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I was murdered by my mummy and daddy.
The bars of the cot stretched up on either side of me and conjoined along the top like my own bones grown into a prison, shuddering in the candlef lame... a roofless prison, since the warders knew I could not fly or float.
I dream of a loose clutter of farm buildings where nobody seemed to work or live - or if they did, kept their curtains closed so that outsiders would pass through ignoring their presence. The trees and chimneystacks were picked out against a sky of mottled grey... the air’s sound peppered with birdsong and cockcrow. An orange volkswagen squats on splayed tyres in a pub car park. A red sign indicating Wem Ales are sold here - or were once sold when there existed real customers to buy and staff to cock the pumps.
If I were to live beyond childhood, I would one day visit such a place... and maybe understand the machinery of buildings and open space.
“He’s asleep.” I heard mummy’s voice, ever on the brink of hysteria.
“He sleeps too long. He never wakes us with squalls of hunger and pain. How can we obtain the fulfilment of parental duty and be disturbed from our beauty sleep to tend his cares... He is basically selfish.”
Daddy’s monotones were poised on an undercurrent of learned responses; he was hug-toeing a tightrope I had prepared for him by means of my listening mind.
Reincarnation reversed, I slept in the conscious coma of an intensive care ward. My future life flickered through me like the past, memories with no scaffolding of experience.
A ginger cat had scooted into the gravelly car park. It took one glance at me and disappeared with the flick of a tail. I merely saw it by the corner of my eye, but I thought it was probably the only real thing in the whole dream.
Dozing, undozing, I fleeted between the dream and the shimmering nursery. Two large faces rose above me, each with tears rilling their cheeks as if twin moons were oozing blood. I reached out with my tiny hand towards them in the guise of touching them back to health. But my fingernails, by their own volition, sharpened and jutted from their fleshy beds, a beast unsheathing its claws… wanting to leave its mark on reality.
Towards the end of the deserted car park, a swing jabbed with the freshening fitful wind, as if a ghost were mugging up on the art of childhood.
Mummy and daddy stirred me from the stupor of near birth, tickling my chest as they cooed in the nonsensical jargon of second childishness. I vowed to turn their tears to real blood, for not putting me to a final sleep.
And I wake cruelly into full middle acre in the foreign land of the future... where, somewhere, my own children await my return from a business trip, from a business I shall never in my own heart be able to master. My car, in which I sit, is parked alongside the Volkswagen and I prepare to drive towards a meeting which, according to my green diary in the glove compartment, I’d arranged. I wonder how I learned to drive... I badly need a refresher course. I riffle rapidly through the preprinted part of the diary... and finally reach the page of personal details where I find someone has written out my name, address and blood group.
On glimpsing up, two ribboned faces reflect in the windscreen and rearview mirror and curse me Orphan!
(published 'Arrows Of Desire' 1990)
As a freak of fate, those who were already there when Antonian arrived in the lamp room, were discussing the dice-throwing set who used to frequent the commercial markets all over the world. Antonian had once considered himself to be part of that scene, but not for some years. It all came flooding back to him when someone shouted out: “Hey! Antonian, thrown a clutch of sixes lately?”
He scowled at the unseen perpetrator of this cruel jollity.
The gas lamps were so aligned with the wall mirrors, they cast shadows over the faces on the settees, but made the ceiling brighter than a sunny sky in mid-June.
He went to the hatch in the wall where pootch was being served at a guinea a schooner. The young lady serving, in contrast to the customers, was in full view, not even a shadow down her cleavage.
“Six schooners,” he ordered.
She poured them from a cask with a brass tap.
“Can you top them up - there’s at least half an inch of head.”
She stared back.
“Oi, Mistah, you may be a right oo-de-lah in your mummy’s eyes, but here you get what yer given. That’ll be six guineas and, if you want me to say please, thàt’ll be another guinea on top!”
Antonian fidgetted his feet. The lamps flickered as a nearby underground train shook the whole building. Like ghosts, the faces of the other drinkers were partially revealed by the tapering, leaning and bluing of the gas jets. He recognized at least one of his fellow shakers from the old days, one who owed him more than vice versa.
“Hey, Jack,” he called, “Give this here lady a guinea and she says she’ll say please.”
“Yes,” she laughed, “I’ll say please for a guinea and give me yet another, I’ll give you a sweet thank you too!”U
“How sweet, Brenda?”
“You’ll see.”
He put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of tight change. He threw it into her cleavage and heard the splash several seconds later.
“Is that enough, Brenda?”
She smiled innocently and fished down her front to retrieve the payment.
