards these examples of parental creation, as if to say, there but for the grace of Megazanthus...
In another dream, one that, although he had dreamed it several times before, took on a reality that belied its credentials as a dream, Mike was a collector of trapped metal piece puzzles – not so much to solve them but to admire their gleaming workmanship and intricacy.
He enjoyed the delightful rattly chunkiness when shaking a puzzle's box-container and relished its sensuous twining of cold steel limbs. Some puzzles were easy, merely slipping off each other as soon as look at them. Others were of middling difficulty: a minimum of choice manipulations brought the various bars, flanges, stanchions, roundels, spokes, rings and hinges into optimum interface, whereupon they readily fell apart almost upon a sheen of oil, like spent lovers. However, those few of an Angel's perversity remained ever-enlocked in eternal embraces of misalignment, as if they were acrimonious ex-lovers who could not disentangle their various body parts for love or money.
There was one puzzle in particular which took pride of place in his collection, one that had defeated all Mike’s friends. He could almost watch himself as a different person when, one day, determination lay in the set of his mouth, teeth grinding with the jaw motion of stunted cattle, eyeballs pierced with pinpricks of light as he ruminatively turned over the reluctant trinket with a knitting-needle under the desk lamp. He suddenly saw a way through. Now bringing his fingers themselves into play, he lovingly eased one pinion into an unusually acute relationship with a ragged tab of metal-flashing which he'd suspected was never intended to be there. This manoeuvre served cleanly to sheer off the unwanted growth; a file could never have been contorted into such a crevice. Therefore, it was fortunate that this near-accidental quirk of prestidigitation had slickly taken it off with the run of the grain.
But with other possibilities dawning, his mind zoomed through too many labyrinths of rivet tolerance, rogue alloys and median scapement. And with concentration gradually deserting him, he threw the recalcitrant piece across the room like a space tool or sound torch – a random act that inadvertently caused four iron curds to be abruptly released from their conundrum of interdependence. They separated with a silver severing sigh of consummation, but at the same time dubbing him a cheat.
One curd was a sparkling bird-spider on splayed legs. Another was the key to the unknown convoluted trip-tumblers of a lock. The third was an Angel crucifix with the blurred outline of a girl's body bulging from its spokes. The fourth was a simple circle, a wedding lock, an eternity ring, or whatever.
At the time, he could only think in roundabouts. He could not plumb the feeling of despair that came over him as he stared at the falsely solved puzzle...
Which of the babies would grow into Mike? The brat, with the huge dolly, spat a wad of filth at Mike from its back gums. That was surely not Mike. Such a creature couldn't solve puzzles even if it were given the answers first. Susan had disappeared, wheeling off one of the prams with a groaning squeal. She'd evidently chosen a baby, without his help. Surrogates were not even part of the game, nor was the icy spermevin now trickling down his cheek in tearful humiliation. This was not a dream, but a life seen in retrospect, sideways rather than from either end of the telescope of birth and death. But then Mike had been a businessman...
There were moments in life when all the bother of actually maintaining a vestige of existence in this dubious world seemed almost worthwhile. That day in mid-December seemed like one of those moments. He had been hand-picked by his boss's boss (whom he'd never met) to travel inwards to visit a potential client of the firm. It was little more than a delivery job, but he did have to say a few vital words when handing over the free sample: "I hope you like the design of this, Mr X, but it is modelled on the version once said to be used by the Grand Old Duke of Y and his men – they're bound to go down like hot cakes." He had not been given the full names for the sake of privacy.
He had the perfectest journey inwards. He woke refreshed, before the heavy-duty alarm clock had a chance to fulfil its customary ambition of glorified fire-drill. The shaving cream was latherier than ever before upon the beaver hair brush, and his overnight stubble slid off nicely as if it were not joined to his face at all. For winter, the weather was ideal for driving, clear but mild, the roads running smoothly under the bright-eyed cars. Breakfast at a motorway hawling station was piping hot: even the bacon rind and over-stiffened fried bread went down a real treat.
He arrived at his destination not long after the sun had perked up. Of course, as was his wont, he was years early for the meeting and decided to have a walk through the pocket cavity town. He had gone straight there without getting lost even once. There was more to him than met the eye. He always said so. The one-eyed Sunnemo stared at him out of the corner of the sky, from just behind the block tower of a semi-sightly church. The shafts of the early morning light played upon the jagged chimney pots which seemed to abound here on the terraced houses.
As he reached the river, he heard the sound of a weir: punctuated by the church bell suddenly deciding it was high time to mark the hour. It was a wide weir, too, with side branches more rapid in their roar than the middle. He had bought a newspaper at the service station. Not too much of interest to read in it, except the stale account of yesterday's train disaster. Safer to go by hawling-motorway, he had mused earlier. Well, this paper came in handy to lay upon the damp bench which was positioned nicely for a view of the spectacular weir.
A dowager lady passed, pushing a pram, with some difficulty across the crude ground. She did not say good morning. Nor did the baby, for that matter: he laughed at his private joke. He shrugged: the place was perhaps unfriendlier than he had surmised. Coming from the surface, he imagined those inward to have small talk on a hair trigger. Well, not that lady and the baby, anyway.
It became chillier as Sunnemo ducked behind some volcanic clouds and he automatically started counting interminably – as if the surface sun were hiding and he was seeking. A helicopter-drill banked overhead. He wondered if the pilot said good morning as it passed. He should never know. He resented the pilot possibly finding the sun before he did. Soon, it would be time to make his visit.
The artefact was still in the boot of his car. He'd left the car in a free car park, since it deserved a rest after the two hundred mile journey. The tyres could not rest, of course, being what they were: the chassis was even heavier when it was not moving along, in any event. He wondered if he should have brought the free sample with him to the weir, in the event of the boot being rifled. His life would not be worth living if he botched this delivery. What was that message he was supposed to say to the client? He should have written it down. His mind had slipped out of gear for a moment. He was terribly confused.
For a moment, he believed that the weir was flowing back across its hump, the way the water had come. Looking at the ribbed water, it was easy to imagine that. It was only common sense that told him that could not be possible. He stayed where he was as he watched an impostor walk backwards from the bench toward the road, folding the damp-stained newspaper as carefully as if it were the linen tablecloth his grandmother used to fetch from her bottom drawer on special occasions. The car would reverse back down the endless hawling-motorways, only to be blue-pulsed by the police on to the hard shoulder of the surface. He wished he'd written down the message. Only half an hour before, he had remembered it perfectly. It looked as if the crucial delivery was to become a terrible abortion...
As the sun dipped into the sea, spreading itself like gory paint along the horizon, the prams became large beetles on their backs, unable to right themselves, their feeble feelers flickering wildly. In the distance, a helicopter banked, its clacking vanes ill-timed and it nearly hit the tops of some nearby trees. Without any reason, Mike now knew this wasteland by the sea was the crèche used by those single parents who worked for the Angel Megazanthus during the current world recession. All human sorrows were nurtured within Inner Earth like black jewels, even to the extent of cabling subliminal TV programmes to all our waking homes. The workers would soon be returning from Inner Earth to collect their infants – after having had a hard day down the hawling-shafts, wringing with huge mangles the blood-gutted nappies fresh from bird-demons' backsides, stirring the great tureens of shining white pus, stoking the fires into enormous weirs of irreversible torture...
And as the working mothers lugubriously waded from the spent seas to retrieve their young from the rust-corroded prams, Mike scuttled into a long chimney of sleep – but, with the mysterious Sudra now having removed her many-layered skirts, he eventually spotted a tiny prick of light at the other end of dream's telescope, through which it would be possible to climb if only he could crack the angel-devilish lock-puzzles of the tiny hand-cuffs he wore himself.
****
"It'll come with the music," thought Amy, her hands hovering above the piano-keys, as if she were to shake some fingers like drying clothes in the wind. Yet she settled at last to negotiate the onset of noise – whilst for moments of mindless panic she confused the notes she was due to wring from silence.
The rehearsal had somehow overlapped into the performance proper ... much in same way as when old memories became more immediate than those about to be newly strained from the impulse of now.
She could indeed empathise fully with the child she had once been: that girl in the tiny frock, a frock which Uncle Mike had bought for her – he who might have been the man who was currently beaming up at her from the concert audience, given the right age.
As Amy's first public performance approached, that erstwhile child, with barely a sign she was female except for the tiny frock she wore, is who she is. Who she was. Now the semi-fledged woman with fingers outstretched, poised for the greatest, if not most memorable, moment of her life...
The keys rang out like cathedral bells, rather than piano notes. A twisted Quasimodo of a carillon that woke Oblomov as well as an ancient Klaxon City to an ancient war. A little girl squats in a puddle of dry mud – watching distant church pinnacles and pylons conspire.
This will be history. This is when.
Her parents are worried she is already an orphan. The war foreshadows black stains across the stone flags of Paternoster Square, stuck with blood glue, bonefish bonding. Lengthening bread queues snaking across the old newsreels like celluloid poison. The air raids extending their range from dark into day; the girl's brother Arthur still sending letters dated months ago.
"You can stay outside – but directly you hear the sirens, you know where to go..." warns her parents.
Tiny Amy nods. And she idly squats in the city square. Most of her friends have grown out of mindlessness. Or grown into it. Whichever the case, Amy was different. Her doll sits beside her, already a quarter limbless. The doll's called Sudra, but never replies. Perhaps the doll's name isn't Sudra at all.
"Amy!"
A man calls to her from across the empty square. She knows it's her Uncle Mike, so she pointedly ignores his summon.
The older Amy remembered even as a child she had strange urges for something her body couldn't comprehend. Unblotted from her adult mind, the urges' echoes were knelled forth by the music she now played, amid the ondes martenot and the modern percussion. They became mistuned tarnishes, mistimed harmonics of image. The hall's ancient acoustics ranged from tickling nostril hairs to vibrating the eyeballs, via a stomach's thunder chamber. The sounds of the piano concerto were intended to convey a war machine. Avant garde. Ultra-modern. Jaggedly loud. Yet Amy's ears were the last organs to be penetrated by the furore, that hubbub which was created around her solo audit trail of the piano. Created by the orchestra's accompaniment. And the sirens. Whistles. Drumrolls of doom. The wurlitzer's bellows.
In the old days – before Amy was even a child, even before the alternate strobe-wars – keyboards and silent flicks were pitmates ... cueing and mis-queuing and pursuing the monochrome marionettes, those dumbsters squashed to the vertical square ghost like flat people dying to act out their insectoid fictions – painfully unsticking as they waded through films of aspic.
The war waif is no doubt prone to some regressive echoes of the future – performing a would-be woman's self – when she is tempted to leave the ancient Paternoster Square in Klaxon along with that Uncle Mike with the sneaky snakey fingers ... perhaps knowing instinctively that, one day, she will need to have been early-primed to carry forward a performing artist's soul: thus to spice up the biography or get the tongues wagging or make her sensitive to the abuse of existence or ease her ability to convey human passions or masquerade as a pinch-fingered lustling with two raw-puckered mouths. Whatever the case, upon that day of war, the Square's siren failed to work...
The man in the audience, the one who looked like her Uncle Mike, smiled as the piano concerto reached its violent climax. Yet when the soloist raised empty eyes to accept her due ovation, he felt her gazing directly upon him. Why him? Who was he? Why did he feel a stranger to himself? Nevertheless, he brought his palms together with loud painful smacks. Feather-spiked hands slapping together didn't sound that odd, however, amid the seamless applause. Tomorrow the concert hall, which doubled as a cinema, was to show a Greta Garbo silent. Full of the motion of white-patched shadows: including a face and body and name that had been peeled from a different square of ghosts.
Amy’s tiny girl hands – those prayer-held amputees of a siren's failure – are suddenly unable to fend off the rebirth of future's solid memory.
"It's come with the music," thought Amy as she was wheeled backstage by the conductor. She drooled a spittly wad of angevin-cream, having found deep within her something she'd never really lost. The only music that a performer with stumps could play properly was that requiring bold raucous dabbing at random multiples of keys, an Avant Garde piece being a gift sent by an Angel for crippled souls or for those with blurred thinking, dull hearing, blank looks, corrupted tongues and dumb sex.
****
They would have been together twenty odd years.
Beth's husband Greg maintained that couples like them grew alike, physically as well as mentally. They debated the subject like a pair of screeching puppets. But, eventually, in the long drawn-out nights, when neither could sleep, Beth accepted his point: that the rising of the same words, the same mutually confessed thoughts masquerading as the most odd coincidences between them, were merely ingredients in the inevitably bland stew of existence. That said, she manufactured squabbles for seasoning such a stew. She refused to believe that their faces and bodies were also, bit by bit, coming together in full-blown skin to skin, socket to socket contact like grafted plants; this she could not countenance, let alone the remote possibility that they could be taken as siblings: husband and wife twins. Her mind's inevitable crumbling away, however, fetched flinching spasms to parts of the very carcass wherein Beth lived and which she had tried to defend against all marauders, summoning the appalling visions of a single tiny peppercorn lost in the coldly insipid slime of Inner Earth.
In a quiet corner of Parismony, to which she fled in a fruitless attempt to escape herself, Beth felt the street lights were dimmer now than they were when she was a house-bound child. Hunters of the small hours, with no more than the dark slots of Sunnemo-summer to tour the up-market estates of the city's outcrops, the shadow-shaped dossers hoped against hope for imperfections in the suburban mansions where Beth used to live between trains: a catflap or pigeon hole or rabbit hutch ... but returned with worthless swag. Beth couldn't make ends meet, if the cull was just a darts trophy or a clapped out video machine that nobody even bothered to clean out come morning or a toaster with a plug that didn't fit the sockets in the city pavements or an astrologer's almanac that contained the wrong positions of the planets for the Inner City or a gold-framed wedding photograph showing the drunken faces of two rival families beaming on either side of a bride and groom.
She shrugged. It was about time she had a go – no point in dossing round here much longer, beneath the Parismony building lights that flickered on and off. One day, she thought, the families would leave this forest of towers, their queer belongings like growths on their backs, for the relative safety of the hawling-tube station platforms: like a reenactment of an era of joy and privation that a war had once brought.
Beth and her adopted kind lived off the scum slowly sliding along the gutters of the street or off the more sluggish birds having inadvertently spiked themselves on park railings: and, when the towers were abandoned, the older dossers would be able to uproot their feet and bottoms from between the gently hissing office heat-vents and enter, en masse, the tall buildings that even now were busy disguising their brick and mortar as mocking scrawled abstractions of art.
As she thought over the various repercussions of evolution without selection, Beth wandered into the outer suburbs where trees still grew, nourished crap and root; but they did not conceal, even from her blurred eyes, the detachments ranged like armoured troops with wide bedroom eyes. Their front doors were raised like drawbridges and, sure, she felt, their owners were literally trapped inside, like costly characters in a Moat City of soap opera that still had an eternity and a half to unhatch its multiple Chinese-box dreams.
She later told the story to the creeping, mumbling shadows on her return from the outer parts. Her education had been nurtured by a lore more articulate, if shallower, than that that of the streets, so she found the words:-
"There was an ancient air-raid shelter in one garden, with a secret cubby, a nun's-hole, where bird-bones still stuck out of the ground like spring saplings. I followed the smuggler's route, at first, but no whiff of seaweed nor tang of salt surf, only the sound of TV channels, filtering along these underground inlets, like babblings of water along pipes to the boxes they fed – a twittering aviary in my head. I made entry shortly and stared as them through a tightly hatched square grill. In real colour they were – evidently a married couple, with hands joined. They stared glassily at me, and I was amazed to see that their two hearts pumped as one, outside their chests, in unison with the love-making which went on behind their backs, in a stretched sausage sort of way. They soon grew bored with me making ludicrous faces through the hatch, which I had done to scare them off to other parts of the house – to allow my itchy fingers to scuttle like bird-spiders among their keepsakes. But they got up, as one, and without even a glance of communication between them, prodded one finger downwards in the most obscene gesture imaginable and pressed something just below the hatch. And all went blank..."
Her story tailed off, since she could not exactly recall her come-uppance, though she vaguely remembered meeting various other people along the hawling-tunnel systems, including those two-dimensional cut-outs masquerading as ‘Big Brother’ guests.
She had returned to her confrères, with jagged shards of glass sticking out of the top of her head, like a prison wall. All she had for her trouble was a flask of Angevin deodorant in one hand and a sauce bottle in the other ... both of which dissolved into wafted motes of thin air when she reached reality amid the towers.
Her husband Greg was there, listening to her story. Having tracked down her down to this innermost pit of Parismony’s soul, he kissed her. They had grown closer by means of separation and, later that night, he lovingly prized out the feather-spikes from her scalp, before they became embedded deeper towards the brain. And then they prepared themselves for an eternal rest in a vertical punch-and-judy coffin. Or another continuation of their train journey with two concocted children. The slots of darkness were thankfully lengthening.
****
My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity. It needed guile to shake off Beth and the children – but, one day in Parismony, I had a rare success in subterfuge. We were about to traipse around a toy museum and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amusements in the ‘Klaxon City’ amusement arcade that needed coins in the slots.
I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too). But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a Sunnemo-less alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books. And I was not mistaken. However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, jingle-jangly shoes, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops – but here they were for sale rather than show. If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.
The books themselves were a dream. First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse. Others, of course, not. Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children's dreams and adults' fancies.
I was surprised to discover an old stamp album: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one large colourful trapezium of a stamp from Agraska), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges. I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride. This boy would have eschewed even birdsong or playtime in the sunshine for such a close-ordered activity.
My surprise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps. Some of the stamps looked "rare", but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics. The stamps used to come "on approval". But there were some examples of stamps in this album that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.
