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John’s corpse’s coffin stands on four stilt-legs and the worms are dead because the corpse is poisoned…….How can John own a corpse if he is dead? How can a coffin belong to a corpse? When a corpse is dead, it can have no possible jurisdiction…….I disagree…….Well, how did the worms reach the corpse if its coffin is on stilt-legs?…….They must have plopped from the earthy roof of the tomb and then squirmed between the cracked soft-centered nut of corpse and coffin-shell…….Well, the poisoning of the corpse - was it before or after death? If before, was such poisoning the cause of death? I believe that any particular poison can only work once…….I can confirm that the poisoning followed John’s death. The natural excrement lodged in its intestines awaiting dispersal was extracted - then inserted in its place was the poison. The excrement was then wadded into the corpse’s mouth and throat, as far as it could be pushed. Corpses can gag at such treatment, an after-death effect that long outlasts rigor-mortis…….Why all this special treatment of John’s corpse? …….To prevent vampires from restoring any figment of its fading life, since the blood for which they thirst should already be nothing but brown sludge. The poison speeds up the body’s corruption better than disguising its private parts with garlic bulbs…….Why are you telling me all this? …….Well, I am a corpse’s dream and I don’t really otherwise exist…….How am I speaking to you like this? …….Well, your voice is so glutted and clogged, the words are coming out like gurgling slime. So it’s a question of me reading your mind. Or even, you reading mine. Perhaps all the words are yours, including mine…….For God’s sake, who are you? …….I’m a very frightened creature who suffers a vocal madness since they buried me with John’s corpse. In its mouth and throat, amid its tongue and teeth, instead of leaving me in its bowels where I truly belonged. Now I’ve told you who I am, admit that you are John! …….Perhaps, but only if a vampire can keep its Christian name.
(published ‘Nightlore’ 1996)
My name is Murkales Mannion, the Reincarnator; and I have re-entered your lives to tell twelve further stories each with a moral in its tail.
(Part i)
Dame Florence Wilson ran the Ladies Group like a religion of her own making: the worship of everything female. Her lieutenants, Lady Dora Slight and Ms Ample Clavinty, on the monthly meets, would set up the icons: to the Menses of Our Lady; to the now legendary Lord Menorrhagia (who having transfigured himself from man to woman, was the ultimate, incontestable proof of the dominance of the container over the contained); to the Great Goddess Hysterectomy (who was represented by a statuette made from a mineral that reddened at the same time each month and on special occasions); and, lastly but not least, to another one time member of the Ladies Group by the name of Wanda Reack (she had commenced her subscription by aggressively petitioning the ways of man in her own mien, dressing in three piece pin-striped suits and kipper ties, but ending up an outcast, a martyr, the one female the other ladies sacrificed to fulfil their own redemption), Wanda’s icon being a huge phallus seeming carved from the finest alabaster...
Such icons were placed upon the platform in the meeting hail, logos that were the essence of the Group’s message. Ample and Dora often squabbled over the relative positions, but Her Nibs the Dame, in her typical overbearing Earth Mother mode, uttering soothing, clucking noises, would arrive and shift things back into the mantra of her own choosing.
Then the other members would troop into the hall, chanting lesbian hockey songs, waving plaster cast images of their husbands’ phalli at the end of whips and bowing three times to the icons on the platform, before reaching their seats ... where they knelt, eagerly awaiting the sacred white tampax to be placed by Her Nibs upon their outstretched tongues.
Then the Dame would formally open up the discussion group and promised coffee to any who had not left before the end.
She spoke of how the Group had developed from the small beginnings of an undistinguished women’s institute gathering into the now big ends of a charismatic movement, a booming cult of womanhood and femalekind.
Ample and Dora would then in turn place their mouths in a light kiss upon each icon. Dora always laid hers lovingly upon the representation of her late husband, George, now sanctified as Lord Menorrhagia, and prayed that his soul was at peace within the cosmic womb of the real Goddess Hysterectomy. He had truly shown the way, proved that the only positive exit from life was by one’s own hand, pummeliing away like mad until the lifeforce merely shrivelled up.
But a religious group could not thrive by suicide alone. So, Her Nibs the Dame Florence Wilson instilled a respect in her followers for the icon of Wanda Reack, as a counterbalancing force whose life had ended by *others’* hands. Then, having set up such wondrous awe of it, the huge white phallus on the platform (while Our Lady’s Menses and the plaster image of the Goddess Hysterectomy pulsed with alternating seeping redness on either site of it) would slowly start to bow up and down, even curtsy, to the audience of members, like a giant wrinkled worm, as if the worshipped had indeed become the worshipper. This ever ended meets on a positive note ...
Nobody suspected that the phallus had a radio-controlled mechanism inside it, controlled from Dame Flo’s presidential plinth.
And so to coffee and gossip ...