Meanwhile, he who had been addressed as Jack had stepped up to the hatch. If anyone had a misaligned smile he did - either that or his head had been put on at the wrong angle.
“Yes, I thought it was you Jack - come to rub along again with your old Uncle Antonian, eh? We were muckers once, so let’s call it quits. Give me a wad, and I’ll let this young lady have another one for her chest of drawers ... and maybe she’ll entertain us both together, later.”
“And maybe I won’t”, she said, as she topped up the six schooners.
“Thanks, Brenda, have one for yourself.”
Antonian wrapped the six glasses in his fist as if he were a born waiter and, without warning, smashed them all to the floor, splinters of glass and flecks of pootch flying in all directions … save one, where Antonian himself stood with Jack.
The rest of the company were not so lucky. They had their women picking shards out of their cheeks for weeks after.
But that was the last six Antonian ever threw. He left the lamp-room that night - smiling from ear to ear and, for the benefit of those who pry, he was carried out in a state of apparent drunkenness. Well, what do you think, after downing six schooners of pootch?
Brenda (if that was her real name), when dressing later that night, told Jack that she’d enjoyed it more than ever, his new pouch being far more chunky.... But it had been strangely dark in the lamp-room and, in this day and age, what matters is who trumped her - names were wild, bodies shuffled and tricks far too easy to take - and who cares whose deal it was anyway.
(published ‘The New Truth’ 1988)
A collaboration with PF Jeffery
"Men!" my travelling companion snorted.
It was her first remark since I had joined her in the train's Ladies Only compartment, boarding, as I had, at a rural halt with a single island platform. I had thought such stations and compartments to have long since vanished from British Rail. There was a sense of travelling in time, as well as space. Glancing down at my hem, I was almost surprised to see the short skirt in which I'd set out that morning, rather than the floor-sweeping fashion of Edwardian times.
"Men!" she repeated, more loudly, seeming to demand a response.
"Men?" I asked diffidently.
"Yes - men: great ugly brutes. Their skin grows a horrible hairy rind. Every day they peel it off with sharp blades, only to have it regrow by night."
I smiled. Her reply seemed to suppose that I, of all people, didn't know what men were.
"Not all of them," I ventured placidly.
"Not all of what, what?"
"Not all men peel off their hairy rind. Some have beards."
"Tush, child! Do not speak of them! They're the worst... All are rapists... And some are..."
"Some are what?"
"It is best that one of your tender years does not know. Indeed, I've already said too much. I should not have mentioned men at all... Not in your hearing, anyway..."
"Why not in MY hearing in particular?" I suddenly must have looked more my age with a hint of a frown, since she evidently now intended to take me into her full confidence. She leant forward, as if there were someone else ear-wigging. The mouth hypnotised me with the way it spoke.
"Men, my dear, are foul creatures who do not rightfully belong on Mother Earth." She sat back with a flourish.
I nodded, despite thinking her proposition ludicrous. Being alone together with someone in a corridorless train does carry with it the responsibility of tact and diplomacy.
"Well," she resumed, leaning forward again, "even as recent as Edwardian days, there had only been ladies in the world. Till these aliens came from outer space with their coiled arrangements below their bellies. They brainwashed most of us to believe they had always been here and that we actually needed them. They called themselves 'men' for short."
The train was drawing into Norwood Junction alongside two platforms which enabled egress from either side of the carriages. A close shave, I thought, as I stumbled from the Ladies Only compartment ... into a lady in high fashion gloves who was simultaneously embarking. She was no doubt en route for Victoria Station (my own original destination). I gave her a warning look, my eyes swivelling to that lady in the corner with the strange ideas. The warning went unnoticed, perhaps consciously unheeded, even relished.
As I scoured the timetable for the next train to Victoria (changing my mind halfway by looking for the arrival of the next train bound for Brighton), I tugged down my skirt which was trying to ride even higher up my thighs. I was afraid of what it would otherwise reveal.
(published 'Trash City' 1993)
The face at the window was of a girl; an example of those old-fashioned sweetness and light popsies who used to abound before innocence was abandoned even by the youngest among us.
Twin beams of the summer sun glanced through beside each of her cheeks and spot-lit the carpet in front of my armchair like two huge shimmering eyes.
But, then, her face startled and vanished - blending the shafts into one boundless tunnel of gold.
I soon realised, however, that I had fallen in love at last with a real life girl - for, surely, ghosts can’t shed shadows nor cast eyes.
I rushed out into the warm sunshine of the empty garden.