I covetted that album more than anything I could recall covetting before. I held a whole childhood between my fingers. But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the surface world. So, that was where Saar was. And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena. Nobody ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps. I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it – one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print. But this was a day full of surprises – since a girl of surpassing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white…
I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum. Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition. Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom. What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party. I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away. And it had not been a particular pleasure, I assured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals and the many ‘nervous little people’ who followed us around in Parismony. But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the ‘Klaxon City’ arcade. The old wizened fellow who sat behind the towers of copper quarter p coins in the change booth actually winked at me. He looked decidedly unhinged.
As I tried my luck on the fortune-wheel, which was supposed to give some inkling into one's future love life and luck, I suddenly wondered why stamp collections always used to be conducted by short-arse boys who did not have many friends with whom to go scrumping apples or building dens. I could not possibly imagine those unattainable angelic girls of my lonely childhood abandoning their china dolls and dressing-up hampers for such close-ordered activities as mounting stamps.
The fortune-wheel did not record any romance in store for me. In fact, the bad luck it indicated seemed to start with me somehow losing the stamp album soon afterwards. Like the beautiful ghost who sold it to me, it must have slipped through my fingers.
****
I rush to admit that I was often branded trampish and over-scholarly. I had even been declined entry to many a posh club in Inner London because of my disshevelled appearance. However, I was, on average, happy and, in the main, financially self-sufficient.
John Ogdon, a life-long friend, was much richer than I. No doubt, he would have been even more trampish than myself, if he had been left to his own devices. He was naturally and all-embracingly intellectual, but a rich Aunt Clare had cared for his physical and monetary needs. One may read what one likes into that, but I must stress that Ogdon was a gentleman’s gentlemen, full of the most fitting good humour, kindness and wit. Some may call it unfortunate that his intellectual pursuits could only be described as pertaining to the weird and marvellous. Under various pseu¬donyms, he had supplemented Aunt Clare’s income with money stemming from visionary stories.
He lived in one of those up market Inner London suburbs south of the Thames where relative peace can be found amidst the turmoil and cosmo¬politanism of life in the Eighties. Since his Aunt’s sudden death (a death which must have affected him badly, but how badly I was about to discover), I knew he would be financially secure in view of the large legacy that she must have left him. As I travelled on the tube towards his stop, I speculated on the weekend before me.
I knocked on the door of the detached house, set back from the quiet avenue and encroached upon by a dense garden of unkempt ferns and weeds. From within I heard the pad of Ogdon’s customary slippers plodding along the parquet hall. His gait was a shuffling, shambling hop, skip and jump and, before I could appreciate the well known sounds, he opened the door...
I had not prepared myself sufficiently for the damage that his Aunt’s death had wrought on his features. His normal pallor was redoubled – a chalky visage now creased with the added years of grief. This mask attempted to grin a welcome but could only manage a sick grimace as a stiff arm raised itself to my shoulder to give it a reassuring tug. As he led me down the hall, his typical shamble was that of some half-mutilated prehistoric creature – an image that was lent some credence by the ill-kept hair straggling in greasy knots down his back ... and the grey flannel trousers mottled by stains.
I made my usual greeting and then embarked upon a speech that I regret¬ted making as soon as I had in fact made it. I berated him for his pitiful state, accused him of disgusting decay and threatened leaving at once.
“Why, man, you can actually see the bones of your skull and cheeks! Have you not eaten?”
I followed as he padded into his book-lined office. This was so familiar to me from many a previous visit, that my affection returned and recalled the occasions on which we had sat together in that very room and partook of literary discussions and recitals. I remembered a much younger Ogdon, fresh from some domestic skirmish with his Aunt Clare, standing before me and reading aloud, with avid and proud intensity, from a new attempt of fantasy story-telling. The guttering lamp would flicker along the spines of the bookcase and across the juvenile lines of his face. As he came to the customary horrific climax of his little piece, he would glance up at me childishly expecting to see awe and praise in my eyes and I would smile knowingly. He had created a world from Inner Earth – and all his stories were in a sort of shared universe, but with whom he shared it was a mystery. He even included himself in some of the stories as an owner of a London pub. A job further from his capabilities it was difficult to imagine!
As these memories hit me at the threshold of the study, I suddenly real¬ised that I had not yet mentioned to him the death of his Aunt. Of course, I had written to him and commiserated in the most conventional of ways but, naturally, he would expect some odd sympathy or two face to face.
“I heard the tragic news… with such sorrow, John. Please don’t think me hard-hearted if I...”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got over it now. It takes time but I have accepted the fact and can only try to forget”.
I knew that Ogdon had had many disputes with his late Aunt but, as in all love-hate relationships, his affection for her had been deep. I took his last statement to mean that he had accepted my condolences but, forthwith, the subject was closed… so I immediately took him on to literary matters and suchlike. I tried to ignore his shaggy demeanour and also the seeming intangibility of his mood… and turned the convers¬ation to the latest Science Fiction and Fantasy he had read (or written).
From that time, we spent countless hours with him reading aloud to me, only broken by my humorous asides, the quickly gobbled meals and the snatched naps that replaced normal lengths of sleep.
One night, however, Ogdon, still unwashed and as untidy as I had first seen him, suddenly became serious. How he could have previously restrained such comments as he now made, God only knows! All I could see was that he must have been awaiting some fulcrum of events, some flashpoint of atmos¬phere, to settle on my ears the most interesting thesis. Evidently, the moment had to be right and therefore, triggered by timely coincidence, he put down the book from which he had been reading and said:
“Excuse me, John, I have been thinking. I have been thinking quite a lot since ... my Aunt’s death...”
The last words seemed to be blurted out despite the obvious grief he was undergoing. I did not interrupt but kept my unflinching eyes on his mouth.
“You know, you have sat with me on many an occasion listening to horror stories, to my futile attempts at fantasising ... This is all very well. It is all very wall ... but, be honest, it’s crude escapism! Books are just the televisions of the intellectual, little better, little worse. But – think about it, just imagine, what if our fantasizing were true? What if every little fantastic scene we were to conjure up would appear realistically before us – and we were subject to and endangered by the forces therein? Impossible, you say?”
“Nothing is impossible until proved to be”, I said in an attempt to humour him.
“And, if all this were true, how so much more worthwhile would our discussions and play-acting become. One only needs the strength of mind, the strength to dream and, perhaps, if the strength was actually greater than the strength that God or whatever force stabilizes the so-called reality around us ...” He waved a demonstrative hand around the book-lined study as if this were the “so-called reality” of one who may be God or, at least, the god who populated his fictional works under the name Megazanthus. “.... if we could but pitch our mental strength against the forces of nature, call it what you will, we could ... say, create a door from that bookcase!”
He pointed feverishly at a bookcase filled with his favourite fantasy books, viz, the mythos of H. P. Lovecraft, the multi-faceted landscapes of Clark Ashton Smith, the garlanded vistas of Jack Vance, the ghost-trodden corridors of Algernon Blackwood.
“How apt! If that bookcase, if that particular field of semantic force were to become an opening to some vast world of horror and undreamable spectacle – how apt!”
“How can this ‘strength’ of which you speak be conjured up?”
“Simplicity itself”. He looked askance at me as he ran his fingers through knots of hair. “Just imagine – the culmination of two minds such as ours. Also, we cannot afford to fail. We shall swear to kill ourselves if we fail – and, consequently, we shall muster the strength to dream!”
Our first attempt ... was a ghastly experience. Not that we failed wholly
For several days after our first discussion about creating an opening or gateway from Ogdon’s bookcase, we sat and planned how such a phenom¬enon could be formulated. Primarily, we had to consider the conflux of time involved – at what point in the duration of our “seance” and for how long were we to concentrate our wills on the potential opening; how many strands of atmosphere and flashpoints of happenstance would be required to coincide before our gateway to horror and outworld spectacle would open before us; and how hard would we have to bind our trances and mutual fantasising (too hard and we may be swallowed up forever in unchanging, unconscious nightscapes; not hard enough and we would only see thin miasmas of horror hooding the very room around us)?
Then ... Ogdon and I sat staring at the bookcase for several minutes, allowing ourselves to be engulfed by the mental vibrations that we were both trying to create. I cannot even hint at what was going on in our minds nor can I list the various rituals of gathering moods that we had previously engendered. Those elements were too vague, too transient and easily forgotten. All I can do is just state, as blandly as possible, the results of our first foray.
It is difficult to depict Ogdon’s expression for I was staring unwaver¬ingly ahead at the bookcase. However, if his nerves and tendons were taut as mine, if his eyes were round, rolling and fully exposed from the rippling cheekbones as mine, and, if his hands were fisted in pain above his vibrating knees as mine, then he must have been a tragic trance-jerked puppet.
Firstly, the bookcase swam before my eyes – the spines of the books rippled and bubbled to some obscure rhythm ... but, instead of the moving vista of watery reality becoming even more tenuous, even more diaphonous, and, finally, instead of turning into an opening or gateway ... the book¬case rippled back into hard reality. I turned to Ogdon with a feeling of disappointment greying my face and he turned to me likewise.
Then… I sniffed the air. What a shocking stench! I could only liken it to the putrid offal of some dark, forgotten canal in Venice or Ogdon’s own fictional Inner Earth cities where ghostly corpse-barges moon through the unending nights of bird decay.
I turned again to the bookcase – and it seemed to shift in sharp jolts away from the wall. Straightaway, Ogdon and I rose and stepped towards the fidgetting bookcase. Together almost, we peered at the space between the now toppling case and the wall against which it had previously rested – and we saw a sight which sickened us beyond reason.
The emotional overtones are certainly indescribable. Between the book¬case and the wall was squashed the twitching carcass of some tentacular beast; its flesh was deeply pored, inflamed and haired, its lists were mottled with melded fat and stained with great warts and wriggling cancers. It was like the half-cooked remains of old poultry – still alive and panting in sick sighs. It was knobbed and crustaceous and in each pit of limb and body was a crutch of jellified, yellgreen pus. But, the worst was its feather-spiked face. Also decked with a cock’s comb, red as blood, we could just discern the human face of Ogdon’s deceased Aunt Clare!
As our minds lost their occult grasp, its form slowly faded from the room.
Little by little, Ogdon returned to normality… he listened to my insistent comments on how it had only been a “vision”, a sure example of the success of our strength to dream. The “vision” or “dream” had merely been enwebbed in some strange “afterdeath” process that had become wedged in Ogdon’s brain. It had to be released – this “afterdeath” – it had to be purged – this Aunt fixation – before we could progress on to the true success of our experiments.
It may be said that I should not have encouraged him to further exper¬iments. But I considered it my duty to do so. Like a rider who falls at a difficult fence....
“John, it was only vision, only imagination. It was not your Aunt at all”. I swept my arm across his desk as if to clean away any dust.
“But...” His voice was weak and cracked. His appearance was even worse than when I had arrived. “We had to move that bookcase against the wall! Mark that! That bookcase was a full ten inches from its original position...”
“True – but there was not one stain on the carpet. Not one fleck of decayed flesh. Not even one hair. The “thing” had been realised as matter, yes. But it was a dream of a vision, not even a vision per se. It did not exist. It was not your Aunt in some tortured limbo. It was not her terrified soul struggling to release itself from monstrous clutches. It was a psychosomantic, poltergeist-type image, a catharsis, a purging of your complexes and fears. We are now free to explore true vision”.
I had in fact been caught up by the idea of material vision. Ogdon’s enthusiastic idea had lost momentum in his mind and, instead, here I was selling the idea back to him!
About a week after the “afterdeath” monster vision, we both sat before the fateful bookcase, the same engendered stares pinned to those favour¬ite fantasy books, the same elements of time and space focussing their energies through our wills. The bubbling and rippling returned, the books doubled up, trebled up, twisted, merged and lumped into wadges of blurred image. The actual area of the bookcase, its face and front darkened like ink silting into blotting paper – and before us opened the gate…
****
He had sat there for an eternity and a half – or so it seemed to him. Perched on a boulder as large as himself, he looked above at the grey skies, heaven upon heaven of unending greyness – strangely morose and lowering. It was as if a great fall of snow was imminent – except that the atmosphere was sticky and thunderously humid. Megazanthus sat there as still as a contemplative statue, as he had for an eternity and a half.
Unlike in Ogdon’s own fictions, here Megazanthus was an ape-like figure – black and hairy – and his bald ebony dome rested in meditation on thick hands. He kept strong links with humanity: his eyes were mellow and deep, almost philosophical; his nose was well-shaped around dim nostrils; his limbs were those of an Ancient Greek athlete. But for the glance at the grey, lowering skies, his pose was indeed statuesque and peculiarly eternal.
The landscape was as desolate as the skies. With the exception of the boulder on which Megazanthus waited, the dunes or lobes around were unending shades of brown, strewn with small stones and unshaped rocks.
Waiting was religion. The depth of his eyes, the dark pools of intellect that welled there, spoke of a faith as deeply yellow as the sky was deeply grey. For an eternity and a half, he had awaited the Coming of those who would lead him to a haven. He had yearned for respite from the boulder seat; some strange paradise would be the destination as those for whom he had waited took him by his black hand to lead him over the brown deserts to a lagoon of peace and rest. When his dark dome was not resting in contemplation upon his thick hands, he would be staring towards the endless horizons for those who must come.
Then, movement came! One day amongst a trillion others, one endless day amongst the endless days without night that the brown desert bore, he saw movement: two dawdling forms approached from the dim distance – and they were heading in his direction!
****
We both hopped into the opening, not forgetting to draw the veil of “firehearthness” across the opening to stop anybody following us.
“Yes, it was certainly a good idea to disguise the opening as a fire-hearth, but would it not have been better to replace it with the original bookcase?” I asked.
“Perhaps, but now we are in the dark and heading for the end of this godforsaken tunnel, let us not worry about that. We have visions to seek.”
When we left the tunnel, I suppose it was inevitable. Whether it was conscious or unconscious, we were flexing our imaginative muscles and the vision before us stretched endlessly to each horizon in the style of every fantasist we had ever appreciated: the mediaeval water-wells and thatched cottages of Morris; the gambrel-roofs and twisted root-bogs of Lovecraft; the strange beyond-cities of Machen; the ghostly promenades of Aickman; the werewolferine reaches of afforested Averoigne; the space-scapes and tube-effigies of Vance; the castellated sorceries of Howard, Robert E....
That vision of multiform and conglomerate fertility soon faded (as our “muscles” weakened) into the brown dunes of some mouldering, sunless desert. The original hiccough of startled fantasy had given way to inevitable insipidity – negative, Pagan, silted, waterless wastes drifting ever to the margins of our minds.
“Well...” shrugged the man whose study we had left seemingly ages ago.
We trudged over that brown and infinite desert. We trudged over that brown brown, as if a goal was beyond the brown or amid the brown, a goal toward which our silent symphony wended.
I glanced towards Ogdon, one day, and I think he glanced at me simultaneously. One realisation apiece and we knew that a strange wonder was afoot. We had been trudging brown ‘pon brown for apparently months, or perhaps years, and no sustenance had passed our lips.
“Could we be dreaming up ourselves as well as this environment?” I swept my hand across the vista as I said this.
“Do you mean to say that not only are we fantasising in concrete form this vile vision of endless wastes, but also ourselves in some godly form – whereby we need neither food nor drink? Indeed, that we are the very same person talking to himself?”
“I mean that very thing, my dear sir.”
Stylization of our speech, in this way, seemed to be the very scaffold of the vision.
It will be remembered that Ogdon had been dirty and unkempt during those far-off days in his South London home. Now, his visage, although pale like some effete angel, was golden-trimmed and shining. His clothes were robes of some garlanded religion – an offshoot of a peculiar Dunsany cult. His eyebrows arched like some intellectual Conan of the Spheres as he responded to my hypothesis of self-creation:
“I am looking at you. I am taking you in. You are like the hero of a romantic book. Your locks are dark. Your brows are deep and reasoning. Your lips are full and delicious. Your beard is grey-streaked with wisdom. And I have never known you different. You are you. And you were you before we started this trail of mind and inner-mind...”
I responded: “I am looking at you, too. Your face is almost transparent, showing from within the fine vessels of silver fluid. Your garb is flowing and Christ-like. Your speech is glowing and Cicerone ... You are you. And you were you...”
There are many tales of another passenger along the way – at first unseen but, then gradually realised. Do you recall how months, or years, passed as we trudged the brown dunes of duration? We wondered whether at first our fellow passenger was nothing but a sunless shadow of one of us. Then, we knew, gradually, we were being accompanied by a negro of leonine cast. He had strange timeless tales to tell – he told of three who followed us. Of three who wished vengeance. And of those three, he was one,
His name was Megazanthus. We learnt, little by little, of his utter fear of himself and of his own relentless pursuit of himself in company with two creatures such as ourselves. We also learnt that those two companions were in relentless pursuit of our good selves. So, we patted Megazanthus on the back and pledged our support to him against himself and against those Englanders who we knew little of except their eternal quest across our own created plains and visions – for our good selves!
I tell of our flight through the visions of our favourite fantasies, pursued by an impossible possee, a deadly crew of thoughtless beings. We set up obstacles of horror behind our trail, we created every crevice and cranny of formulated fantasy to bar their way. We threw behind us pits and nets of thought, we dropped in our wake countless mazes and labyrinths of horror and supernatural, endless avenues of ghosts and monsters, unalter¬able chasms and ravines of imagination ... taking special care not to stumble back ourselves into these carefully constructed nightmares.
When John Ogdon and myself actually saw the three figures pursuing us across the plains of brown waste, we literally shook with fear and anger combined. How dare they chase after artists across the very canvas upon which those artists intend to paint!
We had to think quick. We had to shrug off our self-imposed tautologies and refinements to throw back defensive fantasies. Crude as they might be, unplanned and rough-edged as they definitely were, we had to think dreams – and damn quick!