“The moral of my first tale,” Murky imparted to the sparse gathering around his feet, “is, never cross a woman ... nor, for that matter, woman a cross.”
(Part ii)
Fred Tyrrell had tried his hand at everything, flitting from job to job like a honey-bee in bob-nailed boots. Despite such fickleness, he was a plodder, never to be hailed as one with a brilliant touchstone brain, but merely adequate, mediocre, passable, just another face in an ordinary crowd marching along the bridges of self-deluded permanence, over the rivers of transience...
That had always been the case. Even as a small child, one minute he was the blackboard monitor, the next in charge of the short-arse bottles of milk,... only to end up later carefully stencilling a black “D” on the white pointed hat that was kept in the corner.
But, today, Fred Tyrrell thought he’d at last discovered his vocation; after years of experience in bull-necking terriers, gloom-clearing with a dusk-pan, graph disrupting with false data, oiling machines with unwanted children, he was to put all to good use and become an Agent of Employments. It all sounded too good to be true, matching non-existent jobs with even less substantial people, it was as simple as shelling toes. He set up stall at the end of London Bridge, to catch the office rush, crowing of this or that career, waving influential looking documents that only needed signatures to be activated, riffling wads of monopoly money into pin-striped faces and, finally and most effectively, doling out pension rights as a free gift for every job purchased.
Eventually, it dawned on him, as a bit of a shock, (and shocks* can* come gradually) that most clients were not prepared to pay him for the jobs; they actually expected the direction of the money to go the other way!
So, as the end of the day, Fred packed up his stall and crept home to his wife and kids, giving them all the jobs he had been left with. And, having none over for himself, he squatted in front of the television for the rest of the night (pity, though, that he could not afford to feed it with electricity, but the blank screen was good for the imagination). He dreamt of his own next job - selling toll tickets to those office-workers who wanted to get past him on to London Bridge. That should be fun, he mused.
“A strange tale can lead to even stranger morals,” summed up Merchant ‘Murky’ Mannion. “Being a tale without sex, violence and horror, it’s the strangest one I’ve ever had to tell. It seems rotten to spoil it with a moral, but here goes:
It’s OK if you’re a plodder
it’s probably OK if you’re a will o’ the wisp
but if you’re both of them (like Fred) you couldn’t even sell the two halves of your still dripping, steaming brain as a job lot to a zombie.”
(part iii)
It was at this point that Murkales departed from the story-telling room, leaving in his stead a revolving cylinder of his voice, that proceeded to blunt a needle with words it could not pronounce. For the purposes of this broadsheet, a transcript has been obtained of which the live audience, secondrate to you readers of course, had no benefit.
Siamese twins, Clovis and Tristan Camber, did not come from Bangkok, but they always joked about their resemblance to a drunk Oriental with two heads.
The surgeons had tried to unsplice them at birth when, as the theory goes, the flesh is softer, the connection less vital and the only likely after effects restricted to mind-switching between the individual twins or, at worst, mind-halving
But their mother, who was a woman to whom you would have been well advised to give a wide berth (she *did *after all deliver Clovis and Tristan alongside each other), interrupted the operation, rolling in from the convalescent ward, voice raised:
“Don’t you dare - I don’t want to look after* two* brats — when you think you’ve got one under control - the other’s bound to have wandered off somewhere - it’ll be much easier for me if they stay stuck...”
The surgeons looked at each other askance. They had the double-handed axe ready poised above the rump-joint which seeped blood through every pore. The axe-blade sparked along the edge in evident anticipatory relish.
“If we don’t take the bull by the horns, Ma’am, we may never get another chance. When such twins are old enough to leave home, they may not want to be burdened with each other’s body...”
“Chop ‘em when they’re 21, then.”
“That may result in complications, like bones having grown between by, then, like engrafted branches of two trees. It will be then more like riving one body in two...”
The babies were squalling in unison, their four eyes symmetrically slanting tears across their round, wide faces. It was difficult to decipher* their* particular preference.
But it did not seem to matter. There being such an enormous impetus built into the descending axe, it fell of its own accord, slid through the secret byways of the meat-on-the-bone with the sacred butcher’s art and even cleanly took a wedge from the blood engrained trestle-slab beneath.
The wailing ceased on cue.
But it was taken up by the mother, who seemed to screech with two independent tongues, so loud and persistent was it.
She kept them in the same narrow cot, praying that the two spines would ratchet out from each anus towards one another and infurcate...
Nobody knew whether she was successful, for she tried to keep them away from prying eyes.
... Until, one day, I approached their log cabin, as Christmas neared, and vaguely perceived two children playing on a see-saw, silhouetted against an over-large moon. Their voices were deep, but their hearts were evidently youthful with light.
Busily fixing his flies, Murkales returned just in time to give the moral in person. He inspected the stylus and tut-tutted.
“I’m afraid I can’t give you a moral this time because the whole thing was pretty pointless.”