(published 'The Oak' 1992)
It happened after the visit to the mortuary. Charlotte expected to be in a state of shock for some weeks to come, because she not only identified the body she also identified with it. When she later described the experience to me, I felt also that it was my own body she had identified. And when Charlotte told her mother, her mother screamed; holding her aged hand to her wrinkled throat in referred strangulation.
Charlotte was a writer of crime fiction and, yet, remained a well-respected member of the community, holding Bridge parties every fortnight. She lived with her mother, of course, and the intruder had been a great shock to them both when, one cold crisp evening in November, they heard (from their respective bedrooms) the noise of smashing glass and the unmistakeable sound of human moaning, then a half-stifled screech followed by panting. They never found out whether he was a genuine burglar, albeit a noisy one, or a drunk who had lost his mind or his way home. Her mother had never recovered from the incident and remained bed-ridden. She thought she had herself strangled the so-called burglar. But, even then, she had been too frail even to consider such self-defence tactics. Charlotte sensed the burglar had already been strangled or an attempt, at least, had been made to invade his wind-pipe by parties unknown, since he struggled for his breath, holding his own throat in desperation as he staggered in his escape from Charlotte’s house through the window he had just used as his means of forced entry. That was the end of the matter, except for the many police interviews that ensued. The intruder had made off across the garden, it seemed, despite the perilous appearance of his state of health. But the matter was written off as Charlotte (with her mother) tried, without much success, to regain the peace they had earlier enjoyed.
Charlotte’s glimpse of the intruder’s face in the darkness, after she had staggered downstairs with the poker she kept by the bed for just such an occasion (and why she did not keep a mobile phone up there for emergencies rather than a poker or as well as a poker is now a mystery even to Charlotte who had made that conscious or subconscious decision) – yes, her glimpse of his face was inexplicably supplied by many sudden flashes of light or, rather, by a sudden flash of many lights, enabling her, later, to identify the body during a visit to the mortuary. It had been a chance visit and a chance identification, because she had arranged to meet her brother-in-law there (he worked in the mortuary’s administrative office) and she had been shown around the place to see how mortuaries went about their business. She was currently writing a detective novel that was to feature a mortuary and, therefore, this visit would have been essential research … until she was accidentally allowed a glimpse of one of the bodies in the steady, searching light or lights of the central stowing-room. Then all thought of the novel she was about to write went out of the window as did her strange inexplicable dwelling upon the single nature or blending effect of various lights within the context of this her second sight of the intruder’s face, now on the mobile marble slab of a government mortuary. Even her brother-in-law had not ventured this far into the mortuary before, since official correspondence and accounts surrounding the dead did not normally entail mixing with the dead themselves. So, he was equally fascinated by this inner shrine to the departed and the way it needed to be illuminated, both discretely (separate beams of light) and in overall effect (several beams merging as one). But that was all forgotten when he heard his sister-in-law Charlotte’s short, sharp, but long-echoing shriek of shock.
Indeed, she evidently recognised the previous intruder’s face within the flat horizon of fleshy features beneath her gaze but, so as not to draw attention to this strange and worrying fact, she stifled her shriek before it was allowed to become a full-blooded scream fit to wake the dead. During that uneasy glimpse, however, it is important to note that she noticed that parts of his internal organs looked as if they had tried to escape through his mouth via the throat – for whatever unaccountable reason. The mortuary attendants, politely not wishing to treat a guest of the mortuary as if she were an official visitor here to witness a police-accompanied visual display of faces in an identity parade of corpses, quickly pushed the slab into its slot, so that she could then only see the soles of its feet, complete with verucca. It was a happy release for Charlotte not to be able to substantiate the nature of that unholy glimpse of some frightful details about the man’s outer and inner body. Also, it would be embarrassing if she had indulged her whim by making a mis-identification under deceptive lighting. Nobody invited identifications unless they had to do so. All manner of crossed wires were often caused by mismatching identifiers with identifiees. A lot depended on lighting. Almost as if this were a stage. A theatre of operations.
Charlotte’s brother-in-law (who had recently became a widower when Charlotte’s sister died) was mainly ignored by Charlotte and her mother since he had not been a good husband in their eyes, and they wished him to remain nameless. His crimes remained euphemistically referred to as being those of a cad and a blackguard. But to visit a mortuary at this brother-in-law’s invitation was a chance too good to miss; a sudden bolt-out-of-the-blue communication from him on the email. He explained he had read in a newspaper that Charlotte was planning a detective novel called Mortuary Lights and offered to take her round the place, since he had the ear of the attendants, the closest attendants to the dead as it was possible to reach. She grabbed the chance with both hands, deliberately failing to inform her mother of the invitation.