It must have seemed to Megazanthus that we were setting up a stage, a proscenium arch, with what looked like yellow curtains. We visualized crudely pottered puppets and amateurish scenarios. We thrust our hands into glove dolls and pulled at our tangled threads of tear-stained, jerking Pinnocchios.
We pulled the two yellow carpets together like heavyweight curtains and, pushing those dirty devices through the various slits in its surface, we gargled frightening gutterals to fit the antics of our puppets ... and just hoped for the best. One of Ogdon’s puppets was particularly effective and was the main cause of the utter rout and flight of our three pursuers...
The red glare had started. At first, shafts of red light bore down from the previously dreary sky. The two Englishmen could not tell whether they were sharp, angular shafts at regular intervals of space or if they were blurred splotches of irregular bursts of red fire. In any event, the shafts quickly spread in magnitude and blinded them with a continuous sheet of uniform fire. Brighter and brighter burned its hue. Then, out of the hinterland and mid-mysteries of its shapeless infinitude, the two men glimpsed sharp visages of scorn. Tongues lolled carelessly from tusked openings and eyes, redder still, winked malignantly above white-snotted nostrils. Then... AUNTIE CHICKEN stepped out of the red murk and waddled as if with a broken back. She had brooded in the shittah-tree for centuries and now she yearned vengeance on those who had ill-created her. She squawked beneath her bleeding red cock’s comb and gobbled up their sucking-pig souls.
We had no doubt called up our own selves, our own Destiny of Azathoth from where it should not have left.
And now we perch in the land where the corpses grow and the creature who calls itself Megazanthus tells us far-fetched stories for an eternity and a half.
Many aeons and worlds away, others warm their hands by the fire-hearth that burns on fuel of page on page.
****
When Bob Dylan sang about the tambourine man, I felt older than I do now. That’s probably because I thought I knew everything then and, of course, I knew nothing at all. And, other than this realisation in retrospect, I’ve learnt very little since. Or maybe the encroaching effect of premature senility is giving birth to my second childhood without my knowledge ...who knows?
Listening to the jingle-jangle of life these days is like waking up gradually into a nightmare. The sleep in between is the bonfire smoke of death becoming whiter and whiter with the bones on which it feeds. Or something like that. The words flow in. My mind accepts thoughts too easily. That must signify the first dosage of dotage. And, again, the words flow in before I can stop them. Or am I giving birth to a different mind without my knowledge ... who knows?
Somebody else’s mind? An alter-nemo’s mind? That’d account for the madness. In fact, it rather absolves me from all responsibility with regard to the flow of words – convenient, to say the least. But whose mind? Yours? I doubt it. Anybody with the sanity you boast, surely, surely, wouldn’t have reached this far in my ramblings. So, I suppose, logically, it could be yours, then. But, pray, do not proceed any further. That way lies more madness than even you would credit. It can only get worse.
****
Planet Firehearth gave off no heat, when you approached it, seemingly heading, as you were, from all points of the known compass. The planet was invisible to the naked eye other than its disguise as a blotchy white moon or sun. And you had been out of Earth’s gambit for some time, unsure whether you were still the subject of betting in the Circles of Agraska. You had tried, so far successfully, to avoid the enticements of crafty time-slots, knowing that the dark wheel still turned above, like Fate – making you think you had now fallen in a Black Well rather than a Black Hole; in any event, those in the real know probably deemed you little more than a speck of dust.
You had Welsh parentage with a hint of London Cockney. Your hands, having lost the use of their arms during a particularly violent elbow fight in some alien’s cock-pit, grew straight from the shoulders like stunted wings. Your face was as round as the old Earth moon, a moon you hardly remembered, towards a replica of which moon you were now gliding, moons reflecting each other like nemo-moons or ingredients in an ancient computer game which only lunatics could play.
You sighed, for you felt Fate was still out of your hands. Pumping on the pedals, your pod widened its trajectory for Planet Firehearth, which was now indeed giving off a faint white heat. But, in accordance, you thought, with quasi-Einsteinian physics, the heat was coming in the opposite direction to its source. A real Johari’s Window through which even Schrodinger’ s Cat wouldn’t dive, albeit chased by Pavlov’s Dog.
You felt hungry: no one had thought to feed you, mainly because the lights in the years had flickered past, out of control, like the cranking pictures of an end-of-the-pier peep-show. But, now, the years were slowing, crystallising ... and making you think about your belly kept in a jug of pickling plankton by your side.
A belly like that was all very well, but not very satisfying; you would like to feed it a tranche of beef, before long, followed by your latest obsession, pickled onion and cheesecake. But then the Mad Cow in the moon would make your innards erupt like meat comets. Followed by bird soup thickened by feathers.
****
They often seem to play pop records at funerals these days. Suppose it’s a sign of the times – that people are dying younger or should I say being killed younger. Ought to make me feel sick, but it doesn’t. Almost as if I’ve been desensitised, overdosed on violence and expendability. Everybody’s tainted by international conflicts and civil wars, some of which have created situations which I once believed could never happen.
OK, OK, Hitler did his damnedest to be damned. But when you get three-cornered disputes so bitter that each side fights tooth and nail to defeat the other two, whatever the cost in human suffering, uniquely without the apparent need for treaties or side-agreements between any two against the other (which would have been more in tune with human nature), well, I’m speechless with despair. Gives me nightmares. Yet again, I shrug it off, shocked only by my ability to shrug it off.
In many ways, I’m the greatest villain of all, by the very act of not caring. Or do I care? If I didn’t care, would I be chewing my nails like this? Wouldn’t I just let sleeping dogs lie or, rather, let them spit and scratch each other to a death worse than an Inner Earth more like Hell than anything else.
All this talk of the way things are today leads me naturally to my reason for writing to you. I know we’ve not met since those heady days at University all those years ago, but I remember you as someone with a real heart. You cared deeply – not for a feeling of self-satisfaction nor for any hope of deferred divine reward – you cared selflessly, straightforwardly, even gratuitously.
I learned a lot of lessons from you, watching from a distance as I did. You may not even remember me. I was that girl called Sudra, usually in a green frock and rather childish hair-ribbon, who more often than not sat at the front of English Literature lectures. Weren’t they boring? In retrospect, that business of intentional fallacy, verbal icons, and evaluating a poem as if it were a sculpture rather than putting it in historical/ biographical context – all hogwash! Poems are written by people. People live, breathe, think about their environment. They don’t write words, as if they’re insulated by the bizarre theories of semantics. Words are not pure artefacts. They are steeped in our heritage and, dare I say, the Collective Unconscious. When words are used, then all of us use them.
Everybody should have the credit – or the blame. Likewise, the events and emotions that the words describe should be part and parcel of each human being’s karmic baggage.
Even the most instinctive native in a South American jungle has to bear his own particular share of the world’s collectivity. Don’t you think I’m right? Isn’t what I’m saying here the road to caring, to that form of caring which you knew was the only way to care, those very many years ago?
I’m sorry for being so verbose. I wouldn’t blame you if you screwed this up and filed it in some area of the past that has gone bad like an old meat. Yet, rest assured, my writing to you, like this has allowed me to see more clearly. I’ve removed a few misunderstandings. Clarified a complex or two. Removed my neck from the ultimate hang-up. Incidentally, I got your address from a mutual friend. Do be forgiving, should you ever discover who it was. What are friends for if not to betray other friends for each friendship? And so on forever, until we are all friends. The whole world a chain-letter of love and forgiveness. So, I hope you’ll write to someone else we knew at University in the same vein. So that he or she can do the same. Until the Ying, Yang and the universal You are fighting only for the right to be the first to forgive.
****
A little boy in a Victorian nursery sometimes stared into the spluttering hearth fire newly ignited this crisp winter morning by his Nanny. He watched the coal-sparks scale the back towards the gaping chasm of the chimney, as they marched in glorious sacrifice to their cause – some of which sparks, he guessed, would still be alive after they left the jurisdiction of the house and sprayed into the moonlit sky. Wars were often being conducted up the little boy’s chimney; he could hear them popping in the night, before the ashes crumbled into the hearth with several sighs, like a tooth fairy dying. That would be the token for sleepy-byes but, even then, there was no respite from dreams.
Meanwhile, you disembarked above Planet Firehearth. On waddling out of the hatch, you farted, a gentle, unimposing old maid’s breaking of wind, but one that nevertheless floated you towards Planet Firehearth at the bottom of the Black Well, as pale and round as your own face. You were in free-hawl and nothing could now be done and, odds were even, you would reach Nirvana before breakfast time.
****
Sudra, I heard you’ve written a crazy letter to one of the ‘nervous little people’ who ever seek an identity to wear. Now I’m really annoyed. How dare you? I should never have allowed you to convince me that you wanted the address to invite him to a University reunion do. And all those other addresses I gave you – have they all received a dose of your idiotic ramblings in a letter? I hope not. I shall be persona non grata, if so. Assuming your letter was similar to the one you sent me, I’m not surprised he was so upset. Yes, you put the fear of God in him. Me, too.
Don’t you realise it’s dangerous to play with people’s minds? Who knows what repercussions you’ve already put in motion. Sick, I call it. All that talk of funerals and pop records. Whatever was your purpose? It certainly wasn’t world harmony, as you seemed to imply. Hitler thought he was doing right. But that didn’t make it right, did it? I suppose you’ll maintain that we’re merely bandying words and words simply mean what we want them to mean in the context. It’s like saying if I call a bird a lion, and then someone else does, and then someone else, and so forth, the meaning of the word will eventually become its use, and a bird will always be known as a lion. Believe me, things don’t work like that. People are straightforward and don’t like their cherished logic being undermined. Quit while you can. Lay off.
****
Nanny lullabyed the little boy, while the moon cast one of its freak shafts through the nursery window (divided into varying silver bars of visionary, if thin, effulgence) and spotlit his ludo board and purple shaker and mutilfaceted dice and counters ... all scattered carelessly by a tired boy before preparing for bed. As myriads of dust motes milled amid the heavenly beams, the boy felt disturbed by the idea of breathing them in, as he inevitably must. No fault of his own. Like markets, entropy could not be bucked. But, then, the moon must have suddenly gone behind a cloud for the motes had thankfully vanished.
And you uttered a polite swear word in a language not dissimilar to Welsh. Your hands flapped powerlessly at your shoulder blades, your chest was burning tight and you cursed as your blow-empty belly dropped like a stone towards what you now knew to be the real Fire-Earth at the bottom of a real Black Hole. You tried to guess how long the belly would take before it hit the moving orange waves below ... but, before it imploded like a divine burp within Sunnemo and became just one more gunshot in an endless war between future and past, the last spark in your soul expired with a sigh of fading flame. And the little boy wiped a single shiny tiddly-wink of a tear from his eye. Nanny, with an induced twinkle in hers, lent him a lace-trimmed hankie. She dreaded it might be a foreign body in the boy’s eye, some sparklet of dust at this very moment inveigling a way towards his heart via the optic fuse, a mote that was probably the silver germ of a Victorian ghost intent on incubating in the boy’s spermbank of a belly. Perhaps, even dead aliens had volition.
****
I’ve heard from Sudra again. I think whatever she wrote to you has done a lot of good. She apologised for her earlier letter and said that we need not worry as we were the only ones who received such a letter from her. It looks as if she was trying to create some triangular trouble between us – and I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t been stewing over both of us all these years, wondering which of us she fancied most. Or she’s got a screw loose. I hardly knew her at University. How about you?
It’s rather like being haunted by the ghost of a nobody. Just a blur from the corner of my eyes in TS Eliot lectures, now forced into focus as a real person twenty years later. Incredible.
Thinking about it, perhaps I should write my trilogy of novels about Sudra. In fact, she might have quite inadvertently done me a good turn with her idiotic epistle! My last blockbuster sort of flunked, didn’t it? Maybe, she will be the spur for me to get back into the swing of writing. I badly need a bestseller again. All this just might be the catalyst. An ill wind. Which brings me to suggesting that we two get together again for a bit, since we are in the mood of reprieves! I’m sorry we ended in tears last time. Maybe, it’s time I peeled off another layer, eh? My old nickname of Crazy Lope did signify something at University, but blowed if I can remember who at University coined it or why. Perhaps I made people run away slowly. Who knows? Look forward to hearing from you.
****
The words have ceased flowing since a woman has entered the room, one who switched off the Bob Dylan record. She was my wife when I was her husband. I only know her name because she has it sewn on her overall lapel – she’s about to depart, you see, for her job at the fast food chain.
“Seen my shoes?”
Her voice is strange, but I don’t feel able to tell her how strange. It’s as if her lips have not been dubbed properly by some inefficient backstage technician. Or she’s using foreign words and the translation is ill-matched.
“No. You probably left them at work.”
“Don’t be silly, I had them last night. I had to get home in them.”
“They must be somewhere, then.”
I bit my tongue. Somewhere is a big place. Could be anywhere. It was to late to unsay. The shoes would have to remain lost in no man’s land, as it were. And I’d have to do some pretty nimble footwork to explain them away ... or, better still, explain them back.
****
Thanks for your letter. I’ve written again to apologise for my first letter. Later, I intend to write a third one to apologise for my second, thus neutralising the first apology. That way, I have the best of both worlds. And I have the exquisite pleasure of apologising twice. But to you, of course, no apologies at all. I merely acknowledge you have an equal right to be a character in his fifth novel as I do. “Ghost of nobody” was an expression he used in a letter to you. But, as such, we’re better than most people who are proper nobodies without the ghost of a chance of even becoming icons. So, I’ll see you in Chapter 4 where we were foreordained to meet for the first time and where we’ll collude in rivalry. My fingernails have been filed into claws, ready for the Pinteresque fray. Similes ought to be full-blooded metaphors, don’t you think? Or perhaps you don’t have the same generous share of omniscience as I do. Pity he’s always burnt everything he writes.
****
I wandered the circle of sands, digging fitfully with a child’s spade, to see if the shoes had been buried at a random spot. The sea’s tinnitus surged in my ears. There was a little big-eared boy with his Nanny playing moats and castles by the edge of the waves. In bathing-trunks. Studious.
Upon the distant horizon, there was a three-funnelled steamship. Instinctively, I knew my wife was on board, canoodling with every sailor she could lay her hands on, blouse undone to the navel. I waved ... knowing that I was too far away to be seen, even if I could see the steamship. The boy waved too, although he didn’t know why. That’s the charm of childhood. You still know nothing, but believe there is something waiting in the wings to be known, something special, something for you to discover when your boot-heels are set to wander ... something somewhere.
****
You munch quickly on the fast food so you don’t have to taste it. You wipe the ketchup that has fallen on your army uniform. You try to write a tear-stained letter on a serviette. There’s a familiar song on the jukebox which you try to mime (rather unsuccessfully). And a ghostly waitress who doesn’t seem able to stop smiling at you. Perhaps is a big word. But, perhaps, love is better than I remember it. You look through the salt-stained window and see that the boy has disappeared. His moats and chemical castles, too. And, no doubt, the slots your heels made in the sand. The nemo-moon shines down a tunnel of ash motes. There’s a bonfire on the horizon.
****
For an indeterminate period, Greg, Beth and their two children, Arthur and Amy, toured the streets of Parismony (later discovered, when checking with the railway station noticeboard, to be a typo for Parsimon(y)) but instead of relaxing during this interlude in their train journey they were beset with an antipodal angst which involved thoughts that they may not get back to the station before the train left for Sunnemo. This was an undercurrent that made all their activities fraught with an anxiety, yet an anxiety that soon grew tentacles (giving new worries leg room) including one significant nagging doubt that they had already travelled to Sunnemo before and finished their lives there during a dream – but now the anxiety became more relevant because they feared that that was no dream and the real dream was this their seemingly endless temporary stay-over in Parismony. If the latter is a dream, why worry. Dreams can’t hurt you. Or so the parents told the children.
Other factors lengthening the tentacles of angst included the so-called ‘nervous little people’ that seems to plague them at ever turning of the city. They were seeking identities and, if this were a dream after all, then identities could be stolen and used elsewhere. So one solution of an angst had soon created a new angst! These creatures – of human persuasion – nevertheless chirruped like chickflicks on continuous strobe. One or two even sported beaks instead of lips.
Another tentacle of angst: Sunnemo was looming closer and if it grew even closer as a dull light source or even a surrogate nemo-moon, then there would be no need to return to the train to reach their destination at all! Greg decided to shrug off the angst and ensure he and his family at least pretended to themselves that they were enjoying their stay-over. Pleased, too, to see that Sudra’s Shoes Inc. had a branch here as well as in Klaxon.
****
Arthur occupied the garden, accompanied by a half empty bottle of Muscadet on the white table. He had the world's horrors on his shoulders knowing deep down that if he didn't visualise the downside, somebody far more evil would take up the mantle and dole out even nastier helpings from the chemical mixture of dregs of man's barrel. Arthur’s duty was almost like setting the bottom line. So, his thoughts had pain and sorrow as their marker. Furthermore, the monstrous hauntings that filled his mind had all the gore left in – mulchy corpses lying in wait under the ground where he built his moats, corpses with few shreds of flesh in place, and then there was the mincing, the putrifying, living cadaver-swamps.
He was just visualising such a fate for his sister Amy with whom he now lived, pretending to the neighbours that they were married. Yet, she looked with a wan face into the garden, her dress picked out by Vermeer's palette, greens, blues and gorgeous reds. She stood at the kitchen door, empty wine glass aloft, as if intent on her share from Arthur's bottle. He tries to ignore her. It was soon time to get going to work as a bus-driver in the city. Real people had this knack of creeping up on one and masquerading as ghosts. He'll have no truck with it.
She walks towards him, forcing a smile against his efforts.
He cringes. A small item has fallen from the sky into his wine, one with insect legs. He fishes it out (the creepy-crawly looks more like a microscopic dragon-bird than any normal insect!) but does not throw away the mouthful he is about to swallow. No such insignificant member of God's creatures will make Arthur lose out on any wine. Amy pours herself a glassful and sits down in the other folding garden chair.