(Part iv)
Samuel Rigger sat mooning by the lake for hours on end, not exactly fishing, but slowly reeling in the memory of his mother. Her death was now twenty five years old (whether death *can* grow old, he was uncertain) and, during those years, he had positively tried to expunge such a memory, particularly because he had good reason to blame himself for the nature and timing of her departure. Ah, but, then, death isn’t really the final full-stop, not even an ordinary midpage full-stop, but more like a semi-colon, or that’s what his mother’s religion had taught him.
He had now come up against a comma, he thought, a watershed, a way station for the cross purposes of his life. He really needed to haul back the image of his mother to assist him, there never having been any other member of the fair sex central to his concerns.
Wreaths of mist gently circled above the dawn-bejewelled surface of shinering lakewater, as if God had playfully breathed smoke-rings upon it after inhaling His direct pipeline to Hell. Birds, hidden by their feathers in the bare branches of the gathering trees, squawked to one another, sounding to Samuel that they were complaining of the world being just one big battery farm.
Any lesser mortal would have simply plunged into the mirroring sheen as it stretched from his dabbling toes to a horizon that was distant and wide enough for a full-fledged sea to be proud of it, let alone just a mere lake.
Then, as he lowered his gaze and stared at his own image in the weed-choked margins, he drew his breath in with a gasp. It may have been the hesitant reflection created by his toes or it may have been just a case of wishful transvestigial narcissism, but he saw a woman staring back at him: a young, beautiful creature, with hair lapping cheek by jowl. He suddenly recalled a snapshot of his mother as a girl, when she had been full of hope, innocence and unfulfilled love, without even a suspicion of the encroaching senility that was destined prematurely to seep into her head, just at the time when more understandable, if gorier, seepages dried up at the other end.
As Samuel averted his eyes from the guilt lying beyond the vision’s two-dimensionality, he abruptly remembered the whole scenario: inadvertently, at an office party, he had tipped off a thug (masquerading as a colleague) of his mother’s address, the fact that she often forgot to lock the door ... no, that was not it ... he had let slip the nature of the coded knock he, her son, would always make on visiting.
He wept. The only time he had consumed alcohol was at that very office party. Not a drop before or since. Now he felt unaccountably intoxicated by his own tears, but also strangely peaceful, reflective ...
The whole mighty lake drained away before his eyes, and thus the image ... as if his extended member was a direct pipeline syphoning it up to feed his tears.
Sadness caught in his throat, as Murkales delivered the moral of the fourth tale:
“Those head over heels in love with death, will cry themselves dry when they eventually realise that even death may die.”
(Part v)
The town of Dormitory would never be the same after they closed down its by-pass.
Dogmucker Lean, as he was often affectionately and euphemisticallly known by the inhabitants, was to be the leading force in the campaign for the ending of the sapping by such an arterial road: the traders backed him to the hilt, preferring the juggernauts and holiday traffic to wend their foundation-juddering paths through the winding, top heavy streets of the inner conurbation, than lose their potential custom to the money-grabbing towns that had purse mouths wide open further north, eager to tap the life juice streaming with the convoys of the motorway.
Deadlocker, Lean’s sidekick, often drove through Dormitory in his Morris Minor, trying to lead the overnight lorries by the nose via the town centre. He even resorted to twirling road signs on their plinths... But, nothing short of closure of the by-pass would suffice, and Dogmucker Lean, having once been Dormitory’s only private detective (rumoured to have actually enticed those hard-bitten crooks who swarmed the big City down south to Dormitory so as to increase his business and potential crime clearance rate...) was, to Deadlocker’s mind, the only leader born to give back to the town its lifeblood commerce.
Dormitory had no history. It seemed to grow up abruptly as a heavy industrial town in the thirties, sprouting factory chimneys overnight as it were: the inhabitants at the time were said to lie awake at night, listening to the groaning, grinding noises of the engineering plants emerging from the cracked meadows like metal behemoths from Hell, with railing fences ratchetting in concertina fashion and cul-de-sacking all the roads.
Lean had been raised amid the aftermath, and he well remembered his bleary-eyed elders staggering off at five o’clock in the morning, as if mesmerized by the rhythmic bursts of factory hooters.
Then, as if out of nowhere, the tangential by-pass appeared silently sliding past the town in the night, its concrete carriageways extending before the very wheels of the lead convoy. From that day forth, nothing was delivered to Dormitory, no raw materials; nobody came to the shops that depended on passing trade; even the tourists (once avid for any remnant of Britain’s quaint Industrial history that had been engendered in their minds by Blake’s beauteous lines on Satanic
hills) had found themselves inescapably diverted into the desolate wastes further north (their fate unknown).
Nobody bought the holiday postcards depicting the chimney-tangled skyline: there was a glut of Dormitory memorabilia, such as the tea towels grimed in genuine black sludge from the factories or lavatory seats sat upon by generations of the honest-to-goodness working class...