On return from the mortuary that day, then, as I said (and I have known Charlotte for many years having played at her Bridge parties on and off when I was in the area), she uncharacteristically threw off her clothes and wandered around the house, her mind in a fever of plot and sub-plot. She more normally sat calmly and collectedly at the keyboard, letting ideas slip and slide into existence, with a sweet pot of tea quietly infusing beside her -- rather than this violent plucking of story-lines from the very fabric of the room. Thrusting herself into chairs and tables, biting the edge of a cushion, bouncing her body from wall to wall, bruising protuberances such as elbows and knees in the process. She barely managed to resist grabbing her own throat in this process, because she feared she might go too far. Her stomach heaved and she felt her gorge rising. Such re-enacting of crime fiction in the process of writing it was a dangerous activity and she had never indulged such methods before, although she knew several writers who had injured themselves quite badly in both the de-composing and composing of the chapter where all the loose ends were tied up and the murderer was made known to all parties involved, including, sometimes, to the writers themselves.
During a moment of respite, she heard her mother wandering around upstairs, causing the beams to creak. Although generally bed-ridden, the old woman was still not incontinent and could personally visit the powder-room when the need took her. As long as she stayed on one level. But the process of ablutions had long since ceased to be one that was civilised enough to warrant the name powder-room where it was done. Her mother’s half-stifled cough from the landing caused Charlotte to sit on the settee and dry the tears she suddenly found in her eyes. It was a difficult business – writing; even the writing of pot-boilers and whodunnits.
She eventually got up and turned down the room’s dimmer-switch, as she listened to her mother flush the toilet upstairs and stumble back across the landing to the empty bed, now probably ice-cold from her body’s absence. Charlotte wondered how the shaded bulbs from all corners of the living-room made conflux just above her like a dying searchlight. In the limelight. Now within the grey effulgence of something that preceded either sleeping or dreaming, as she crumpled down and curled up on the settee.
It was a dream, rather than sleep proper, that beset her. She dreamed of words, many words. It seemed as if these words were the culprits. The culprits of the culprits. Even her sister had asked for it, it seemed. The police said so. Almost as if a victim was defined by the guilt of having attracted a criminal to commit a crime upon their person. Without a victim, there could have not been a crime. Charlotte now felt herself to be a victim of her own words -- in her rightful slot at last, she thought, because if she were dreaming, rather than sleeping, how could she ever wake up?
It was then she heard her mother uncharacteristically coming down the stairs…
###
I never went back to Charlotte’s Bridge parties. I hear they are still being held, but probably not by Charlotte herself. I read dictionaries most of the day, so that I can report the world’s events with some precision and believability -- this world of which I really despair. It is a vivarium letting the lights in like a glass mortuary … or possibly vice versa. The words did it, then. Or just one single word. And at last all loose ends are tied, when I discover the word ‘lights’ on my internet compendium of words, drawn to its definition, as I am, by many underlined hyperlinks.
LIGHTS n. The lungs, especially the lungs of an animal slaughtered for food.
(published ALBUM ZUTIQUE 2003)
The girl turned out to be seventeen, but she looked younger to me. She was working in a bread shop until her first University term began in October.
I had been staring meaningfully for days now, ever since first spotting her behind the crusty loaves and jam doughnuts. However, she had not met my eyes fully with hers, until one day I attempted small talk with her. I think it must have been on the subject of the amount of traffic in the High Street, since I always avoided mentioning the weather to anybody. In fact, I always think that people who hang a conversation on whether the sun is shining or not, are cheating somewhat. That’s mainly because, I suppose, the sun is ALWAYS either shining or not shining. Come to think of it, the sun is always shining, whether it’s behind cloud or not (or even when it’s night time).
She merely smiled half-heartedly and plopped the macaroons one by one into the brown bag, crunching up the saw-edged opening into a tight fuse of paper.
I think I must have bought more bread and its accessories that holiday than I would eat for the rest of the year. Eventually, she responded to my prattle with a willingness I would never have previously dared to expect. Her voice was as pretty as her face, although I do think it was the way that the bakery overall made her body strangely sexless which attracted me most. It was as if she had no pretensions to flaunt her charms, keeping them hidden like a surprise parcel for Christmas. I suppose she had no choice really, since all the girls in the shop had to wear such overalls. But the others seemed to be more careless with their top button or had bigger busts anyway as a result of nature rather than anything else.
I couldn’t see much of their legs behind the high counter, so comparison could not be made with my favourite in this regard.