****
Planet Sunnemo was exactly 30,000,000 years old that day.
Beasts gathered at the Anniversary Point in readiness for the festivities: mostly fire-breathing dragon-birds, ones with short memories, originally exported to Sunnemo in man-made mindlessness (from Jules Verne Land on surface Earth) to work as labourers on the Anniversary Point's construction. During the last century or two, indeed, mountains on the dark side of Sunnemo had effectively vanished, as sizeable cross-sections of them were transported by the dragon-birds to the Anniversary Point – via a tunnel that their breath had fire-drilled straight through Sunnemo to by-pass the mid-marginal ice caps.
Only the evening before, Arthur had watched the banana shape of Sunnemo dip behind the completed Anniversary Point, feeling much satisfaction in a job well done. As Human Foreman of the Terrain for the Furtherance of the Building of Anniversary Point, Arthur had gazed lingeringly at what he could only call, in his Earthen terminology, a giant statue or ornamental stone marquee. Dying sunlight had embossed its massive silhouette, while the shuttle-wings of last minute builder-dragons clambered over it – their saw-beaks wreathing smoke upon the background of brightening stars. Hundreds of them, Arthur had thought: hundreds scrambling to finish the tremendous pounding and moulding of cataclysmic sculpture.
That had been yesterday. Now light source was high and elongated in the clear blue sky – literally minutes from the precise moment of Anniversary. Arthur recalled the thoughts that had drifted through his mind since the previous night and, as he watched the multitude of smoking dragons entering the Anniversary Point's ground-level gate of gaping black, the image of Amy, gorgeous blonde-head and sweet mind-shape (the actual words with which Arthur tantalises himself), provided him with exquisite pain, abandoned as Amy (sister or wife, the dream made unclear) had been back on surface Earth, consigned as a slave to the Inevitable Wheeling of the Universe – whilst he, Arthur, equally susceptible to the unseen moving of mysterious cosmic forces, was pursuing this geomantic mission on Sunnemo.
Chief Dragon approached, interrupting such sentimental musings. The planning and negotiating had been an overweening preoccupation for the duration of Arthur's prime years and, secretly, he cursed those who had manipulated such involvement on his part, whoever "those" were. Still, everything had its compensations. He fumbled with the stubble of his burnt cheek as he returned the dragon's tail-flick salute. Arthur had never grown fully accustomed to these wonderful creatures: with their grimy armoured scales, great jointed limbs, smouldering beaked orifices and huge, yet human-like, eyes. Their likening to giant birds had been mere subterfuge.
Chief Dragon waddled towards Arthur and reported, in grunting tones – barely audible on Arthur's side of the timbre threshold – that the birthday festival was open and in full swing. Wasn't Arthur coming to take part in the fun? Arthur shook his head as if to convey that there was no business for him within the Anniversary Point. His job was finished. The absence of Amy as a reason was left unsaid.
****
"There are dark places that I dare not clean," Amy said, after pouring herself a glassful.
Was she the woman Arthur had hired to keep house for him? Not a wife (or even sister), but an employee? He could not be sure.
"I know the landing is dark, Amy. I understand your fears." He does not understand his own, however.
"Not only the landing, the broom cupboard, too. And the main bedroom at the front of the house."
He seethed. He had told her not to venture into the master bedroom. There was nothing that could be cleaned properly in there, after all – and she might see a yellow Angel thing in the bed with which he slept.
Their son now stood at the kitchen door, another empty wine glass aloft. All Arthur's visualisations had now reverted to type. The boy used to be Arthur's son, before he grew too old to have him as a father and left home to be a teacher. Amy beckoned their son to join them in the garden. The grass needed cutting (still does), but Arthur had ensured that nowhere was there available anything that could cut it: to be on the safe side of the bottom line.
The boy helped himself to the wine and sat in another garden chair which had unfolded like a yawning stick insect before their very eyes. His long legs took stretch and splay as if they yearned to escape the body they were tired of toting.
"Hiya, Dad, lounging around again, thinking up those thoughts of yours?"
"My thoughts, son, are more real than you'll ever be!"
Amy, by now, had taken stock of the grass and urged someone, preferably not her, to cut it.
"There are dark places that I dare not clean," she said.
Was she the woman he had hired to keep house for him? Not a wife, but an employee? He could not be sure.
"I know the landing is dark, Amy. I understand your fears." He does not understand his own, however.
"Not only the landing, the broom cupboard, too. And the main bedroom at the front of the house."
He seethed. He had told her not to venture into the master bedroom. There was nothing that could be cleaned properly in there, after all – and she might see the Angel in the bed with which he slept.
The boy now stood at the kitchen door, another empty wine glass aloft. All Arthur's visualisations had now reverted to type. The boy used to be Arthur's son, before he grew too old to have him as a father and left home to be a teacher. Amy beckoned Tom to join them in the garden. The grass needed cutting (still does), but Arthur had ensured that nowhere was there available anything that could cut it: to be on the safe side of the bottom line.
The boy helped himself to the wine and sat in another garden chair which had unfolded like a yawning stick insect before their very eyes. His long legs took stretch and splay as if they yearned to escape the body they were tired of toting.
"Hiya, Dad, lounging around again, thinking up those thoughts of yours?"
"My thoughts, son, are more real than you'll ever be!"
Amy, by now, had taken stock of the grass and urged someone, preferably not her, to cut it.
****
Disappointed, Chief Dragon stumped back towards the Anniversary Point. No doubt it sensed some affection for the two-legged man and cast a second tearful glance at Arthur's handsome blue-robed shape standing alone. Indeed, Chief Dragon could not now face the uproarious stamping and buffets of the multi-coloured fire-dance herding from corner to corner of the Anniversary Point's vast catacombs. How could it enjoy the side-splitting, leather-beating fandangoes when Arthur remained outside emanating sad vibrations across the plain: a plain that stretched illimitably in featureless abandon of dunes and lobes around the Anniversary Point's sole pinnacle of towering landmake. Chief Dragon knew that Sunnemo died around them all. It had read that on Arthur's graven brow – and it disappeared into the Anniversary Point's gate with no further backward look.
Arthur heard the distant thumping of eager dragon-feet. Three of the creatures suddenly emerged from the entrance in a flurry of activity, and he soon realised that two dragons of a male persuasion duel for the affections of a female one. The latter could be distinguished by the many nippleless paps drooping from the underside of the body. The male dragons gobbed sparks at each other before the two unwieldy bodies met in clumsy collision. Then, the conflict grew quite violent as the flailing appendages and fast-champing beak-jaws clashed and curbed. Chunks of dragon-meat ripped off, leaving crimson gashes on both sides – and, before long, one had chewed through the opponent's limb: a rather grueful stance, standing there with the firebubbling extract crunched between its spitsteaming beak-jaws.
Arthur turned his back, reminded of a similar incident back on Earth: the reason for his mission to Sunnemo and the abandonment of his sweet sweet Amy to an unfathomable Elsewhere. Try as he might, he could not completely recall Amy's reaction to his departure. Nor his son’s. He had been their hero, of course, and as this fact confirmed itself once again in his mind, he swivelled on the balls of his feet to view the dragon fight. The two male protagonists slumped together in a dead pile – bits and pieces of chopped yellow arrayed around them – with the female's teardrop-curds sliding over her useless paps.
From such bitter sorrow, Arthur lifted his wet eyes to the bright banana-shape that started to dip in the deepening sky. He knew that his vantage point was one of magical destiny – since, no sooner had he found himself gazing at the magnificent, if mutant, light source, it faltered and dimmed. It then died. Simply that. Simultaneously, from within the Anniversary Point, the thumping of the dragons ceased. The party was somehow over – as if conscious of Sunnemo's near death – a magical realisation of the universe's mastery amid their drunken cavortings, an inevitable sorrow sparking from joy.
A spectral thin effulgence, the source of which was mysterious to Arthur, lit the abandoned plain in the shadow of the elongated light source's residual stain. And, black against such a wan saviour glow, the magnificent Anniversary Point soared into universal night. He wept for this memorial, pitying its looming omnipotence. He knew that it would stand solitary and bleak on this dead dune of dunes forming a discrete body of geography, stand there for an eternity of forgetting – a massive black shape like a seaside pier without a sea thrusting mindlessly into deeper, more forbidding black. He prepared to surrender himself to a cold aching demise beside the Anniversary Point: the huge statue whose construction by gullible dragons Arthur had organised.
Arthur watched, as fiery smoke began to curl from the cavernous nostrils of a massive stone nose. Arthur knew that the huge smile was just a stone mouth's quirk. The odd pitiful dragon grunted, as it managed to struggle out through the Anniversary Point's over-sized left ear-hole: disturbing the silence for a while, quite irrespective of timbre threshholds.
****
The people had returned to the house, leaving Arthur to think away to his heart's content. Where was his son? He was probably visiting one of those dark places from where no children ever returned. Better than watching soaps on TV. Amy had yearned to marry a fruit-stoner, but Arthur had said that a tinker, tailor, teacher or suchlike were beneath her. But she'd gone off to find the beggarman or thief, no doubt, to fulfil ideas she kept like birds' eggs in her head.
For all Arthur knows, his real thoughts are even now being acted out inside the house, whilst their alibi sits out here.
He puts the wine to his lips and is slightly amazed to find it treacly red, ripe for a midnight feast at noon.
He'd soon discover that the bottom line had been snatched away.
The people had returned to the house, leaving Arthur to think away to his heart's content. Where was his son? He was probably visiting one of those dark places from where no children ever returned. Better than watching soaps on TV. Amy had yearned to marry a fruit-stoner, but Arthur had said that a tinker, tailor, teacher or suchlike were beneath her. But she'd gone off to find the beggarman or thief, no doubt, to fulfil ideas she kept like birds' eggs in her head.
For all Arthur knows, his real thoughts are even now being acted out inside the house, whilst their alibi sits out here.
He puts the wine to his lips and is slightly amazed to find it treacly red, ripe for a midnight feast at noon.
He'd soon discover that the bottom line had been snatched away.
"There are dark places that I dare not clean," she said.
Was she the woman he had hired to keep house for him? Not a wife, but an employee? He could not be sure.
"I know the landing is dark, Amy. I understand your fears." He does not understand his own, however.
"Not only the landing, the broom cupboard, too. And the main bedroom at the front of the house."
He seethed. He had told her not to venture into the master bedroom. There was nothing that could be cleaned properly in there, after all – and she might see the thing in the bed with which he slept.
His son now stood at the kitchen door, another empty wine glass aloft. All Arthur's visualisations had now reverted to type. The boy used to be Arthur's son, before he grew too old to have him as a father and left home to be a teacher. Amy beckoned him to join them in the garden. The grass needed cutting (still does), but Arthur had ensured that nowhere was there available anything that could cut it: to be on the safe side of the bottom line.
The boy helped himself to the wine and sat in another deck chair which had unfolded like a yawning stick insect before their very eyes. Tom's long legs took stretch and splay as if they yearned to escape the body they were tired of toting.
"Hiya, Dad, lounging around again, thinking up those thoughts of yours?"
"My thoughts, son, are more real than you'll ever be!"
Amy, by now, had taken stock of the grass and urged someone, preferably not her, to cut it.
The people had returned to the house, leaving Arthur to think away to his heart's content. Where was his son? He was probably visiting one of those dark places from where no children ever returned. Better than watching soaps on TV. Amy had yearned to marry a fruit-stoner, but Arthur had said that a tinker, tailor, teacher or suchlike were beneath her. But she'd gone off to find the beggarman or thief, no doubt, to fulfil ideas she kept like birds' eggs in her head.
For all Arthur knows, his real thoughts are even now being acted out inside the house, whilst their alibi sits out here. His thoughts kept coming back (still do). Like feasting with panthers. Or burning out with dragons.
He puts the wine to his own soft stone lips and is slightly amazed to find it creamy white, ripe for a feast at a sunless noon.
He'd soon discover that the bottom line had been snatched away.
Snatched away.
****
Arthur watched, as fiery smoke began to curl from the cavernous nostrils of a massive stone nose. Arthur knew that the huge hard-lipped smile was just a stone mouth's quirk. The odd pitiful dragon grunted, as it managed to struggle out through the Anniversary Point's left ear-hole: disturbing the silence for a while, quite irrespective of timbre threshholds.
Arthur, meanwhile, recalled another Amy, one with soft lips.
****
Edith sat in the Proustian arbour, holding the stalk of a flower pressed between the backs of her hands, the red bloom of involuted petals held at eye-level.
She posed for both painting and photograph, unsure as yet which of them would do her full justice. She held the angles of her body at their optimum level whilst masking the ugly birthmark on her forehead with the bloom.
The painter was standing by an easel at the far end of the inner garden, the long brush held aloft, his artistic thought processes apparently taking their time to percolate, and the palette upon his other arm mounted with wormcasts of corruptive colour, all chosen for Edith's complexion.
Further over to the side, where the neatly manicured topiary began, there was a tall tripod bearing an instrument with a retractable snout and a black cape flowing from its rear and the legs of a man curved over from under the cape and a bulb to squeeze and a flash like lightning and...
...Arthur, as a small boy, shut the pop-up book with a crack. He twiddled with his left ear absent-mindedly.
The front of the board covers was decorated with the only abstract image in the whole volume and, with the dying light of the nursery fire, he discerned a pattern more suitable for carpets than murals.
The book had been left with him as a peace offering by his parents who had departed in a horse-drawn carriage for an evening at the opera. He had heard the clatter of hooves disappearing into the echoey Klaxon distance, leaving him alone in the house – or worse than alone, since the only other person left behind under the same roof was the family's ancient nanny. She sat in the corner by the fitful log fire, knitting-needles clicking, her asthmatic lungs rasping. He watched the sometimes insect-like, sometimes bird-like silhouette moving only very slightly in unfaithful rhythm to her deft stitching.
He wanted to be a dare-devil. He wanted to stir her into realising that it was too dark in the nursery, since she could have blindly knitted on forever – and that her little charge was in danger of being snatched by the Angel Megazanthus who, to the boy's certain knowledge, lurked up the chimney.
So he broke wind. And a distant siren fortuitously boosted the noise.
She jolted in her wicker chair. Her neck creaked, turning a stern gaze upon him.
"Ptcha! There are places for such noises."
"I know, Nanny Edith, but my tummy-ache – and the fire's going out – and I'm worried sick about the darkness."
"I know what will sluice out your belly, young man, a good dose..."
At that moment, soot billowed from the chimney, as silently as an army's secret striking of camp at the dead of night. It caught his eyes, so he heard no more of her mad ramblings. She did however absent-mindedly brighten up the end of a candlewick.
He returned to the pop-up book to bury himself in its pages, whilst yearning to hear the hooves which bore his parents homeward from the Klaxon opera. He kept at least one ear pricked, despite the utter dread of what he expected to hear with it. Nanna's bones cracked loudly as she lifted herself from the wicker-claws of the chair to attend to the fire, perhaps entice a few more flames from the glowing ruby embers...
...and Edith, elsewhere, elsewhen, had by now lowered the glowing bloom and positioned it between the points of her bosom.
That part of the face bearing the stain of the birthmark lacked features and, possibly, substance, too.
It was as if one could look straight through her head at the point which oriental mystics had once believed to be the site of man's invisible Third Eye or, at least, an optical illusion of one. And through it, could be seen the blacker eye approaching from behind.
The hair of the painter's brush was known intuitively to be manufactured from a dictator's moustache. He had dipped it in a generous mix of strange paints. It formed a colour but at the same time not any colour under the Zodiac.
The tripod camera had lifted the photographer's legs into the air like wings and was in the violent process of flapping around the garden, a huge insect bird of a creature, clicking insanely. Nowhere to go, it could not bring itself to halt the wild careering – until it became entangled in the ivy trellises of the arbour. There it flinched for a few seconds, with fitful bursts of fire from its black beak and the squeezings of purple venom for a naughty boy's tummy, until it died...
...like the fire in the grate.
Nanna Edith had by now lit the oil lamp hanging above the boy's cot. He could vaguely see the remains of a dead entity woven in and out of the wire fireguard. In disgust, he threw the book towards the fire and, despite falling short, it proceeded to pop and crack. He made his way to the cot to crawl between the covers. And, then, while he dozed, he imagined he heard hooves clopping on distant cobbles.
As Nanna bent down to give him a little peck on his petally cheek, he heard her churning, phlegm-clogged breath and saw straight through her head – and through this head he saw a bloated spider-bird glistening in the crook of the ceiling. The little boy squeezed his eyes tight, praying for sleep; even nightmares would be preferable to such reality...
...and the man into whom Arthur was eventually to grow woke with a start. It was freezing in the garret and he had a job to do. Not before fulsomely farting, he quickly dressed in darkness, picked up his heavy-duty paintbrushes and departed into the shivering Klaxon square, to await the arrival of the bosses with the ladders. He stamped his feet to rid himself of pins and needles. He felt along his hardening top lip – yes, coming on nicely. Even rind-growth was, in itself, a would-be entity.
The Sunnemo dawn, when it painstakingly arrived, was colourless and cold. The hooves of the decorators on the cobbles could just be heard.
The man's ambition was to paint on palace walls in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch, whilst a thousand Popes screamed inside.
And nurseries exploded within him as the brain bloomed red. A bogus waking fetched the thud of his parents' hooves clopping up the stairs. He prayed they couldn’t have fruited each other with him in the first place. The real frighteners, however, would come when the little boy stopped dreaming.