Dogmucker Lean, one time crook, more recently arch crime-buster, made Deadlocker drive the morris minor, at the dead of night, to straddle the mighty six-laned autoroute. That should do the trick, he had mused. Born leaders were born to think of such brilliant but deceptively simple ideas ... of which most ordinary mortals, such as you and I, are bereft.
Well, he did have the good sense not to accompany Dead locker.
Dormitory’s undertaker would have been delighted with the custom arising from the biggest motorway shunt in history - but since the undertaker was Deadlocker himself, as you have guessed, even this business had to be farmed out, leading to a bigger trade gap than ever before...
The mighty gore-machine pile-up of metal and bone and blood that had grown its tower overnight on the motorway’s hard shoulder, glinted in a sun that shone everywhere except in Dormitory’s narrowing streets.
Murky was shifty-eyed. Eventually he came clean:
“The moral is that leaders, like towers, are not born; they have to grow overnight from Godgiven raw materials.”
Nobody understood it, so they eagerly brayed for the next telling tale,
Part (vi)rgo
Longiand Jones remembered being a boy. He kept a stickleback in a jamjar under his bed, but later forgot it was there.
Now he’s grown up, he has far more respect for detail.
He was once told by a solicitor that he could change his name merely by standing in the corner of the room and stating aloud: “I hereby resolve to change my name to...”
Of course, it would need to be evidenced in writing (by Deed Poll or whatever) if there were already contracts to which he was party under the old name. But, other than that, the standing in the corner process was the correct thing to do, as legal as most things can be, give or take a slight tolerance either way stemming from typical human imprecision.
Longland Jones vaguely recalled, as a boy, hearing a bedtime story about a chap named Kane who owned a long fence that stretched straight through the middle of his own land for no apparent reason...
It’s a strange cast that often appears in the eye of memory.
The story came flooding back: about how Mr Kane tried to paint the whole fence as white as white could be. Then ... the dreams came, more substantial than the usual sort of dream that affects sleep, for they left dark, unsightly blotches all over Kane’s painstaking white brushstrokes. He ended up burning the fence down with a blowlamp, because any amount of white paint could not then diminish the concept of those nagging, lurking stains...
Longland became so obsessed with the story of Kane (which was in turn about an obsession), that he wondered why a little kid, as he had been then, was treated with such a story upon which he had to go to sleep.
He abruptly remembered the stickleback. On looking under his bed, he realised that the bed itself had been changed years ago (the mattress having crumbled away under the onset of his teenage incontinence), so it was very unlikely that the stickleback would still be there. But, no, he was wrong, there it still was, a jar of yellow slime tucked away in the darkest nook of the bed’s shadow. However far he stretched, he could not reach it. He was almost certain that the stickleback must be dead ... how long had it been? Twenty years? Thirty? More? But stranger things happen in stories.
He strode to the corner of the bedroom and rattled off a statement that had been mulling away for some time in the soft underbelly of his brain:
“I hereby resolve that from heretofore I shall be known as Longland Kane.”
He now looked under the bed and, with relief, saw that the jam jar had disappeared.
He rushed to the window and was pleased to see a mighty fence tapering into the distance like a coiling serpent, perfectly, glisteningly white in the renewed sunshine.
Sitting on the fence was a little imp, grinning mischievously, as he dabbled his arrow-point tail in a tin of what looked to be black gloss paint. Another one, further along hanging his tail over the side hoping for a bite…
Longland rushed back to the bedroom corner praying that, legally, the process could be reversed.
Murky knew all his stories off by heart, but he seemed to find it very difficult to recall the moral of the current one.
“Errr ... Longland was such a stickler for detail, he felt able to differentiate between fact and fiction. However, when he got down to actually inspecting the Deeds of his property, he discovered that the fence ... ummmm ... did not exactly cross through it, but separated it from dreamland. As for those sitting on the fence, they really ought to have appeared in my next zodiacal tale, for obvious reasons...”
Forgetting that his audience was not clever enough to read between the lines to catch the moral, he quickly forged on to tine next tale.
Part (vii)
I am playing on my see-saw, up and down, up and down, I go: the gentle creak creak is the only item to mar the country quietness: my invisible playmate at the other end is balancing my weight with perfection.
It’s getting late, but I can’t bring myself to decide whether to dismount and let the other one down with a bump (to run to my mother’s arms in time for bed) or stay here into the darker reaches of twilight. I’m usually told that I’m not really old enough to make up my own mind. So, if that’s true, I shouldn’t have been left out here to my own devices at all, but being old enough actually to realise that fact, must make me sufficiently mature to create a proper working mind for my body.
I whisper to my friend:
“It’s been nice playing with you all day, but who are you?”
“I’m the Weirdmonger,” breathes the sudden wind.
“Who? That word’s too long for me to say or understand.”
“Why does your mother let you out so late when you look so young?”