One thing I could not explain was the fact that whatever time of day I arrived to buy bread, however long the queue was when I arrived and the speed it went through dependent on its demands, I was ALWAYS served by my favourite. She ALWAYS seemed to be the one who had just finished serving another customer when it became my turn. It was not intentional on her part, nor mine for that matter (how could it have been?), but this is what ALWAYS happened - without exception. And I visited the bread shop twice a day for a fortnight.
When my stay in the area was fast approaching its end (a particularly sunny one as it turned out to be, spending most of my free time lying on the beach), I decided I would need to pluck up enough courage to ask her out.
I had debated whether to wait until the bread shop closed of an evening and follow her home. Then, at least, I would be afforded a glimpse of her without her overall, thus, perhaps, releasing me from my obligation to ask her out. Whatever the reason, I did NOT want to tarnish her innocence. That was the last thing I wanted. Still is.
In any event, I did ask her out and she said yes straightaway, filling me with wordless excitement and surprise. During our little chats over the bread exchange, we had never reached anything more personal than that she was going to University in October (so she must have been at least seventeen, I suppose) and that I was on holiday, whiling away fourteen days until work started again. I don’t suppose she guessed how old I was.
Of course, she never turned up for our date. And on the Saturday, the last shopping day for me in the area, she was not to be seen behind the counter. I asked after her, but one of the brazen hussies merely shrugged and said she was off sick.
I was off sick, too, the first few days after my holiday. The doctor said it was constipation resulting from too much starch and carbohydrates, next to no green things and lack of exercise.
As far as my emotions were concerned, they were left relatively unscarred, since, if I am honest, I had been relieved she did not turn up for the assignation. I know she exists somewhere or other on the face of the Earth, even if I never see her again. And because of our relative ages, that will be for at least as long as I shall live. The thought unaccountably gives me enormous pleasure.
(published '8th Issue' 1990)
He came into the room expecting to find his fiancee. Imagine his surprise when he saw me sitting in the armchair,by the log fire, where she usually sat.
“I’m sorry, Bill, she’s not here, she’s upstairs, and would like you to go without any fuss and bother,” I said.
“But, why?” He was crestfallen. “She’s not in love with you any more. Not since,you know...well, I’m told she’s very disappointed with what you tried to do to her last night, to be blunt.”
“You mean...well, whatever it is why couldn’t she have told me herself? I could clear up any misunderstanding.”
As if automatically, he went to the window and drew the curtains across, as the street lamp just outside had just been belatedly lit by a man on tiptoes. He stood there for a few seconds, as if gathering his thoughts, staring at the floral pattern in the curtains that he’d man-handled, no doubt seeking some inspiration in the weave. He then turned, expressionless, having regained his composure and said:-
“It’s you,isn’t it? You’ve turned her against me. I’ve always seen it in your eyes, now I know it’s true...”
Any outside observer would have described my face as turning white as a sheet. I could not even bring myself to believe I heard what I heard him implying. Then the door to the room opened and in she came, tears streaming down her uncannily young face.
“Bill, just go! Make it as easy as possible. We can’t go on, and that’s that,” she sobbed.
“What did I do?”
I had ceased to be party to the gathering; I slipped into the shadows and just watched.
“Fancy saying you could pretend to be a doctor and that you would give me an internal examination!”
“But it was a game! You agreed, darling.”
“But you didn’t do it right, Bill.You only used your finger!”
Hearing a smart knocking at the window, I went over and undrew the curtains. It was now completely dark outside, but one could see that there was the lamp-lighter with his face squashed up to the glass, flecks of drool rhythmically bubbling at his nostrils.
He shouted something like:
“Doctor,come quick, there be an accident down the road...”
I immediately grapped my coat and ran out to help, leaving my daughter to deal with her ex-fiance herself.
(published 'Exuberance' 1990)
"Hiya, Ralphy, going to the Pictures?" asked the girl.
He nodded; more wishful thinking about Saturday Morning Pictures than anything else. But the stars were against him. His father expected him to clear out the drains this Saturday and expectation was tantamount to fate, as far as his father was concerned.
"Can I do it 'safter instead?" Ralph had asked.
"No, you do it 'smorning, me lad, and lump it!" was the retort of his Dad who was that moment under his push-bike, changing the oil.
Ralph got a bucket of suds from his mother - who would have handed out such devices to any bob-a-job upstart who happened to call at the front door expressing a wish to clean out something or other. She had a brain for such matters.
Ralph stumbled outside, with the warm water slopping from one side of the bucket to the other, a factor which almost unbalanced him if it were not for his steadying use of the long-handled hinge of a Sponge Mop.