****
Boys were insects or foul-smelling birds with crossed feathers – or both at once. Or so it seemed to Mr Clare as he weaved his way among them to put a stop to a scrap between two of them at a thinly frequented part of the schoolyard. This was his fifth tour of playtime duty in a week and he wondered why teaching had to be his vocation: nobody had made him do it, in fact many of his college contemporaries had ribbed him and, if he’d been of a weaker mind, he would no doubt have ended up like his friends in stockbroker’s offices, earning money left right and centre. Still, it was a nice day today, good to be outside under a clear English blue sky.
“Lope!” he shouted as he caught one of the culprits by the earlobe. He could not help think¬ing that in the old days street urchins like these were actively encouraged in the arts of pugil¬ism.
“Yes, sir?” said a thin boy with thick grey trousers down to his shinbones.
The other boy had scuttled off before he could be recognised, but Mr Clare had a suspi¬cion…
His ruminations were interrupted by the outlandish sound of a mechanical roaring from above. All those boys not caught up in the periphery of the fight’s repercussions had their faces already level with the cloudless sky, volcano-cone noses pointing upwards.
Crazy Lope (called this by pupils and teachers alike) took the opportunity to wriggle free from Mr Clare’s pincer fingers and legged it across the playground, seeking out the boy, who’d just been his companion in fisticuffs, within the heady confines of the Boys’ lavatory. They’d both probably decided that it was in their inter¬ests not to pay too much heed to the mysterious roaring from above: they could not afford to be left out in the open, with old Clare on the warpath. So, eventually, inside the dank, seeping dark¬ness, Lope felt his way to the nearest cubicle door and rattled the latch as he called: “Dog, Dog, are you in there?”
He could still hear the noise, but now it was muffled, more lugubrious with its continuous under-rumbling.
There was no answer.
Lope was nonplussed. The motions of his mind were far too slow to support finer feelings. Sometimes, he even wondered whether he was who he thought he was. His whole life had been playing arse-up to his father’s belt, dangling his baby sister above the water butt in the garden and drawing intricate grids across the pages of his schoolbooks rather than read them meaningless words.
If ‘Dog’ was not there, where was he? He did not exactly want to hurt him again. One fight’s enough between friends ... for a while anyway. Lope must have been thinking hard for time passed without properly realizing it. Dog must have been outside all the time, risking punish¬ment from Mr Clare, maybe believing that he had not been identified.
Mr Clare did not scare Crazy Lope. Why then this skulking inside the Boys’ lavatory? Surely not to avoid the likes of a teacher. He lifted himself from his haunches, rubbing at the damp patches on his trousers. There was silence beyond the door.
Unaccountably, Lope thought of the family back home. His mother ... but she’d died years ago and he could not recall hide nor hair of her. His father, the despot who tried to keep the rest of them from existing. His sister. His half sister. His third brother. His second cousin. Crazy Lope, himself. And…
The schoolyard was deserted. The whole sky was of metal grey. It was easy being a teacher when all the boys had gone. Mr Clare ambled towards the staff room, buttoning up his flies.
****
Boys will be boys. Or that’s what my mother used to say, when I’d got up to some mischief or other.
I had a particular friend. You know the sort, one you remember for the rest of your life, even though you never see him again from, say, the age of seven. Most faces are non-stick, easily passing through the memory ... and out again. But Jules was different.
One of the games we used to play in the school playground was called “Girls”. I can’t recall much about it now, since the mental fuse-wire of the experience blew some time ago.
It’s strange, I can still see faces out of the corner of the eye of my mind hustling in from all quarters of the playground, watching Jules and I at our games. I recognise none of their ill-defined features nor pick out actual words from their hubbub.
But, one stark staring day, the call of “Fight Fight Fight Fight” bounced off the ancient school walls like the ghost of a future football crowd (for in those far-off days, fans did not chant mindlessly but waved scarves and twirled rattles) ... and the memory is even clearer to me now than the present.
Jules and I were playing the “Eyeball” game, where opponents would crouch knee to knee, face peering intently into face: the first to blink would be the loser.
We must have stared at each other for the good part of dinner break. An irresistible force meeting an immovable object
Time was frozen then. I can jump back into that moment whenever I like and I sometimes do so when modern existence wears me thin. As I re-enter my own body as a boy, it’s like easing into the comfortable clothes of the past. All is silent. Desperately silent. The wire of memory as taut as a piano’s. Incredibly, his two separate eyeballs are of different colours, one glinting like a ruby, the other like an emerald. Then, Jules’ head audibly shatters, scattering splinters of bony blood and curds of brain to every corner of the playground.
I had won. And the cheers erupted round me.
I’ll ever see Jules’ face staring back at me, a suspicion of growing sadness in his eyes. I recall it clearly, for how I had studied it in obsessive detail for that frozen unblinking moment of childhood.
Boys will be boys and never will be men.
****
The boy removed from his pocket what resembled a squat, round pillbox. He was sitting in the fork of a tree, looking down upon his hometown, distantly laid out in the valley like the models on the carpet of his bedroom in one of those very houses below him.
The tall factory chimneys did not belch smoke, for it was Sunday. He wondered why the Old Drillers Inc. had decided to build them right at the centre of the town, where the terraced grids were at their thickest. Perhaps, to ease the journey for those who worked there ... which used to be 98.6% of the inhabitants, but now with unemployment spreading like a cancer even through the most industrious streets, the proportion was sliding down the temperature gauge towards a new ice age.
The boy was old for his age. He was the kid philosopher of his times. He knew more about life than most ... he seemed to soak in the mental energy emanating from the town roofs, willing it not to wane. He saw himself as a deity. A King in Yellow. The other boys spurned him, because they did not like the way he looked at them. Not unfriendly, but all-knowing. Almost pitiful of what he saw in their eventual fate.
He opened the pillbox and took out a roll of narrow paper tape which seemed to have raised circular blemishes spaced equally along its length. He put it to his nose, but the smell was not significant ... though an underlay of its potential…
He was interrupted by a flash of sun on one of the windows below. Someone had evidently spotted him, examining his bird or insect speck in the only tree that had survived the recent wind storm, its branch-holds slipping on the friction-less summer sky, standing like a skeleton of an alien monster upon the hill ridge.
Let them look. He could outlook them any day. He had nothing to hide.
Inserting the roll into his silver cap gun, he artfully wove the strip between the spindles, letting just a short tab protrude under the hammer. Satisfied with what he had accom¬plished, he caressed the trigger with his index-finger, testing purchase upon it. But, for some reason, he could not yet find impetus to pull it.
Now, an old man, he yearned for one more sniff of that redolence blossoming from a burst caphead. That would retrieve his lost youth, recollections of times unhindered by modernity and of thoughts even too shameful to remem¬ber. Through the open window, the old man looked and looked and looked ... he saw the old tree still there; it had only moved to the side a few yards in the intervening years; the ridge itself had only been slightly weathered into different contours.
The insect (or was it indeed a kind of bird?) was incredibly still there in the fork of its branches, waving its hair-trigger feelers. The old man flinched as he heard the tall factory chimney crashing to the ground … another echo from a past age. He put on his old Davy Crockett hat, and slept.
****
Dog and Lope peered from their eyes and saw stars sparkling like scattered jewels. It was as if a careless, or self-disgusted, thief had left them in his wake.
Then, the two boys wondered if they were not really looking down upon a town, where night had failed to dowse the lighted windows of their erstwhile neighbours. The actual words in their minds were nothing like those that were written, but words themselves often have mis-meaning to freight them, for the sense of the word is in the way it’s used or the way it’s not. If I said the boys were in a spaceship, the whole thrust of my story would misfire and stall. It was more like a huge Circular Saw than a real spaceship.
And that’s where they were: a roaring, some¬times stuttering flying-object, built by ambi¬tious inhabitants of a world similar to ours, except they had the gumption to exceed their own abilities ... unlike the men and women we all know so well who squat within their own skulls, dreaming that they might hatch one day into full-blossomed butterfly-birds with wings wide and strong enough to reach the strange, beauti¬ful fulfilments at the shimmering heartlands of the universe, but ever retreating into the petty incestuous reality that money and earthbound love engenders.
The Saw hovered seemingly for an eternity of misbegotten entropies, its engines now humming silently on underdrive, evident¬ly reluctant to leave the slight ghost of an attrac¬tion from the planet below. The night had by now slipped round the corners of the world, sliding like opaque slime. The town that had once been the stars to those on board was creep¬ing with incipient insect life; the various self-contained beings wove intricately curved grids that were clear to the observers in the sky but entirely unknown to those who actually constituted them.
Lope nudged Dog and pointed to the schoolyard where they had once flicked ciga¬rette cards. Boys scattered across its concrete surface, whereon white lines had been painted to cater for the demarcations of various ball games, but those games that the boys played on their own seemed underpinned by nothing but bright illogic and fresh disorder. But these were different boys than had played here only the day before. Or they were ghosts of those who’d once played here. Only Mr Clare, the sole teacher on play¬time duty tried to reimpose the patterns
Dog’s turn to nudge Lope: there was a boy evidently playing truant, crouching in a tree at the rising edge of the town, like a spider roosting in the web of its winter branches. Even at this range, they saw this was Lope himself ... and they wept bitterly as they un¬accountably realised that they were the ghosts, and the real boys were in the schoolyard.
The Saw shuddered as the unseen pilot placed a huge humped cap into the triggerhold of its gun turret ... which in turn swivelled the barrel on its grinding plinth, targeted it upon the tiny skull of a boy haunched up in the schoolyard opposite his friend similarly con¬torted ... and fired pointblank. The flash was blinding ... and a tall factory chimney in the industrial part of the town crumbled to the ground in apparent sympathy or symphony (or ricochet), thus concealing the abrupt sound of the Saw’s roaring off into those parts of the universe where there was no light to go faster than.
Pity the words meant nothing.
Despite this, the butterfly-birds followed on.
****
Though I never lived during that kingdom of war – the one that blitzed London – I could easily imagine the colourlessness (or, rather, variegated brown) in every wet afternoon, prefiguring the contrast of night's man-made lightning. Séances were being held amid the chintz of every blitz-free sitting-room; tears being shed in every outhouse; tender hands held, over and over again, in every beach hut and every park.
Well, for every every, amen. I shook my shoulders – not a shrug as such; more of a shudder. I tramped the back-end streets, wondering if I had been transported in time to those very afternoons when shapes in fragile freedom from the night's shelters (the Underground included) became the slowly nudging together of lightly-fleshed ghosts in the hope that something worthwhile or tangible would emerge by this serendipity of touch. Ghosts, I guessed, were to be everybody, even you and me.
This was to have been a poem. But it felt like prose fiction, with all the trappings of a plot, albeit missing a beginning, a middle or an end, if not all three. I could have gutted this fiction of its protagonists, but then nobody would have been there to report its waywardness.
I met Sudra in a park where courting couples were more colourless than most, if less tearful. She was someone with whom I assumed an immediate mutuality. She smiled, wiping away her tears with a burnt hankie. Collateral damage, she said, from last night's bombs. I didn't take umbrage at her false modernity. I knew she joked; this was then, not now.
A fleeting image of an evening when Sudra and I did walk under a fleet of doodlebugs – and suddenly a thing like a plum-pudding bursting with a fiery sauce came down and a lot of glass fell out of the windows on to us.
"Good job we were not there": my first ever set of words to Sudra upon meeting in the park. My second: "Ghosts were simply the future."
"Ghosts will forever be the past," were my sweet Sudra's last.
But truth told no rhymes.
****
Crazy Lope’s head was camera, or it seemed like it to him; he saw everything as if framed for a motion picture. As a film, he had been given an adult certificate, when he reached a relatively young age, but now, with the years piling up on top of each other, even that was not sufficient to cover the scenes he sought out.
One day, Lope discovered a backstreet of his home town he had not previously explored in which there was a tall disused warehouse with a faintly glowing signboard on the vestigial gantries. He could just peer through the misted up lens and see the letters spelling out SUDRA’S SHOES INC. He tried to pan round but his feet were rooted to the crumbling pavement and his neck had stiffened: he felt a movement on his shoulders as if a creature had lodged there, squinting through a slot in the back of his head. Whatever it was, claws were penetrating his overcoat and, finally, his flesh ... fastening on to the blade bones like steel. He tried to shake off. It was all well and good to imagine being a camera but here he was actually being used as one by some frightful inhabitant of the night.
His eyeballs revolved in the sockets, and warehouse sign flickered out of freeze frame, scrolling like an old-fashioned black & white TV of the fifties. He desperately needed vertical hold: but that was the least of his worries: before long, he found himself going into cinemascope and edges of the scene he had previously not been able to view encroached and fluttered in from the sides: things like wriggling hairs and, then, insect feelers which often used to blemish projections upon the flea-pit screens of the sixties; the technicolor oozed back, and a blood-red haze gave the whole vista a dream-like quality; like speech bubbles in comic strips, this was a token of dissolving ready-reckoner reality, a symbol of beliefs being suspended.
The whole vistavision screen was now acrawl with translucent bird-wings beating faster than the strobe of the frames. He could no longer make any assumptions about his own sanity. He turned his eyes downwards as far as they would go without detaching the optic nerve, to see his cylindrical nose extending forth from his face: zooming in on the entrance of the warehouse: where he saw a camera filming him filming it: but surely it couldn’t be a real one, because it seemed to grow wonky and misshapen the more he stared back at it. However, he was pleased on discovering eventually that it was a female camera: but, as their noses came together across the street in some primitive ritual of a kiss, all he could see was the utter emptiness of his own backscreen soul.
That’s when the thing on his back extricated itself from Crazy Lope's bones and scuttled off somewhere, abandoning the tickertape of the film to flap uselessly ... as it reeled off the spool and tangled up the inside of his skull. Since it left no other room in there, his brain slithered out of the ear like a white worm in search of a bird.
****
Walking into that house was not unlike coming home – and after a lifeful of disasters, it was good to feel everything panning out at last. Everybody deserves at least one lucky streak. So, as soon as I passed through the double-doored entrance, which had been left partially open, I felt instantly that I needed to turn straight back, if only to find the Estate Agent to tell him I would definitely have it at the asking price. And what did indeed the price ask? Only a few years of self-deprivation, until my inheritance worked itself through the system.
Inside the house, as well as darkness, there was a faint but pervasive scent, rather like flowers left fractionally too long in the vase or a chicken in an open fridge. Indeed, I questioned my own motives of walking into the house without permission – although it did have a For Sale sign outside. Outside, its dark yellow roofs had clambered towards a henge of chimneystacks, where I imagined my future children playing, as the dare-devils they would surely become. The walls that were half hidden by the shadow of the overhanging gutter were constructed from larger than normal bricks with generous fillings of grey cement – and, each about a yard apart, were set fluted pillars of what appeared to be creosoted wood. The garden path had led me, between rows of bending sunnemo-flowers, towards those double doors, doors which seemed to be the open covers of a black book with its narrow spine pointing right out at me. However, I could not read the title until I arrived close up and discovered it was not a title at all but the glimmering of a candleflame being carried up the long winding stairs to the first landing. The light disappeared as soon as I thought I knew it was a candleflame. I had slipped the latch of the garden gate with some surprising ease – after having previously negotiated some dreadful roofed alley-ways which led from the centre of the city. What I had spotted roosting on one of the chimneystacks was not a TV aerial, but something with a similar configuration: angular bones and a tiny beating heart: brooding as it gnawed upon a gable-post: balanced upon splayed elbows.
I would have come through Hell to reach my ideal home and, having arrived there, I obliterated all idea that evil lived in or on it. It was indeed a family house being sold by an Estate Agent in a normal city of Inner Earth. The heady scent of dying flowers was stronger as I backed along the hallway searching for a light switch. Yes, yes, my inheritance would surely pay for this place. No fear of that. But, I would have a few years to wait, since my Aunt Edith was showing no promise of death, as yet. To borrow on the strength of an inheritance, young man, the consultants had told me, was difficult, because no financial institution worth its salt would accept as security the fortunes of death, especially if connected with the continuation of an auntie's good will to her nephew.
For a moment, I believed I was still in the garden. The sky had disappeared altogether, leaving a black hole in its stead. The wafting of a sound like sea or birdsong in the treetops became noticeable the further I edged towards the foot of the stairs, where the faltering candleflame had earlier climbed. Pull yourself together, young man, you were inside a house where you should never have ventured. You were not invited. Go back to the garden, where the flowers and daylight should still be fighting back the onset of darkness. Return down the garden path. Go back, young man, and found your dynasty amid a destiny elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I heard the stairs creaking, as if somebody was passing down them towards me – or something – or, even, something else.
"Who's there?" I asked in the faintest whisper, in case it heard me.
No answer. Whatever it was, it did not have the courtesy to renew its candleflame to shine up its face and allow me to recognise it. "But I never had a candleflame in the first place," it would snarl into my ear on eventually finding my ear.
"I saw the candleflame, when I came down the garden path," I insisted, "like the gold lettering on the spine of a battered black book."
When I had at first come to that city, the last thing I had expected was an adventure. I had arrived in search of a home, in some ordinary backwater close to an underground station deeper than the one to which I was accustomed. I had not anticipated actually having to crawl along the hawling-tunnels to get there. What else could one do, when there was literally nobody around to work the transport system, with property prices in this city being so sky high? All to do with the base bank rate, my consultants had told me. My adventure was turning out to have no start nor end. Only an ever-expanding middle.
I remembered I had some matches in my pocket, for which I proceeded to fumble. Eventually, I produced a short-lived flame and saw sitting on the intricately carved stairs an entity with wide wire whiskers which turned widdershins and clockworkwise: the rest of its body not a body at all but a series of stair-rods erecting themselves from the treads. It was evidently related to the thing I had spotted brooding on the chimneystack when first I approached the house. Birdishly mechanical, with a drill pointing from it bottom end like a genital.