“Because she lends me her mind to while away the endless summer evenings ... for she sits at home merely darning my father’s socks and she needs no mind for that.”
“So, if you’re equipped with a woman’s mind, small girl, why cannot you get your tongue round my name?”
“Because she was never good at English at school, always sat down first in the spelling beam, when words were still at their shortest.”
The sun has now dipped below the treetops, catsing perfectly straight and angled shafts of golden light across the meadow. The birdsong wells upon the wind only to die in the abrupt misty calm of night amid the branches.
I feel the see-saw shudder as my partner weighs me up in the air, where I stay put as he (or she) prepares to dismount. Now further up in the sky, I can just about smell the fumes of supper emerging from the cottage chimney.
After minutes of telling silence, I wonder if I should climb down the plank towards the pivot, for my partner has either disappeared merely leaving his bodyweight or he (or she) is just sitting there staring up at me ... I hold down my skirt over my knees, so as not to look improper.
Before I can reach the middle of the plank, the light finally seeps out of the sky, leaving me just an island of consciousness, unable to move up nor down, just frozen with fear and apprehension.
“Little girl, I’m still here, you know. Come down towards me. Both our weights at this end will sink us further into the ground...”
“Was it ... Weeerd-Mungger ... you said your name was?”
“Yes, you’re correct. The night has brought a clearness to your mind.”
I find myself moving down the plank as it it’s turned into a well-oiled playground slide ... and I feel his (for I know now it is male) arms gathering me to him as I arrive at the bottom.
“Hello, my dear, you’ve arrived at last. Your decision has been made for you. I’m your father and your husband, and we shall forge another little girl between us ... who can in turn take your mind on twilight games and endless summer fun in the wan, hazy meadows.”
I merge with the night and dream of another world where I would be darning socks and stirring supper.
Murky smiled. “A beautiful tale deserves a beautiful moral, but to weigh death and life in the balance, as well as night and day, winter and summer, dream and reality, good and bad, you need to have a foot in both camps, as the Weirdmonger does when he bring us weirds to sell and words to spell.”
Part (viii)
The City streets vie with each other to avoid entering the mainstream of history. They know they will end up widening into dual carriageways in the godforsakem sticks if they actually cross the boundary of the Square Mile; so they have become a tangle of blind alleys, backdoubles and dead-ends in overkill.
He who knows their ways better than most is one Dognahnyi. Some say that the tubings of his own body’s innards are self-perpetuating, too; parts of them sticking out of his various orifices and joining up (by means of rubber seals and washers) with the close-circuit of the City sewage system. Incredible as it may seem, Dognahyi saw himself as a filtration plant for the slurry emanating from all the wine bars, banks, insurance companies and low dives.
Therefore, he moved about the City under cover of darkness, in case all the pin-striped yuppies could see the bare ends of his jump-leads poking from his trousers. He docked and undocked himself with all the interceptive pipe-joints that were protruding from buildings and lurking under man-holes. Not that he was exactly shamefaced: he was secretly proud of his role, passionate about his knowledge of the City’s underworld (which was even more entangled than the scribbling of the map-maker each time he had to survey the area for the A to Z).
But, as the years passed, he became more secret than passionate, more passionate than proud. His favourite haunt was in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, because its particular shadow was lighter than normal night. He would enjoy tapping into the effluence that the religious order granted to their crypt latrines. Sometimes, he would rub his suckers (specially nurtured along the nodules of his backbone by years at self-induced metabolic nightmares) up and down the lower reaches of the cathedral’s mighty walls: drawing into himself the centuries of faith that those walls had soaked up from within the vast echoing helmet of the interior.
He saw God. He actually saw God itself, a huge umbrella of webbed spider-legs, creaking and groaning above the world:
unseen and unheard by most mortals, because it used the apparatus of the building in the sky as its disguise. But, with all the rich juices of humanity (its hopes and despairs, its useless body waste and salvage, and above all, its dark, deep, secret passion for proud death, as opposed to shameful life) racing through his arteries like night turned into slime, he saw God itself more clearly than others.
However, one day, he wanted out. He was tired of being the world’s martyr, the one taking all its burdens upon his narrow shoulders. He unplugged himself, one night, from a particularly virulent wine bar’s overflow pipe, and ran for all his worth towards the edge of the Square Mile. Until he realised he was running in gradually more and more imperfect circles.
The City workers were bemused by the sight of this wild shape scattering wanks of dark snot in his wake, as he reached the frenzied proportions of street-jacking. They shrug, and forge on to their desks where they turned many over, money feeding on money to make more money for those who already own
it. They do not even notice that they don’t go home of a night any more, what with the 24 hour global exchanges and the drugs that keep yuppies alive without sleep.
Murky gives his moral with a short burst of meaningfulness:
“Men walk the world with eyes shut and minds insulated against the infiltration of their bodies’ inner fluids.”