Attacking the drains, he pretended they were Flash Gordon's worst enemies (so frightful that the Saturday Morning Pictures manager would have banned their appearance, soon as look at them). Even at their optimum, Flash Gordon films had things floating around the stars, things that aped budding Concordes but farted like wonky hoovers.
It wasn't as if the drains didn't need doing, for they most definitely did. Even though the family was poor, there were bits of Mother's meals that were simply created for no other purpose than to be left-overs ... and these bits had ended up half-suspended down the drains, their toe-holds snagged upon the metal grid. This browny-green slime-grid seemed put there merely for such snagging, one of those devices God made humans create to annoy other humans.
Ralph, who had missed Flash Gordon for real at the Pictures in favour of such unsanitary delights, wondered why they were called storm drains. A real storm could never have squeezed through such ridiculously narrow gaps.
He plummetted the sponge into the coagulating suds ... and, oh horror, there was that girl. She pouted her lips, which she expected him to read.
He turned back to the drains as if, by ignoring her, she'd ignore him and go on her way towards the Pictures, perhaps to hold hands with that long-nosed snot-man he knew as Uncle ... with whom Ralph had seen her during the last summer holidays. But, no, her beaming face just hovered there, like a dream teetering on the brink of becoming a nightmare.
He tried to think her away. Childhood was a self-inflicted fiction, anyway.
His father, wiping his greasy hands on his back apron, shouted about something or other, a complaint of sorts, but nothing could be heard beyond the eventually fading undergrunts.
"Hiya, Ralphy."
He turned again to the drains, where to his delight the tail-ends of the left-overs disappeared faster than he could see them. The hinged Sponge Thing would have been no good, anyway.
"Didn't you hear me? Coming to the Pictures?"
He shrugged, shook his head.
She had probably decided that she would not ever want to hold hands with the likes of Ralph, anyway, considering the state of them. A tear, that she had not felt coming, was upon her petal cheek, proving (Ralph thought) she'd not known her own mind. She hid this behind a gust of laughter that took her on to the Roxy.
If she *had* known her own mind, she'd have married him without second thoughts and lived happily ever after *and* had loads of tousle-haired children looking like Ralph to give odd jobs to ... come Saturday Mornings.
Strangely unpredictable is the nature of Fate: but whatever its benevolence, it cannot possibly soak up the many mucks and messes that most humans get their lives into. Even God had a mop for spilled stars.
(Published 'Rattler's Tale' 1990)
In his dream, the female had sharpened nails, one of which she viciously dug into his cheek. The blood gouted as if a bomb had dropped on a high pressure mains...
Dell woke. That particular dream was becoming more vivid each time it recurred. Including the waking up process itself. Without fail, the drone of aeroplane engines above the house sent his eardrums into deep murmur and mumble. Forty odd years since the War, and here he was imagining it still going on. The contemporary newspapers were full of the Berlin Wall being dismantled (whether it be in reality or symbolically), and of the face of old Europe taking on a new disguise. *And* there was still this one mischronological pilot maintaining a blitz of London single-handed! For him (or her?) the War perhaps never began and he (or she) was trying to stir the embers of man’s natural antagonism to man by dropping a dream bomb or two on an innocent at home, such as Dell.
He had given the game away. He woke himself up with a start, knowing that dreams within dreams could not be allowed to continue or one of them might take on a semblance of unshakeable reality. The Berlin Wall was a fixture - its crumbling less likely than the London skyline being without the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral for one of its credentials.
Dell took a black ready-stick stamp from the album beside his bed and applied it to the wall mirror. He never questioned this routine. Much like an assassin would notch his gun handle (one for an enemy soldier, two for a nun, three for a new born baby of either sex). These stamps ware the mementoes, insignia, regalia, accoutrements of dreams had. Sometimes the stamp was white. An inch by inch square. Often black *and* white. With straight or blurred divisions. Sometimes slightly smaller, sometimes bigger, or that might have been a figment of his imagination. But always square enough. They began to fit like limbless jigsaw bits, as time built up. They were his proof of waking up. The room with the mirror was where he was at. He needed confidence in the reality of reality and in the discontinuity of dreaming. As long as he could return to this room in time, find the stamp album, *know* intuitively the exact place on the mirror’s surface to position the next randomly chosen sticker and, finally, with a flourish and a fanfare of tuneless humming, press it neatly next to its neighbour. Soon, Dell would not be able to see his own face at all.