Travelling to the city, originally, had been a trial in itself. I hailed from north of the cotton mills, and all connections had to be arranged by my Aunt Edith, she and I poring over the thick timetables for months in advance, till we both suffered the same small print headache. It all worked, though. Go forth, young man, and forge your connections. And so I did, bribing train station workmen to bend the points in the direction I wanted to proceed and waving at railway children from the carriage, beckoning them to send their schoolfriends ahead into the hawling-tunnels to clear away the obstacles that old rail workings often had. In hindsight, I hope the wheels were soft on them kids.
Could this be the Estate Agent squatting on the stairs? Or a policeman, having been tipped off in advance about my breaking and entering? But I did not break anything, officer. Certainly not any best porcelain.
"Climb to the bedrooms, young man," the entity seemed to indicate with one of its bony metal feelers. It clanked and churned. It stepped aside, only to become part and parcel of the iron banisters.
All that in the flame of one match?
The stairs wound up for longer than I anticipated and I was sure they missed out floors, heading me towards the topmost attic, giving me no choice but to follow a destiny that was only at its planning stage. As I ascended, the banisters closed behind me, of which ratchetting only well-oiled machinery could boast. It gradually grew lighter, for sky was filtering through the ill-made roof.
I had bid farewell to my dowager Aunt with a light kiss on the wrinkled petal of her cheek. She sat buried in her four-poster bed, surrounded by a lifetime's knick-knacks and her pen. She took me by the hand telling me to beware the city down south: "It's like a big cobweb of tracks, cantilever bridges, tunnels and flyovers, and buildings too tall for their own good." She had always had a wonderful turn of phrase and with her words ringing in my ears, I had entered upon the connections. Click, clack, click, clack, they went. And the roof was swelling down upon me, threatening to make the attic nothing but a room with no space, or a space with no room. Desperately, I pushed upwards. Changing direction, I realised that effort was now required elsewhere, and I pushed with straining muscles against the rising floor. I heard the crunching of my bones, as they splintered into my flesh. There was a war raging within my very body, so I quickly changed the track-points and escaped like a ghost down the empty stairs, leaving the rest of myself to its own devices.
It was easy now, because I had become the haunter and the house the haunted, instead of vice versa. With the likes of a ghost loitering along the stairways, the Estate Agent would find it even harder to sell. For a while, it didn't seem to matter that all this may have been a fiction into which I had inadvertently stumbled. But there was one vital connection I had missed till it was too late – the despicable class of person who was to read the fiction. I suppose it could have been worse: I could have become a mere image on a small flickering screen in the corner of that person's room – fed by monsters to monsters – with no connection between except the TV aerial.
Somewhere else, I sensed that a little bit of me cried its heart out. And an old lady took off her wire glasses so as she couldn't see the tears.
****
Mike lived someone else's life. Not that he made a drama out of an identity crisis. Or so he thought. Or was it that someone else thought it? In any event, Mike convinced himself that he could not really be the individual who, on the face of it, he seemed to have become – working in an office factory in London from 9ish to 5ish: surely it was not possible for him to be a run-of-the-mill routine-toady, especially with a name like Mike, a name which incidentally had to be so ordinarily real since it could never have been invented.
He religiously followed the channels of destiny which were laid out before him, with glances to neither side. Blinkered by bathos. Dulled by a dire dearth of flair. Cramped by a strait-jacket of uncharisma. His wife, Susan, told him that she loved him – yet how could anyone love a souped-down zombie in the midst of living out a black situation comedy? It wouldn't have stood up to reason, if reason he had managed to apply to it.
Then a dose of doubt dawned on Mike – causing him to sense within himself the proper person he instinctively realised he truly was. Mike lived someone else’s wife. So, one night he fell asleep, after having bashed his head seven times on the pillow – a trick that worked better than an alarm clock set for seven next morning. However, that was the very last routine Mike carried out as the erstwhile self. Indeed, waking up had always been a struggle into renewed existence at the best of times – via the bleary regions of brainache, the blinking yellowmanker custard in his eyes and generous yawnfuls of sour spittle. But this particular morning, it was somewhat different. Everything seemed fresh, effervescent, renascent...
He failed to recognise Susan, since she now lived as someone else's wife. Mind you, she did not recognise him either and, what was more, overnight, her name had changed to Beth. After the initial shock, they made love, as if it were the start of an illicit affair. And she called him Greg. Their kisses were searching, their foreplay an extended version of teenage exploration (with the backwash of sweet prurient froth upon the roof of the mouth), ending not in premature ejaculation but in a mutually stunning slowmo orgasm that lasted even beyond the fuel that fed it. The breakfast she then cooked was a feast fit for a banquet: jacket potatoes that had been gently simmering in the oven from the previous evening, providing melt-in-the-mouth flakiness and knobbed off with a generous dollop of fresh-churn butter; rare gammon steaks upon a bed of artfully under-coddled free-range eggs; toasted doorstops of granary bread smarmed with a marmalade so thick with peel it was tantamount to a whole-orange bob game at the fair; and, finally, a breakfast birthday cake where the candles seemed to burn upon the seeping fuel of the rich cake mixture itself – a mixture which was constituted of jumbo currants, molasses, long- and shortbread, oodles of rum &c.).
Mike did not understand why there were so many candles on the cake. Surely this was the first day of his life. A ready-born ... not tarnished from having emerged via the channels of a woman's body. But there was something very diminishing about not being able to blow out one's own birthday candles. So, he went to work ... but found his desk occupied by someone not called Mike, but Greg, plugging away at routine tasks, the simplest of which would in any event be beyond him. He then lost himself in the city, where he would never find himself again. Susan-or-Beth did not even bother to look for him, in any event, because she did not know he was lost. And never again did she rustle up bumper reward breakfasts for Mike.
Nervous little people, Mike hated those damnable nervous little people. The way they inveigled themselves into his little group, selling bottles of what they called "Angevin" water, it made his blood really boil. One in particular was a nasty piece of work: a nervous little person who came from a township that was further north of Monday than anyone could possibly go. The accent was so broad, it sounded as if the nervous little person had a wagon wheel wedged in his mouth. He picked Mike from the crowd, knowing simply from the cut of his face that Mike was not a nervous little person himself but an all-round character actor. But it was drawn stares at high noon.
The crowd faded into the background and they became – for both Mike and the nervous little person – the Undergrunts who claimed that the sun always rose and set in exactly the same place upon the squeezed orange horizon. Mike, since his days with Susan, had become a professional character, open for offers to appear in plays, novels, poems, operas, bar mitzvahs – even avant garde prose. But his big ambition was to go into Inner Earth since that was the life for a real man. So he joined the army.
Mike, older and, hopefully, realler, had left the army with stars and sunrise in his eyes, to appear in stories, but really his heart was not in them, as he wanted to kill someone for some cause or other. He was not a greenhorn private, being a Captain who had pensioned himself out – well respected, too – they were sorry to see him ride off into the horizon. The only regret was that there were no proper wars about when he was in service underground. His regiment was also the most respected of them: the Third Royal Mercenary Klaxon Reserves. Surprising that they sent them so far under.
The wizened old man – whom Mike found himself to have become – finally ceased his incessant chatter and looked the nervous little person straight in the eyes from below his drooping eyelids – one of which twitched uncontrollably like a tiny wounded bird’s wing. He told the nervous little person that his name was John Ogdon, a character out for what work he could get. But his continued whining to the nervous little person was almost imperceptible – a war-monger or writer obviously off his rocker ... and he soon fell asleep like a wrinkled babe in dream's arms, only to be followed by a sleep slower than death. His heart was not in writing fiction, but in the battles upon distant sunnemo-streaked islands which continued within the dreams, until the last glimmer.
Any developments that occur – please tell Mike straightaway. He is fed up with making idle threats, so the next one will not be idle, he can promise you. By the way, do you like his new wild honeyed look? He has done his hair specially to entice you, but if you snub him again, by God, he'll make it very very painful for you. Hey! Are you listening? Mike's losing his patience. OK, OK, he has got you to look as if you're listening. That's half the battle. What do you think? Is he pretty? The way he has just raised his voice accentuates the blusher, don't you think? They do say that a woman is far more eye-opening when dressed, complete with suspender-belts and artfully positioned garters and frills, than a bare one. These things turn you on, I know they do. You can't fool Mike. Like you, Mike is nothing without his wardrobe. Nor without a nervous little person like you to hear his caterwauling. But your attention is drifting again – is Mike that boring? What's going on in your little head? He made you promise to keep him abreast of all developments. What! What! You're leaving him – to disappear into the sunnemo-set! You're fed up with him! Good God, Mike owns your brain, dear wrinkled nervous little person, and you'll never get away! You've simply have to keep him fully sweet and fully informed of developments or how else do you think an old man like Mike can function?
Mike could tell you thousands of jobs he has had as a character, but he has chosen this one because it happens to be true. Once upon a time, Mike was a child and, having been a child, one can more readily appreciate his predicament. He knew he was to become an adult and there was very little he could do about it. The necessity of quitting humanity and entering such a state of grown-up disgrace was a nightmare that dogged the heels of puberty. Not that there was a sharp dividing-line. But he does recall waking up one morning a slightly different person to what he then thought he was. One with a huge left ear. Over a few months he became the nervous little person he is today, a pretty soulless, unimaginative, money-grabbing, moralistic individual with nothing to recommend him except the traces of nostalgia for his earlier state. But can one actually be "nostalgic" for something never experienced? For, then, Mike was another person. It eased the killing, if nothing else. It all has a happy ending in a way, because he is now in those very early days as a child setting up means to remind a later self of whom he may once have been. Can you credit the joy that gives him? Forever and ever, horizons apart. Yet, dreams come in two forms. Ones you know are dreams when you're dreaming them and the others that seem so real only waking can turn them back into dreams. Most of Mike's dreams used to fall into the former category but, more and more frequently these days, he experiences large doses of the latter – so much so, he is not at all sure whether he is dreaming now or not. He is pretty sure he is not. But equally he is pretty sure he is mistaken in being so confident about the existence of the current reality around him. And the "you" he addresses is out there somewhere, so simply make yourself known to him: it may help you both.
One day – Mike witnessed a soldier in Klaxon City being gutted by another soldier, and they were both in the same uniform – and in broad daylight in a dune-urban street. And nobody seemed to bother, nobody went to intervene but merely passed by as if nothing were happening. He couldn't believe his eyes. It made him sick to the pit of his stomach watching a man's intestines being harvested from his innards like a weird bouquet of sexual organs. To think the world had come to this. Nothing but nervous little people. He put it all down to dreaming – and when he wakes up eventually, he will try to find that dead soldier, to explain why he ignored his plight. But, on second thoughts, if he does wake up, where will that leave you? As the famous quotation goes: "Further north than you can possibly imagine Monday to be, there's a bed-roll and a pan of piping hot beans – and tomorrow at sunbreak you'll be able to cross that last horizon to the last pattern of sunnemo-streaked islands."
"I've never heard that said before. Anyway, want your usual?"
"No, make it a large one."
Mike thought he had just suffered a shock. Not that there could be much doubt about having a shock, except he felt as if this shock was self-inflicted, rather than deriving from an external force which could be assumed as the proximate cause. What was more, shocks in general rarely allowed their victims thus dispassionately to speculate about their nature.
"You do look a bit pale."
The nervous little person, who was not typical of that breed, bore a broad smile across his chops, as if he could not believe his own words. Indeed, after decades of seeking every pub for the innermost pub, he had learned that there was very little said in pubs that could be believed – if any of it. Even in Ogdon’s pub.
"I've just had a bit of a fright – that's all."
Mike felt his cheeks, as if that would allow him to gauge their degree of purported paleness without an element of narrative collusion. As if, as if, as if, all was irritatingly as if. That's all. That's all. That's all. Frights were not exactly run-of-the-mill, were they? Mike sensed that he had belittled something that had been very big indeed. From now on in, he needed to overblow everything, to bring it all back into kilter. He took a second gulp at his neat rum and said:
"Yes, I was coming my usual way, you know, across the plateau towards the Canterbury Oak. Done it for donkey's years."
The wrinkled nervous little person nodded, knowing full well that his head, given its head, would rather shake dissent, heads having more integrity than the people inside them.
"Well," Mike continued, "you know the bit between the field and the road-fence?"
"Yes, it's got barbed wire, hasn't it?"
The nervous little person had just proved he didn't know, despite Mike peppering his explanation with the odd "you know" or two. At the end of the day, the sad thing was simply nobody knew.
"Well, sort of," answered Mike. "Anyway, the sun being hot and real bright, I was surprised I couldn't see beyond the edge of trees – and there was a loud sneeze as if a full-blooded bird-headed buffalo type of creature had a bad cold coming from it."
Coming from it? Coming from what? There was more meaning in the words than either could countenance or give credit for. Or equally no meaning at all. Nevertheless, Mike's tongue had escaped his teeth:
"There followed a snarl, or rather a roar, louder and snortier, even doggier, than anything heard from a bull-ring."
There was colour in Mike's words, like rum so red it was darker than any blackcurrant. Fruit-picking near Klaxon was an activity which older and older people pursued these days, he thought. Some of them, really old, with lungs that had become toughened leather as a result of careless burrow-smokes and even earlier youthful solvent abuse. Or even lungs turned into bird-bodies that scratched the inside chest with their beaks. Indeed, the act of scrumping engorged ear-bulbs from the scrawny head-rows was no longer simply the holiday past-time of schoolfolk. Mike shrugged as best he could without narrative force. There was now no need of such nonsensical words to further the fright or scare or shock or whatever he cared to call it. It just was.
He sucked the Angevin drink as if it were part and parcel of his breathing process and winked a loud "you know". But nobody received such collaboration of the cheek-muscles, since the nervous little person had been called across to a fresh bevy of snorting snifters, a clique of clients who, Mike inferred, had drained their ankle-socks, yonks ago. One of them looked like someone he once knew as Susan.
And there Mike's story would end, with emptiness gored upon the narrative vacuum of a story-tellers' ultimate shock in discovering that he was none other than its purely fictitious hero Mike. An implosion of meaning: an inverted snort: pub talk. Emptiness is tantamount to non-existence. But then Susan breezed back into Mike's life with very little warning. A confirmed bachelor, being accosted in a shop by a winsome, pointy-faced girl, he suddenly rediscovered a concupiscence he didn't know he had lost. And that was how they met again, even if neither could remember meeting before. She told him that she had become a confirmed spinster or dowager like Edith. He claimed it was more complicated than that – which was later borne out by the facts – but, at the time, complexity was the last thing on his mind. He was smitten, physically stirred, fighting back an unseemly lust and, quaintly, subsumed by a spiritual adoration, too. What more could a lad like Mike have wanted? In fact, the whole thing would have been better with less.
They had several dates, before she elaborated upon their encounter. She had been following him for days, she said, a behaviour which, even now, she could not reconcile with her more customary demureness: as if she had been possessed by a third party, one who wanted to follow Mike but had no body with which to accomplish this. He looked askance. Was Susan quite mad? Doubts bred new doubts, and then back to the initial doubts, in an increasingly vicious circle. She then gave him one of her sweetest kisses which calmed all such tail-chasing: a kiss with no tongue and, even, very little of the lips, but one that tasted of old-fashioned childhood confectionery.
Gradually, without Mike noticing, in fact, they became affianced: not officially, but as if that autonomous third party, in whom he now believed as much as her, had rubber-stamped their Big Brother romance: with greater, more significant rites and dalliances waiting in the wings.
"You remember that shop where we met?"
How could I have forgotten? It was a mere month back. Her voice was mellifluous, with a barely perceptible underbuzz created by vocal valves foreign to the rest of us. Indeed, Mike had begun to see Susan as almost inhuman – not in the cruel sense of that word, but more in its other-worldliness. He believed it was his imagination. But simple imagination could not really account for a permeating feeling of otherness, an otherness truly bestowed by someone other, unseen, yet ever attentive.
"Yes, how could I forget?"
His voice, in turn, was nondescript, as far as he could tell, from within the body that owned it.
"Well, I was going to buy something – before I saw you."
"I thought you had been following me."
"Well, I had for days and days, but it was quite accidental in the shop – I had in fact given up following you – I had lost the compulsion – then I saw you amongst the Angevin cosmetic counters – and I knew it had all been leading up to that optimum moment."
Mike frowned, or at least he thought he did, without a mirror being close at hand. She had earlier given him quite a different impression with regard to the circumstances surrounding their encounter. He was still in the metaphorical boat, but he had lost one oar. His greatest fear was now of sinking.
"What was the something you intended to buy?" he asked.
New shoes, she thought.
Without changing the subject completely, he was steering the conversation away from the white water, even if that meant drifting into a dark island-lagoon of misunderstanding and increasing recrimination.
"A present for... SSSSSsorry."
She was interrupted by the stage-swags opening upon the drama which they had come to see. The audience shushed. The lights dimmed. Mike's and Susan's heads turned front. His mind was fevered. Her mind was – well, how could he tell? He wasn't omniscient. He was merely a spear-carrier: an oar-packer: a cipher: a nervous little person. The play was passable: a typical three-acter, with fewer parts: so Pinteresque Mike knew he and Susan would leave the theatre repeating inconsequences to each other, carefully preserving the printed programme for what he called posterity's nostalgia.
"A present for who – who was the present for?"
"The present?"
"Yes, that present you mentioned – who were you going to buy it for?
"Someone you don't know."
"Try me."
"Well, it was someone I once knew – before you."
"But you once said..."
"Yes, I know, but once saying something is not everything."
"Not everything?"
The two voices, one under-laid, the other over-, disappeared into the glistening darkness, leaving a dosser called Padgett Weggs with his empty hand outstretched. Mike would never see Susan again, unless he forgot the earlier meetings.
"When you fall asleep and whilst your mind's far away in dark desert and dream, your real thoughts are dead still, thus allowing the Dream Tracer to renew the templates of your soul."
Mike said this without thinking, seemingly as pretentious as ever.