Despite being a statement rather than a moral, the audience seemed to take the point and put fingers down inside their throats.
Part (ix)
Max Haze was a reporter on a provincial rag (though he probably considered himself the Thief of Baghdad on a magic carpet), who chugged around all the suburbs of various towns in his green and white 2CV, a car phone ever plastered to his ear in attempted contact with the intermittent diatribes of his longwhile editor Luke Grubbins.
Today, Max felt it in his bones (and in the very juddering of the car) that this was going to be a big job, a once in a lifetime scoop, at which Luke would pat the handset of his telephone back in the newsroom and perhaps (rather unlikely though) give Max a raise. It was one of those days when, stemming from no accountable visible influences, he felt expansive and in charge of his own destiny. The 2CV free-wheeled down the longest slope towards a township that did not seem to appear as either a blob or a cross, on the roadmap he had used since 1953; it cluttered the impending valley with the spokes of several church spires arising haphazardly from amid the disgeometry of clambering houses ... as if the town council had long spurned the advice of the architectural fraternity.
Despite the evident age of the stone that acted as substructure of the chimneypot-pourri, Max wondered if it was still being built around the day to day lives of the townsfolk, for ladders of all sizes leaned from gableposts to fluestacks and stretched, like the climbing-frames of steeplejacks, from looming churchtops to mock-Arabian towers of the masonic hall (wherefrom, Max imagined, if the town were not amid the hedgerowed allotments of England’s green and pleasant land, the muezzin made their haunting, echoing dawn chorus).
The 2CV drew to a halt in the market square, just as another gentle slope rose steadily in the opposite direction out of the town. Those people he thought originally were swarming in unguessable patterns across the square, in and out of the deceptively positioned alley-mouths, had disappeared. He only felt the twitching of curtains at those garret and attic windows built, like eyes, into the ramshackle, teetering roof-systems; but, soon, even that hint of life ceased and Max turned on his car engine to expunge the frighteningly deafening silence of a town that should have been athrob with Saturday trading.
He spoke into his phone: “Hello, Luke, are you there? I’m on to a big one....”
“Haze, Haze, I can hardly hear you. Speak up.”
Max stared back at the handset as if it were alive. He held it further away from his mouth and shouted at the top of his voice:
“This set-up I’ve found, Luke, it’s not even on my map. It’s out of time, somewhere,,.”
He could see the headlines already:
ALTERNATE WORLDS ARE GO!, or
PARALLEL EXISTENCES ARE FOR REAL, MATE! from your favourite paperazzi, or
TIME HAS NO BOUNDARIES FOR MAX HAZE, or
LOCAL HACK IN Sci-Fi SENSATION!
He cringed as if he apologised for every lie he told.
Luke was now struggling through heavy static on the line:
“Haze, where are you? It’s as if you’re too far away for a cordless phone to work. It’s a pity there are no more of those proper GPO boxes... I’ll hold the front page till you can get through.”
The line then went dead. Max clambered from his timepod (as he now preferred to call it, having turned of its lawnmower engine). He scratched his bonce, looking for one of those long extinct red telephone boxes that once inhabited the laybys and street-corners of our world. He suddenly realised that Luke himself back in the supposed Daily Jupiter office, must also share the same alternate reality as himself. He cursed. The story was dead even before it started ... for their readers also were surely part of this particular existence.
Eventually, he strolled, at peace with the world, into a nearby tavern that, before his very eyes, emerged organically from the moving feast of the town’s non-euclidean masonry. Therein, he had a quiet pint with a friendly local who told him he was the third reporter to visit the town that week.
Even the scoop that all the townsfolk were window-cleaners was as stale as yesterday’s time travel story.
Murky moralised: “Reality is full of stories, and all are true, somewhere, somewhen.”
Part (x)
Alzheimer’s goat was the mascot of the Ladies Group. It was kept in a field most of the year at the back of Lady Dora’s estate, chewing ruefully upon the dietary cycle engendered by the clumps of grass. However, at the annual spring fete, when the funds of the Group badly needed replenishing, Lady Dora would hitch it to the nanny-cart and urge it to lug it into the grand arena, where all the children of the town (born from marriages and mis-marriages alike) would vie with each other to pay their tuppence-ha’penny for a ride.
Dame Florence Wilson had been dead now several years, since the scandal when (as many suspected) the Group (originally intended as a polite, sitting-room attempt to further the already acknowledged right of way of ladies in the world at large) tended towards a more religious, cultish “worship” (what else could us outsiders call it?) of the feminine condition, almost creating deities from woman’s physical shortcomings... That had been a scandal indeed and, since Dame Flo’s timely sudden demise (at the hand, some rumoured, of a resurrected, martyred Wanda Reack, who was at great pains to put out positive feelers from her earlier abashment and abasement as a man), the Group had reconstituted, forged new consolidations and (for a time) withdrawn into its institutional shell like a clitoritic snail.