One dream he feared more than any other., It was the female with nails. They looked sharp enough to worry and tease the edges of the stamps and eventually peel them from the mirror. If *that* actually happened in the dream, perhaps he would discover that it was not *him* dreaming it in the first place, as the silver back-up reflector shone into the room like an air-raid warden’s hooded torch ... lighting up his face as a wild ghost in the mirror.
Waking up from the dreams with *her* in them, he would be shaking and shivering, not even able for a few minutes actually to establish the whereabouts of the album, let alone have fingers nimble enough to pick out a single stamp.
In the early days, Dell thought the design of evolving stamps was a Jackson Pollock mishmash of monochrome. No rhyme nor reason to the shapes and smudges of black into white, white into black. They were predominantly spreading from the left hand side of the mirror in a snowstorm. After a spate of dreamless nights, he gave up the idea of ever finishing it.
Then eventually, a pure white gap began to appear about three-quarters of the way up, imperceptibly widening out as it angled downwards at forty-five degrees (or thereabouts). For several weeks of sporadic dreaming, each stamp was pure white. There were, of course, different shades of black that intervened, ever positioned to leave the white bar uncorrupted. There was, after all, a partially recognisable form emerging. It was as if real life was in slow motion, compared to the speed of his dreams. No other way to explain the phenomenon, however unsatisfactory. Holding his breath, to die...
One night when he dreamed of the old drone over the house, it was so close, he could hear the bombdoors unlatch and the half-stifled, shrieking whistle of a shortcut doodlebug. None of it made sense. It *must* be a dream. He woke, thankfully, before, whatever was dropped fell on his house.
But the stamp that particular night convinced him. He wondered how he had been so blind. The design on the mirror was nat a wartime St Paul’s Cathedral amid revolving floodlights: it was one half of an old-fashioned aeroplane. He recognised it from some of the black and white films they still showed on the box. Not knowing what it meant, he felt crazy to finish it, even If it meant ripping out stamps without the concomitant dreams first. It built up under his flickering hands, square by square. A star on its wing. Friend or foe, he could not recall from the history lessons at school. Heading into a snowstorm, or was it flak, over the dark seas of the past time … cheating the wind. The last stamp went in perfectly - there seemed to be a dome, too far back for a cockpit, he thought. Was this some consolation prize for it not being his favourite cathedral? He knew next to nothing about Fokkers, to know it wasn’t one. Or that the dome was a gun turret. He knew too little to know that he would be wrong, *whatever* he decided. That’s the way dreams are built up. With bricks that seem to fit, until they topple down.
The relentless droning above his head, he did not notice, despite being fully awake by now. The noise was too obvious. He had met it too often in his dreams, teasing the eardrums with barely heard undergrunts of vibration. In real life, it was there and not there at one and the same time.
Crossing the wall of the mind he heard the bomblatch slip...
Dell woke, not with a start, but an ending. The bedroom’s walls ware shimmeringly lit with a city ablaze. The mirror threw beck the red shadows like shunting ghosts. Dell stared wild-eyed at the image of self staring wild-eyed at its replica. Raising the sharpened claw to the cheek, Dell scored, as the bomb missed.
(published "Flickers 'n' Frames" 1990)
When I visited the old man, I was not surprised to find him bed-ridden. But the plain black mask he wore on the top half of his wrinkled face was, to say the least, a little off-putting.
Despite being forewarned of his eccentricity, I was not prepared for the meeting to which I was to be party. He was a distant relation of mine, true, but, even now, I'm uncertain as to the precise lines of communication upon our complex family tree. Although it was beyond my memory, I had indeed met him before. Children have wide outlets in their sieve of the past, and only people considered big enough in the child's own personal scheme of things are left lodged across the drain-holes beyond any tide of senility's reach. But even people thus reclaimed remain as they were; they do not, in our minds, become as they are now: quite changed, scarred by time, foreigners of lost intimacy.
The old man I was told to call Uncle Clayton. He seemed to know me better than I knew him, clawing me, as he did, by the back of the neck towards his face for a soggy kiss from his loose-covered lips. I feared the eyes, wishing his mask was a veil or hat-net that some women used to wear in the old days: either to protect their features against time's cruel weathering or, more importantly, to protect us up-and-coming ones by blurring out their various sockets of evil.
"It's so nice to see you, Jay."
His spit found much scope for play with the 'so nice to see' but the name, thankfully, supplied no such scope. I was almost glad he'd got the name wrong, my real one being liberally sown with the letter s.
"I'm pleased to see you, too, sir."
I was almost suffocated by his flabby jowls but managed to say my piece. Even his nose looked sloppy.