"There is only one real way to prove whether you're alive or not: take a deep breath, as deep as you can go, and don't release it till you're dead sure," said the nervous little person, laughing at his own attempts to beat Mike at his own game.
But deep dreaming, as well as death,
Can slow the lungs and blunt the breath.
Mike's reply in rhyme marked the end of their game of outwitting each other – except the following night ... he dreams he is Scimitar. He slices through the earth as if it were merely scum. He meets the whetstone mornings with a hearty heave-o to the female who has this night been his sheath. There is one, though, by the name of Dognahnyi who thinks he cuts a finer figure than Mike. Thus, Mike pledges his future to teaching Dognahnyi lessons of which the past has been sadly lacking. Dognahnyi's latest female is a living animal and, so as to punish him, Mike decides to steal her from under Dognahnyi's chopper. Mike crawls beneath the bottom edge of Dognahnyi's wigwam, the sharp side of Mike's underblade slipping through the surface of the hard inner desert like a shark's fin. His oaken haft follows behind like the guiding-handle of a plough. There they are, Dognahnyi and Beth (the latter being the name Dognahnyi calls the female animal). Mike recognises her ... and a teardrop slowly wells at the tip of his silver curved tongue. Lining up for their turn are several young blades sharpening edge against edge, sparking off. Mike cringes at the sheer crudity. Dognahnyi does not need Mike's help to catch a dose of rust. Mike will leave him to his own devices, to a cruel fate that Mike cannot encourage more than by merely letting it take its course. Mike will simply forge his own lonely furrow, slide away, unnoticed. He does not fancy blunt marital aids nor animal hide upon his brightness. The only regret is that Beth once was his sweetheart.
The second dream that night was not unrelated to the first, but only with the benefit of the foresight that hindsight granted. The fire in his throat had raged for a good few hours, drilling further into his chest. But he plugged on inward, regardless, knowing that waiting at the end of the hawling-tunnel was one whom he would love with a love that could not be topped, nor even equalled. Beneath the yellow bloodshot Sunnemo, he prayed for the mercy of night. He yearned, too, for the slaking of his torrid tongue. He begged that at least a vision of the woman he was to love would be granted him ... in case he should die before reaching the real thing. Then, Eternity's eye would be assured of focusing on beauty. He stumbled, just as Sunnemo lurched from its height. How was he to know, with his eyes riveted upon the curved silver mirage of the horizon, that there was a corpse waylaid to trip him. Least of all did he recognise the corpse as his own remains which twitched as he parcelled himself within that dried-out husk, like a bird to its nest.
She sat at the very edge of the inner desert, where sand became grass. She was grinding a blade against a whetstone. The relentless noise hypnotised her, as she dreamed of the one who had promised to arrive today for her love. She ground on forever beneath the eye of Eternity.
"There is as much to be done as has already been done, the one difference being the timescale. The past is always finite, if you consider the present as a permanent way station."
The speaker was a wizened old man with a terribly long beard. As Mike pondered his words deeply, he half believed the old man was the Angel Megazanthus. In the meantime, he seemed surprised or, rather, perturbed at Mike's lack of response. An interim smile would have at least eased his concerns ... and Mike's also, perhaps. A smile can often help the smiler even more than the smiled at. But, from either point of view, a smile is worth its weight in gold. So, somewhat belatedly, Mike made a scimitar smile. But the old man, Mike’s future self, was already a corpse, breathless as the day before he was born. His voice undergrunted on within his chest, despite the lack of breath to sound it: "When the Dream Tracer delivers the templates of your soul to Megazanthus, he proceeds to hone his teeth on them." Dead, but pretentious as ever.
And when Susan told Mike she was going to a place called Moat City, he believed her. Now as old as the oldest dream, Mike imagined a place with such a name being beyond even the back of beyond. Beyond being under it.
Except for Susan, he had nobody. To be abandoned as an old man was tantamount to suicide by another's hand. Yet he held his peace. Stayed silent. His eyes speaking volumes.
"Aren't you going to wish me luck?" she asked, reading Mike's eyes better than he could see with them.
"Yes, of course, dear. But where is Moat City? And am I going with you?"
He tried to level out his expression into one of neutrality. But he had forgotten – was he her dog or her husband or her uncle or her father or, even, her son or nephew? He lived someone else’s wife. Mike was so senile now, he could not even remember whether Susan was married, divorced or a life-time spinster. Or even what his own name was (or had become).
"Moat City? Yes, it's abroad. Too far for you to go, I'm afraid."
She gave a look which was a cross between embarrassment and bereavement.
"Oh, I see. Where abroad exactly?"
His mind combined feebleness and astuteness – a wonderful way to hide shrewdness with silliness. The voice revealed neither.
"It's hard to say. Let’s say – overland. Cheating the Above, the Below and the Across. I've got a job there. All I know is an address."
"An address? So you know where it is, then. Way out west?"
"Sort of. No, not west, really. Further than west. It's hard to explain. It's sort of ... in the past.”
East, west, past – north, south, death.
"Time travel, eh?" He had evidently hit the nail on the head, since she reddened in silence. "I did not know," he resumed, "that time travel had been invented yet." He added the word 'yet' against his better judgement, but he decided that he would humour her. "I suppose this Moat City has a drawbridge."
She perked up. "No, it hasn't got a drawbridge. I've seen a photo of the place and its name doesn't derive from there being a moat actually surrounding the place but because the city itself straggles round a huge lake of sea, like an enormous complete circle of buildings, and 'moat' is a sort of metaphor for the actual shape of the city itself."
Her description was painstaking. Mike did not have the same educational background as Susan, since, like all people generations apart, you try to better yourselves in the shape of your posterity, don't you? And it is true to say that he hadn't stinted at all in giving to Susan all that he could. He even gave up having cooked breakfasts to pay for her pet dog to have obedience classes. A Dad’s duty after all. One that he doesn't regret nor resent. So, some of Susan's words went straight over his head. Hence his question:
"What's a metaphor?"
"It's a sort of shorthand for things."
"Oh, I see."
But he didn't. His question had reminded him of that old joke: what's the difference between a daggafor and a pub? What's a daggafor? What's a dagger for, you ask, well, it's for cutting your feathers off! Yet, looking back on it all, after his lobotomy, Moat City did become a metaphor of sorts. A metaphor for life. Body and soul. Mind and matter. Blood and flesh. Moat and meat. Just the right philosophical jump start he needed. Spirit-diluted or flesh-corrupted reality – it depended on how you looked at it.
Susan didn't emigrate after all. And following her accident with a knife, it was discovered that she was a registered brain donor. Very useful to Mike, as it turned out, and there's nothing like your own blood and flesh coming back to you, is there?. He is glad he got her such a good education, even though originally it was self-evidently not for selfish reasons. Whatever the brain, however, there's, no high-faluting globetrotting for the likes of Mike. Too long in the tooth for that sort of malarkey. The further west you go, the further east you are. Meantime, his dear old mongrel Dognahnyi keeps him company: the wag he takes walkies to the pub for talk and more talk. A retired office worker like Mike has got to make up for lost time somehow, hasn't he? Got to cut right through the matter to what it's really for. In the war against time and madness. He lived someone’s else knife.
Sometimes Mike thinks it is him who is taken out walkies to the Canterbury Oak. Barks like knife-twists in the trunk. As if. Sort of. You know.
****
The park was surrounded by silos and gleaming metal pylons, with puffs of electric-blue smoke escaping from the enormous silver canisters which floated in Klaxon’s metal-grey sky.
“Didn’t you know I was coming?”
“If I did, I would not be here, would I?”
“I don’t know how to take you, Lope.”
“Take me how you like, Dog, but do not read any meaning into my words, because I guess I am not even talking to the likes of you.”
Dog squinted quizzically at his companion on the park bench. The opening gambits were expected to be tenta¬tive, feeling their way towards less insubstantial statements fitting for a Summit Meeting between dossers.
Lope wielded an empty angevin-whisky bottle, at which he looked wistfully from time to time. His dowdy clothes, which had not even seen better days in the best of times, belied his well-spoken, rounded-out articulations of speech. His brief had been merely to test the ground, since the man called Dog may have been shrewder than given credit for. When the world teetered on the balance, not even half chances could be taken.
Dog carried a brief-case, evidently brand new, in real calf leather, with his own embossed initials. Taking a gold key which was tied to the string around his waist, he inserted it into the lock and, after hiding his fumbling with the combina¬tion numbers, he opened it with the sound of falling domino trip-tumblers and the crack of fresh-cured leather.
Lope noticed that Dog’s garb was a Klaxon army great¬coat, stinking of mothballs even out here in the cold air and veritably green with well-seasoned mould. His tie seemed as if it had not been unloosed for at least fifty year or more and his shoes, if they had once reflected the beaming faces of children in the polished uppers, were now hidey-holes for scuffed demons.
“If you’re not talking to me, what’s all this bother then in actually moving your lips and letting noises out?” weasled Dog.
“Good heavens, man, do not take what I say person¬ally,” laughed a perky Lope.
“I cannot hold with such high-faluting talk. I’m a man of means.” Dog moved his oily hair from in front of his eyes as if he were shutting back the cover of a book.
“I do not doubt it, Dog.”
Dog had never considered Lope doubting it, so he wondered why the other dosser was making such a song and dance about not doing so. He rummaged in the briefcase and, after a period of heavy tutting, produced from it a scroll done up with red sealing-wax and a ridiculously large bow of blue ribbon.
“You know wot I have here?”
“I do not doubt it, Dog.”
Dog appreciated the non-sequitur: “Well, supposing there may be some doubt, Lope, I’ll put it on the record...”
“No need, no need.”
Unknown to the two dossers, several other faces were dodging in and out of the old park rides nearby: the grimy, unsmiling, pointy faces of nervous little people, these faces leaning forward to tease out at least some clue as to the words passing as a real conversation. A lot seemed to hang on this meeting, more than the individual importance of the two participants added together.
“This here is a charter.” Dog pronounced the word “charter” with care and some pride. “A charter for peace within all Inner Earth. He elongated the vowel in such a way as to give a further meaning to the word “peace” which it really could not support unless he mistook it for a different word altogether.
Lope was not to be out-done by surprise props (even though his own prop was already out in the open). “And do you know what this is?” He pointed to the empty angevin-whisky bottle which did not bear any label or sign of identification other than its glass and characteristic shape.
“A bo.. .ttttel.” Dog accentuated the consonant to show he had breeding (and no favouritism towards vowels).
“Not just a simple bottle, Dog. It is an empty bottle – and you do not regu¬larly find many of these about, do you? You will have to go a long way to find an empty bottle. Full ones are two a penny.” Lope pointed at the surrounding pylons hung with what appeared to be bottles of fizzy lemonade.
“An emptttty bo...ttttel, then.”
“Yes, Dog, this is the emptiest bottle you will ever see. Never has there been an emptier bottle.”
The prying faces had now been joined by the broomstick bodies they owned and were grouping nearer to the park bench, many of them straining to hear the fateful, if haphazard, words. In the distance were several black-garbed Nannies wheeling prams through the mudpark
Lope continued: “Give me that charter and I will put it inside the bottle for safe-keeping.”
“Let me see your Kree-Denshalls...”
“In the beginning there was the Word. At the end, there were merely Creden¬tials.” It was almost as if Lope were making it up as he went along.
“You reeeelly are him, then? I didn’t believe it, but you are him, no mistak¬ing.” Dog had not wanted to appear ignorant of any passwords or codes and handed the charter to Lope who forthwith threaded it into the narrow neck of the bottle, surreptitiously leaving just a tab of ribbon poking out. The pointy faces were now so close they lurched like puppet-heads on poles between the co-conspirators.
After shaking hands, Lope walked back along the path which wound between the pylons and silos towards the park gates. Dog remained sitting and, with a further crack of new leather, snapped his brief-case shut with a flourish. He lay down on the bench using the brief-case as a pillow and snored himself to sleep. It had been a hard day. Working towards peace within Inner Earth was very tiring.
Even Dog had forgotten that the real charter was still in his brief-case and the cleverly crafted duplicate was now in Lope’s empty bottle. If Lope discovered this trick, which he must when the future dictated, there would be Hell to pay. But it was all worthwhile: for the sake of just a little quiet, a little peace to snooze and forget the troubles of the world about him.
Even in his sleep, he was sure he had taken out the right charter from the briefcase. How could anyone doubt it?
The faces on broomsticks spoke, each with a line from a conversation yet to be held, or never to be held, or was held once in a different past to this future.
“Do not doubt it, Dog, do not doubt anything.”
“Each of the two charters was a replica of the other one except perhaps for the words inside.”
“You know what was written on the charter, Dog.”
“Mere figures of speech but I forget exactly what.” Dog often spoke to himself when asleep.
“But we thought you were a man of means, Dog.”
“Right on, I always mean what I do say, even if I wonder sometimes whether I meant what I did say.”
“You’re a man of impeccable credentials, Dog.”
The snoring grew louder as the parkland darkened. The scarecrow shapes, now fat with shadow, shambled off to see if they could find Lope.
In anger, Lope threw the empty bottle at the nuclear power station complex into which the land had long since grown, hoping for a lucky (or, better still, unlucky) strike.
He had time, however, to fold the blank charter into a ship shape and launch it upon the viscous meniscus of radioactive slurry which the mudpark’s paddling pool had already become. He did not notice the lolly-stick children launching toy tanker-boats from its margins, amid pointed laughter. And the number of prams had increased, wagon-trained around the pool like giant upturned beetle-birds.
Lope had been wrong since, at the last, Inner Earth, the whole universe in fact, would lack credentials.
****
The clouds are churning around the cone of Mount Core, with clutches of overlapping lightning sparking continuously within the roiling masses.
Further up from these Agraskan stretches of the River Balsam that taper towards this dead volcano, huddling along its bank, where an incipient wharf is being constructed, is the new Arthurian Moat City: a strange mixture of different styles of building, blended from the remains of several wars, it shines forth on this stormy night, all its windows lit, to welcome any lonely wayfarer in from the brooding marshes that, with the lake-river, is surrounded by its community. The river itself had formerly formed the moat after which the city was named, circular the round table-land upon which the Mediaeval style habitations squatted
One of the town’s youths, a bit of a loner since his close pal died at the paws of a grizzly bear in the Fall before last, is lurking in his dripping den on the bank beside the river rapids halfway between Moat and Core. He prefers it here, whatever the weather for, it has to be admitted, he has made a good job of the intertwining of the plant and tree produce trawled from the countryside around. He feels as snug as anything, looking out of his den at the drenched fronds that shake themselves like dogs fresh from a swim.
He can also survey most of Moat itself, its lamps shimmering in the storm, and he wonders why, of all people, he has ended up like this – outside the circle of light, as it were, one, although self-fulfilled at the top of his head, deep down yearning for something he cannot quite define... He often sat in this den reading soggy copies of King Arthur comics, but Merlin was not quite the image, not quite that to which reconciliation was needed...
Had it all started when the other kids mocked him about the boogey-man? It is true, he always had believed in the Angel Megazanthus ... ever since his parents had told him that, if he didn’t go to sleep, he would see this “charming” gentleman coming to visit him. He did not question how this feat could be accomplished through barred windows and a fully bolted bedroom door, but it was the fear engendered by this very impossibility that frog-marched him into sleep.
He made the bad mistake of telling his close pal (the one who was destined to dance death with a bear come his twelfth birthday) about these visits (none of which, of course, he’d seen because he was fast asleep at the time) and this so-called friend blabbed it to all and sundry, including the school-teacher (the latter forthwith threatening to imprison our hero within the blackness of the classroom chalking-board where it was said Megazanthus spent his days...) and so forth...
And now, here he is today in his den, ostracized even by his parents – they now ridiculed him for actually believing their boogey tales to get him to sleep when he was younger. And despite the craft-work that he once put into his den, it is now allowing drips of cold rainwater to run down the back of his collar and into his left ear. He envies the warmth seeming to emanate from Moat itself...
Suddenly, all the lights go out in the city in one fell swoop of darkness. This followed a particularly bright shaft of lightning that arched from the peak of Mount Core to the top-most chimney in the town, as if Heaven and Hell had circuited up on some enormous cosmic grid...
He thinks to himself ... abruptly realises that Moat has not yet been wired up for electricity; the authorities are gradually working along the river communities starting from the harbour town of Klacton, illuminating each township along the way like Christmas trees, in great ordinations of currents along washing-lines on Y-sticks...
Moat is due for this eucharist of electricity come Sunnemo Spring – so, in short, how have all the oil lamps and candles, with which they have to eke out until then, gone out in one go? Some Heavenly power cut? Or has some enormous opaque monster, hunched up on haunches of night, settled itself between our hero and the town, thus obliterating its homely beaconing?
He shudders bodily. Shyfryngs in the encroaching damp coldness. Alone in the world, the only flea left alive on the body of Lemuel Gulliver or Phineas Fogg. He pops his cheek with a finger to make a comforting sound, for he used to do that in the classroom, much to the hilarity of his school pals (before the trouble with Megazanthus hauntings and tauntings).
The lightning is now so fierce, playing at the lips of Mount Core, that he begins to doubt whether it is lightning at all. He even doubts his own identity. And to doubt one’s identity is only asking for nervous little people to swarm round eager to steal it for themselves.
He sees that the lightning is now so intense it etches the glistening roofs of Moat against the sky, so whatever squatted between had moved... But the lamps are still out, not even his little sister Amy’s dim nightlight glimmering in the attic of his home which he fancies he sees silhouetted along with all the other staircases of chimney-stacks that make up the forbidding profile of the city.
However, there is a glimmer, very slight, coming from what he takes to be his own bedroom – as if the occupant is secretly reading a thrilling Arthurian story under the sheets with a candlewick-torch.