Ms Ample Clavinty and Baroness Barmbrack, two other erstwhile active members, had brought the residue of the Group (following Flo’s departure) into a huddle like a rugby scrum (without any of the bad language) and kicked the ball out to Lady Dora Slight who then threw it steadfastly into the slips where the wing-threequarters Wanda Reack made a nifty run for the line; whereupon the try was converted and the Ladies Group breathed anew, like a spring lamb.
Fete-time approached apace. Alzheimer’s goat was treated with every titbit that the membership could salvage from their husbands’ tables (“Oh, my dear, I’ve done you two nice chops, so that you can donate one to charity”; “Hubbie, please don’t eat too much, the goat will prefer your left-overs whole as opposed to regurgitated”).
Consequently, the goat grew fat, as the untamed grass abounded about it like hair on the Godhead... Many had tried to put out of mind their earlier spiritual leanings (when every particle of the world (even their husbands’ skid-marked underpants) used to be an ingredient of a pantheistic whole) but, even so, echoes of the erstwhile charisma of the One Undersoul of the Bleeding Woman still permeated their dreams: even the noxious, scabby head of the Goddess Hysterectomy reared from the bowels of Hell’s sleep to remind them of their eventual destiny, fete or no fete.
Then the day arrived. The whole town (even the men and boy children) gathered in the Recreation Ground to try their luck on the Chance Dip, the Bottle Stall, the Tombola, the bottletop Bingo, the Raffle for a 2CV car and, even, the coconut shy that Lord Menorrhagia had agreed to run because he was shy and coconuts themselves reminded him of something vital in his pre-female life.
Alzheimer’s goat with the cart eventually trundled into the arena, Lady Dora (Vice-President elect), vestigial whip aloft, in the harness seat, the animal, being now older than anyone cared to recall, found it very difficult to pull such a load so far. Eager children clustered round for the first ride (hustling Lady Dora from her plinth), awaiting the signal from Wanda Reack to start the fete proper (a finger pointed straight up into the sky).
But, Wanda was *not *in the commentary box: only the celebrity from the local radio station waved back ... and he was a man.
The goat collapsed, in full view of everyone. A little girl (by the name of Rachel Mildeyes who, if things had gone differently, would have fulfilled the future role of President in a flourishing Ladies Group - Wanda Reack happening to be her Great Aunt) later told the gutter press that Ms Reack’s own pitiful eyes had stared back out of the goat’s dying eyes (as if she’d holed herself up inside its skull for the duration of her premature death by mindblowing), trying to tell them all something important before it passed away.
Murkales faced the stony silence of his audience, who were predominantly female. “Woman is but a cornucopia of surprises....” he stuttered.
Part (xi)
Digory Smalls was a little lad for his age. The stunted arms and legs, the hydrocephalic head and the developed mind of a pre-born, did him no favours at all.
Many wondered how he had survived so far. But his parents (if they actually admitted to such a birthright) nourished him in a large house at the edge of a creek. They allowed him to tote water from the well ... and back again. Religion had taught them that people could only exist if they had a purpose in life, so they gave Digory this small chore to perform. The rest of the day he would roam the battlements of the roof (using the suckers at the end of his foreshortened limbs to clamber from one cornerstone to another), watching the specks of ships wending their spice trails along the horizon of the distant sea. He yearned in some deep, unknown part of his soul to be one of the crew of such floating communities: he thought he could be at least half useful as one who could tote sea-water from in front of the prow of the ship to behind the stern.
Digory had several brothers and sisters, all whole in limb and mind. The parents, though, often resorted to the master bedroom trying to create a sibling more suitable for Digory than the beautiful maidens and handsome youths who already abounded in the interlocking rooms of the house ... and who taunted him unmercifully when the parents were so otherwise engrossed in family planning.
Digory’s life was a misery. He looked to God to help him grow straighter: for *all* his bones were hinged like the elbows and knees. His one talent (other than the water toting) was creating electric currents along the surface of his skin: he did not know how he managed it, but certain nodules in his otherwise dormant brain had qualities of electrodes, sparking lightning between the pylons of his extremities.
This scared his brothers and sisters, who would slouch off holding their tingling fingers aloft, as if that would ease the dose of pins and needles fomented by Digory’s touch. Some even went down to the edge of the sea to douse them in salt-water. So, everybody (except the now increasingly absent parents) hated Digory Smalls.
One day of storm, the spice ships floated nearer to the house than Digory had ever seen before, He could watch them in the intermittent half-light of a lugubrious dusk, edging ever into the hazardous backwaters of the creek. He could even spot the sailors clambering the rigging like tiny spiders, desperately hauling in the billowing sheets. Lightning forked cruelly from mast to mast, as if God was threading needles with uninsulated power cables. Digory disbelieved God could be so nasty, for some sailors fell dead into the roiling sea like fireflies, all dreams of the spice lands being relegated to their cowardly surviving confreres in the hold.