"There's not two of us here." He laughed, referring back to my statement in the manner of a joke; but I could tell he wasn't really joking. "Call me Uncle Clayton," he continued. "And how is Jay? You were hardly out of your push-chair..."
His speech was not so rounded and continuous as the words implied. In fact, he stuttered and halted and squeezed up his eyes until they were blackened belly-buttons retracted within the frame of the mask. He became a dose of melted mutter. But, by this time, I had managed to free myself from his head-lock. He fidgetted with the pillows as if death was the only comfort he could ever now expect: incubating underneath them in the shape of a tooth fairy's foetus.
"I don't remember much about when you came to stay at the seaside, Uncle Clayton." This time it was my turn to falter. A demon faltering. I was no longer human. His eyes, upon reopening, had scoured out my soul. It would take another whole lifetime to replace the mortal stuffing. I quickly shook off such thoughts which he instilled in me and continued: "There's a photo on a donkey, of me, with you, Uncle Clayton, holding the bridle - on the beach. So I knew it was you now."
He smiled, with even less conviction than his earlier laugh. I wished that I had not come up here alone. The rest of the family were elsewhere. Or had I heard them giggling as they went out for a spin? I sensed death was like being abandoned. This old man should know better than me. We had all arrived in this far-out place - was it for a Christening of a child in the more esoteric branch of the family? Or a funeral? A wedding? A birthday? Some other less significant anniversary? Such events always brought families together again, without anyone really relishing reunions with near foreigners. Most yearned to put evil at the back of their minds, not dredge it back up from where it was clinging like fungus to the bottom of the ever-dripping sieve.
"Yes, I remember," he said, as he fingered the mask to straighten it a little. "You were dressed cowboyish, with six-shooters, eh, Jay."
I nodded, humouring myself with his idiosyncracies rather than humouring the man who harboured them. A characteristic pause ensued, giving me time to stand up straighter from the kiss. I looked towards the window and excluded daylight as a source of assistance. The others were probably hiking it at the creek. I thought I could see their bobble-hatted shapes in the distance, disfigured by the chokings of net curtains.
"I was famous once, Jay." I scowled as he rambled on. I knew it was time to make my excuses. I bent to kiss his cheek before he had chance to rekiss mine. And his arm coiled round my neck again, before I could bob up like a bird escaping an early worm. "You a girl friend, eh, Jay?"
I liked the question since it contained not even a sniff of an s. Yet, I hated its meaning. He obviously wanted to gauge the lie of the land vis a vis the family tree and what potential regenerative extensions were up my sleeve. Shame had never been a chink in my armour, but at that moment I felt steeped in it. I felt as if my skull was covered in tiny holes left by a helmet of tin-tacks.
"No, Uncle Clayton."
I said it simply, with no double-meaning in the delivery.
"No?" He stared, as if his eyes had become splinters of ice, rather than shellfish. "Well, it's about time you did, Jay. We've no one else with a silver bullet in his holster." He laughed. He put his hand down into the bed and brought up a rosy-rubbed pippin apple and tried to balance it on my head, with a further chuckle. Then, planted it my hand, inviting me to sink my teeth into it. "Doesn't a bare of pear breasts tempt you?" he resumed, leeringly.
I nearly laughed at his childish prurience. His eyes spoke schoolboy smut. I don't know what mine spoke, but Uncle Clayton, with amazing strength for one of his age, hugged me closer - as if he wanted me to get into the bed with him. Of course, I resisted, whilst hoping that he was merely being affectionate in the only way he knew. In the tussle, however, the elastic holding the mask round his eyes broke and flopped down his face like a disjointed spider. The unharnessed eyes sagged out, the pupils like nipples. Before I could make the memory big enough, I heard the others screeching as they piled down the stairs from where they'd ensconced themselves. They had been in the house all the time, as I later discovered, indulging in a fancy dress party in one of the attics. I managed to unclutch myself from Uncle Clayton's gloomy bedside, amid the rumpus that spilled over on our side of the door. One untidy urchin, who some said favoured my looks, spat at the old man in the bed who was already trying to refix the mask over the wobbly eye sacs as well as plump up the bolster pillows behind his back. I held my head between my hands as others helped me down the stairs towards the parlour where eatables had been set out earlier in the day. I imagined I was actually spraying the place with high-pressure brain through the holes in my skull.
"Who was that in the bed?" I managed to ask someone close enough to hear me amid the ruck.
"That, my boy, was the Lone Ranger."
And some wag put the William Tell overture on the wind-up.
(published 'Nasty Piece Of Work' 1997)
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