So he leaves his dank lair, snorts at a few inquisitive churn-owls surveying his exit with bemused interest and shuffles off towards the town. He is set on punishing any brat who will not sleep. That’s the raison d’être of any boogie man worth his salt.
The night wears on. The lightning fizzles out, as if sucked to an even deeper core by the funnel of the dead volcano. The mighty River Balsam just crashes on like a lumbering beast; and between the sound of the rhythmic grappling with its rapid rocks, one can hear bears lurching to and fro in desperate search for a dry spot to doze off the rest of the long night.
And no lights, not even the eeny-meeniest glimmer comes from Moat City. For several more hours the place just teeters on the edge of one big awakening. And during this coda of inner night, the Angel Megazanthus (or one shambling in his name) shambles back to that den so carefully, so conscientiously constructed from our hero’s skin out of which our hero has just jumped .
****
With a hammer sword spliced to his side, Megazanthus shambled like a mammoth, with tusky beards, thickened lips, thumper nose and a frown fit enough to irrigate a greater dome even than his head. He grunted from the depth of his chest as if his mouth were not implicated. He was one whose tongue, ages ago, someone or something had rudely excised, and he now found it impossible to wield speech. Also, with lips gradually turning into two beaks that clicked and clashed, they could not assist with even any makeshift articulation.
Whatever his deficiencies, that night, Whofage City celebrated his arrival. Come morning, though, all took on a new complexion, as different as Sunnemo from nemo-moon. The wild parties had become breakfasts all too easy to sick up; the crazy notions had turned to worries of the clock and of the purse; the idle chitchat and pub talk had long since run out of words; the eyes ran with yellow sleep; and the visitor now looked more like a monster than a man.
The townspeople rose from their beds, made the best of bad jobs and hunched their shoulders at their smallholdings where not even a solitary chicken could scrape together enough provender for the day. They donned sufficient clothes just this side of decency; and they proceeded to come and go in the sunnemo-sweltering city square where the visitor still snored beneath the dry fountains. Having woken, with their eyes still glazed over with an ingredient of reality which some called dream, others life, the citizens crouched like school children on the dusty ground, to await the visitor's own wakening.
The city was at the foot of a inward panhandle. The endemic swirling fabrications of season ran their course without due consideration for each other. Indeed, the previous night, at the height of the festivities, the visitor had mimed his journey to Whofage ... lengthened out his legs, lowered his head nearer the ground and pretended his feet had become only fit to be root vegetables, following his trek. His massive lungs had done nothing to cool the sweaty spaces within which his body had, in turn, briefly incubated along the way. The seepage from his own eyes had done little to hide a wild fury, one that danced like the hugging haze of firebirds he was forced to follow.
If only he had tongue enough to flicker in pace with his pantomime of passage, his power for prayers and chutzpah would have been a whole sight better. Indeed, whilst he boasted that he was an Angel, none could even begin to believe him, because his boasts were silent ones. They asked him for his words and, instinctively wondering whether he was the long-awaited Megassiah, they told him their own secret wishes, even prattled prayers by his side because prayers, they knew, were most efficacious when you could actually see to whom the prayers were sent winging.
But the vigils merely grew hotter as the Sunnemo seasons leap-frogged each other with no winters between. Eventually, the visitor became a mountain of stagnant flesh. Only his hammer sword remained recognisable, untarnished by the sultry air. But, then, came another like him. Or like him, when he had first come. This new visitor (also calling himself Megazanthus) dislodged the sword from between the palpitating thews of the earlier visitor's self-made monument and sliced joints of him asunder, like chopping away ravenous squealing runts from their mother's steaming udder. The crowd of citizens crooned in pain, since their own unborn babies were swollen beyond the lips of the wombs. Yet one citizen was able to speak:
"We flock to this baking square every morning in good faith. We kept him here as a dream-duct for our prayers."
The tidal slurry that the first visitor had become was pointed out, before continuing.
"We felt he had something to teach us about birdsong, about beauty, about ugliness, about faith itself. We asked him. We had a thousand questions to ask. If our enemies came, would he up and fight? If our feathered friends came, would he tell them of the luck he'd dispense to them as he would to us? When he decided to speak, with all incomprehensible gutturals forsaken, would he teach us of the past and how we're to create a new past for a brighter future? Would he ring the unfaulted brazenness of his bell along the length of Inner Earth in clear and certain tones? But he possessed no clapper for his bell, as one of us eventually found out for sure when prizing open two loving rows of teeth in his massive beak-jaw, to ease pain in the rotted rutted gums. Yes, it was his throat that indeed ran up and ran down the scales of utterance, but all we heard were empty boasts. While chests are boastful, they're inarticulate, too – and, indeed, if he had ideas, if he had solutions or benedictions for our troubles, they were never transcribed by the guttered cords of his oaken neck. So, he turned out as effective as the very tongue of land he had crossed to come here: in short, he was little better than an ordinary god."
The voice of the second visitor answered with the following non-sequiturs accidentally disguised as the most logical statement possible:
"I am the one true god called Megazanthus – a god who can speak out louder and clearer and fluenter than any other god. Give me your questions, poor folk, your hopes, your desires, your unanswered dreams, because each word I utter becomes a truth even as I utter it. So, quit this muck-strewn prayer-mat!"
He pointed to the pile of sodden cack within which the first visitor still remained conscious.
The townspeople shouted at once, all in a babble of tongues racing to communicate at last with a matchless chosen one. Some even rose from their haunches but, such had been the length of time in crouching, they left their feet behind like carrots. The noise was so loud that the second visitor collapsed upon the first, lungs ballooning from his largest ear.
The people later wondered whether their uproar could have stoned the second visitor as deaf as a hairy cabbage. Or, more probably, he had always been deaf. Some began to believe that gods must, by necessity, lack at least one human capacity, actually to mark them out as gods.
After all, entities with capacities greater than humans wouldn't surely have bothered to be gods and have to listen to prayers, because prayers actually needed, they thought, to be two-way conduits of mutual faith-and-favour between the participants.
The townsfolk wandered off, muttering that, whatever the niceties of the case, unheard prayers were, of course, worse than unanswered ones.
If the people had been bright enough, they would have foisted a course in reading and writing upon their gods. Better still: osmosis, because there was at least one god holding court somewhere in the lower universe whose whole basis of worship and prayer depended on a paranormal conduit, one called telepathy. Such a capacity helped compensate for a heavenly blindness. In the main, however, sad to report, gods, as well as their groundlings, were insensitive and unimaginative beings.
The citizens had a party that night which, despite the soaring heat, was wilder than ever: plenty of young meat baked in wrap-arounds of old … followed by a rhythmic stumping dance till dawn. Not many stayed at home – but those who did so prayed against a further encroachment of gods. A few of those few even prayed that the need for prayer be lifted from their shoulders – so that they could spend their time farming the panhandle. One of those who stayed at home didn't want to be sold out to faith yet again and put a finger out in the darkness to touch an Angel's nose, believing that words could only be truths in a world where truths were wordless. That one wrote ‘The Tenacity Of Feathers’.
****
The worrying thing about Agraska was that, despite being positioned in the same hemisphere as Lope's homeland, each night seemed to blend into the next one, with only a fleeting hint of dawn-dusk round about the time that his luminous watch indicated it to be midnight. In contrast, his homeland was roughly in line with the 20/20 day shift, where seasons only created a small adjustment in the ratio between light and dark. For the record, elsewhere, seasons were harder taskmasters and created wilder fluctuations from the norm. Such concerns should not have affected Lope – but, as the events still unfolded around him, he could not guarantee that irrelevancies would not become relevant and vice versa.
He was currently on a job for the Sudra Shoes Incorporated: a cover for higher things than shoes. Its head office was in the outskirts of his homeland, so that, when a child, he could see its tall buildings along the horizon like teeth of a comb. His parents said it was their ambition that he should become an employee of this organisation, as soon as he was able to leave the house on his own two legs. Very good fluctuating emoluments and perks could be taken for granted. So, his awe, and even consternation, was overwhelming as he knelt by the bed and gazed at the distant pillars of his destiny gradually becoming snagged with the strands of inner night.
Later, of course, Lope was far more confident of his own identity. He had been with Sudra Shoes for some years, and he was entrusted with their most important missions. His parents were still alive; but the outbuildings of the organisation's original head office had encroached nearer to their house, threatening compulsory purchase in the near future. There was no stopping progress.
He was now located outside his homeland, surveying the lie of the land for a proposed site of another head office, with the eventual aim of moving all the staff from one to the other. Cheaper than renovation of the original head office, the architect had advised. He had already called back on the walkie talkie that the only drawback he could establish was the constant darkness: but, since the air conditioning of the new head office would control light/dark as well as heat/cold, he could see no problem: as long as the staff had all facilities under one roof and the relocation expenses were sufficient.
Despite having been steeped in the organisation's self-effacement programme for three decades of his existence, he still had a soft spot for his parents. He believed the more he held back on criticism of this worrying area, the more it was likely that his parents would be left in peace. However, he could hardly recall what they looked like or what they may have turned into, and one of the vital ingredients of love, they told him, was visual communication between the parties. But that took no account of blind people – or, for that matter, people living, for lengths of time on end, in constant darkness: only at midnight, perhaps, could love flourish. He had conducted himself always in accordance with the organisation's motto:
Sudra Shoes are the one great virtue;
For Dreams will never even start to hurt you.
As he sat shivering between the dark masses of land and sky, he could not guess if his watch told the right time. Then, with the suddenness of a single brushstroke of luminous paint across the sky, he saw the first distant skeleton of an office tower in the process of construction – and disciplined Indian Files of hooded figures trudging towards it. Some pushing prams. Some nervously twittering. Obviously, the organisation had taken his walkie talkie messages more seriously than he intended. And even more abruptly, it was night shift again, for the short storm of dusk-dawn passed on around the world. He fell asleep like a nervous little person at the interface of two nowheres. He called out: his parents did not come. They never had a walkie talkie (except Lope as a toddler, of course!). There was no stopping regress. He fell fitfully for sleep's enticing.
****
The night so far had been quiet, far too quiet. I cursed, for whatever happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep. If our baby started whining, then there was no hope even for a fitful doze. But the utter silence was worse. I sat up in the bed, brow glistening, ears pricking, worried that our baby would rediscover the squalls in its lungs at the slightest suspicion of its father sleeping. My wife snored beside me, although I seldom had the cruelty to describe her night habits, come the daylight.
Soon, despite my posture, I did drift off into some dream interruptions – about a cathedral with a dome and a woman I loved more than my wife. I then paced what I can only describe as an alien landscape. Sunnemo was not yet up, but a strange living fluid filled the air with an inhalable light. I noted that I breathed through gills in the sides of my neck and that I possessed a tail which dragged a trough behind my legs in the loamy grey sand. Someone had hung decorations from the sky and I heard the distant thuds of an impending storm. Before much longer, I came in sight of an estate house, like those often found when hiking in parts of Great Britain. Its windows were lit brighter than the pervasive glow, so I walked spritely to a lower bay window. Groups of people stood about in a large drawing-room, barely moving and talking no more than in desultory mumbles. I somehow knew they were mumbles, rather than words, despite the intervening window-pane. One woman had a bundle in her arms at which, from time to time, she cooed and purred. Whatever constituted the bundle, it was alive, moving of its own volition.
I was abruptly awoken by a squawking. It was my turn to see to it. Considering that my wife was still snorting like a beached whale, I withdrew my body from the bed, pulled on my stringy dressing-gown and approached the nursery along the dark corridor. Sometimes, I wished its mother had taken up breast-feeding. That would have enabled me to stay in bed whilst she went off to feed herself to the brat. But then, on second thoughts, I cringed at the thought of the milk mountains.
The night-light was still flickering in its jamjar; the curtains seeming to move, as a result. The cot cover budged up and down, as I went over to the tallboy, upon which we had left the creature's comforts. Eventually, when I lowered the teat, I found the opening straightaway and listened to the suck-suck while the clear liquid filtered down. Gradually, its short sharp breaths lengthened, and the guzzling became more of a ritual than a struggle for life and death. I knew the next thing would be the shit, but we could live better with stench than screech.
I replaced the still unwieldy udder on the tallboy, blew on the night-light to tease out its life for the rest of the dark hours, tucked in the cot covers around the gentle rise and fall of the mound – and, unaccountably, tested the strength of the side-bars, knowing babies couldn't fly like birds. I laughed at my own dozy thoughts. Then it spoke. Not with a babyish gurgle, but a shrill voice. It actually negotiated its tiny tongue around real words. Words I understood. Could find in the dictionary, if need be. Write down. I listened unintently, since surely this must also be dream – surely I had drowsed off whilst giving it a nibble of my engorged masculine tit.
"Can you hear me?" it whined, amid a streamer of pure white phlegm.
"Yes," I found myself answering.
"Dreams," it continued, "within the mother's womb are commonplace, many experts say."
"Are they?"
"Within the watery world of tubes and black hanging things, listening to the mountainous thunderflesh of her inner earth, a dream can form like weather."
There was no chance to note my dream's undreamlike quality, since a storm abruptly struck with the breaking of red-flecked waters and an irresistible thrust upon a tiny body. The G forces were so powerful, the body turned wrinkly and unsightly, its mind fogged with fear, beshitted with memories gone bad...
****
The Elizabethans had a fixation about Death. And that's how most of them ended up. But one travelled ways so straitened, so full of blind alleys, that he ended up in corners of a London where time did not seem to matter, let alone pass. His name was Lope or Ogdon, but today he's Lope and he roams City churches, like a noon-time shadow, a black aura huddled up to the church wall as if tapping its spiritual power for a further go on the dodgem of life. I first made his acquaintanceship when I was courting Susan. She was to be my girl and I wooed her even to the point of obsession. Other men often accosted me, by the scruff of my lapels, saying she was in no way my girl. But I preferred to believe in myself, not them. They were liars, in any event. You could see it in their eyes. Susan's eyes, on the other hand, were wide open and she said I could see to the bottom of her soul, and I believed her. I understood her. I was secure in her simplicity. But, then, of course, I had not accounted for Lope.
Susan and I, when walking out, often sat in the grounds of City churches, fresh from business lunches with the Exchange Brokers. Our favourite was St Paul's Cathedral, not least, on my part, because its dome looked like a woman's breast. Susan was full of ideas about her future career (as long as she could obtain the right contacts). Often, she expounded about the making of money and what she described as filling the space that a man inhabits with the irregular shape of a woman. But I knew Susan better than Susan knew Susan. She was all up front but, deep within, without outward admission, she saw Lope as well. Only Sensitives, I believed, could follow such fleeting hair-pieces which often darted up and down church walls like apprentice angels' dusters. People steeped in Stocks and Shares need not apply. Don't call us...
On the occasion we first encountered Lope, Susan was sitting on the gravestone of a City businessman who had founded a Coffee House which later transmogrified into an Insurance Company Conglomerate. She was holding forth in her mock-serious manner to which I had grown accustomed. "If we could demolish St Paul's," she said, "that would leave room for a few more Futures Exchanges or Eurobond Dealing Houses – it's about time this City shrugged off the loose appendages of the past. There are not enough Computer Mainframes for the Unit Trust or Put Option mega-yields to be accommodated – it's a scandal – nobody will miss St Paul's..." She rambled on in her attractive satirical fashion, and I laughed in spirit with her words. It all sounded too much like a speech to be true. I loved her, you see. She was a poet at heart – like me. That was why I brought her to the churches. I wanted to cuddle her, too. I needed someone as sensitive as myself to cradle my head to her soft bosom.
Suddenly, I saw him, creeping like my image of an Elizabethan. The only one left. Susan was at first unaware of his presence, with her back resting against the gravestone. His open mouth seemed full of creamy ice which he sicked up all over Susan's power dress. He acted like an evil kid. A non-Sensitive would have said it was simply the night coming in sooner than the dusk. But we both knew that we had met Lope, a representative from another age. But she called the new Lope by another name. An Angel of the Night. She could not admit it, of course – she pretended nothing at all had happened. And, even when I challenged her with it, she merely shrugged and said it was only to be expected.
We encountered so-called Lope on several other occasions. He dug at the graves, black elastic hose stretching back to the church wall like thick kite strings. He followed us along Bishopsgate and Fen Church Street, loping between the shuttered foreign banks in the guise of an urban scarecrow. He swung from lamp standards in the vein of monkey-birds, his eyes floating in the dark sorbets of Winter. Yet Susan was, from the very first encounter with Lope, quickly promoted, not staying in any one job long enough to be discovered as a true Sensitive, as I knew (and still know) was her real condition. She became Stockbroker General and instigated a whole chain reaction of fiscal meltdowns – but, as during an earlier war, St Paul's managed to withstand the decimation around it.
Susan has now begun to live with Lope and she does not have much time for me any more. It's like losing a mother, rather than a sweetheart. I still wander the wedges between leaning computer complexes, where churches used to squat. I feel that Lope is good for Susan no doubt, because he once lived in the Alchemical Age of Queen Elizabeth the Second where fifties met nineties. The true Elizabethan. One who followed Dickens. And even Churchill. A contemporary of Thatcher. The real McCoy of an Elizabethan. That era of history has much to teach us, since women were in control and there's still nothing like their soft touch.
The last time I saw Susan, I asked her if she remained my girl, since I still had a crush on her. Susan's mouth yawned wide to answer and black treacle stretched like split innards from tooth to tooth. Something moved inside her blouse. Evidently, she and Lope are more than simply good friends. But it's no good crying over spilt milk. I merely hope that they will find time, amid all their other civic duties, to visit St Paul's to disentangle it from the barbed wire with which the City Guild has seen fit to surround it. On the other hand, perhaps such fencing is to keep the Sensitives inside the Cathedral, safe from the outside world. And, albeit a man, I'm the only one left outside with the soft touch.
Meantime, either side of the dream, the baby blows kisses of creamy white spittle, for me to suck.