Soon, one ship came so close to the eaves of the house, Digory managed to jump, with the aid of a mutated spring-like coccyx at the base of his spine, into its rigging ... whereupon he set about furling and unfurling the sheets, in a strange, arcane rhythm which tapped the winds and lightning-strikes with an efficiency tantamount to hyperdrive and faster-than-light travel (about which science fiction, at the time of our tale, had not even dreamt, let alone invented).
The whole fleet, led by the nose as it were by HMS GULLIVER (the ship upon which Digory had happened to launch himself) arrived safely in the spice lands... where he received a telegram that he had been blessed with a bouncing sister with rosebud limbs and a hairlip that would fit his kiss exactly.
Digory Smalls sobbed ... because he could not choose between the spice lands and the dream of one he could love back home.
Murkales, now on the safe ground of a tale with a real moral, did not even bother to say it, for by saying morals, they become less than they were when unsaid.
Part (xii)
Murkales had reached his last tale unscathed and sooner than he anticipated. He was surprised to discover that most of his audience were still sticking with him to the bitter end, unlike many of the previous occasions when he had embarked on such a project.
He went round collecting the used sick bags, because most of them were now full. The story of Dognahnyi in the City had done most of the damage there.
“What, no tales of Padgett Weggs, Blasphemy
Fitzworth et al this time, Murky?” one asked as he handed in the squelchy innards of his stomach.
“No, but my last tale, fine friend, is to be of myself, Murkales, which, together with that narrative concerning the inscrutable Weirdmonger, should fulfil your lust for tales concerning my more familiar characters.”
Refreshed, relieved and, with the end in sight, the audience settled back for the last tale in the present sitting.
“My friends, as this tale concerns myself, I will ask someone else to tell it for me.”
He drew back the black drapes at the rear of the stage, to reveal a tall, androgynous figure, whose face darted so quickly from expression to expression, none of its features could be defined. Many guessed that it must be none other than the Weirdmonger, though few were certain. The creature spoke through its snotty nose, as it twirled its capes like a dancer of Hellish Fandangos: -
“Murkales has been dubbed the Reincarnator by some. I call him something different, but it means the same. His mortal coil is a slimy snake of a spiv in an East End trading-post whose name is Merchant Mannion. His heavenly guise is a sheet of lightning as big as the sky, that strikes fire as long as there are days left to divide night from night. His story-telling mode, as you yourself have seen ... well, how can I describe it? … I am neither male nor female, I carry the attributes of both and of neither ... Murkales, on the other hand, is likewise a creature neither good nor bad, or both, one who hides beauty and ugliness behind each other, so that beauty and ugliness can eventually shine forth with renewed power by contrast of its surroundings. He has used the symbolism of the zodiac to underpin morals which he wishes to be remembered rather than the tales that gave them birth. He has laid the golden fish that now lies flopping and flapping on one pan of the scales, whilst weighing it down on the other pan is my scrotum womb opening and shutting its mouth in rhythm with the air.”
The Weirdmonger (whether it is or is not, does not matter) retreats behind the threadbare drapes with a bow.
Far from demoralized, I, Murkales, step forward with the last word:
“They say that creatures weigh more dead than alive… and as the world’s air becomes the placental fluid that brings us full circle, I will either die clogged to the gills with my own disgust or, perhaps, swim from one pan to the other, where I can nest, like a flaccid phallus, within the chrysalis of wrinkled fleshskin that my counterpart has shed.”
Applause mingled with tears, as the narrator dispersed from the stage. Nobody being a stickler for detail, the amateurishness of the whole performance had gone quite unnoticed.
(published ‘The Scanner’ 1990-91)
The fact that Cobb could arrive in time for the conference was a ludicrous proposition. In any event, by all accounts, Cobb was dead. But ALL accounts are not necessarily ALWAYS correct.
The conference table was peppered with note-pads (some already scribbled on with figures and diagrams), strewn with HB pencils (a number snapped off at the point due to the haste of preparing for this unplanned meeting), and edged with nameplates in no particular order (in fact, there were not enough chairs to go round, either).
Upon the wall, the cinemascopic computer-screen flickered, focused and unfocused, as the keyboard-man, somewhere in the bowels of the building, struggled with the knobs on his console. He was desperately trying to tune into the various intercoms on board the starships scattered across the known and unknown universe (some even, no doubt, blinking out incomprehensible codes from corners of the UNTENABLE universe whereto they had accidentally strayed). He managed to obtain, in his panic of twiddling, only local radio phone-ins, instead.
The delegates arrived outside in Government-requisitioned items of ancient public transport, clutching their umbrellas and briefcases (the latter designed to look like antique supermarket carrier-bags). One individual in particular, Captain Erak, seemed especially keen to appear nonchalant, as he ambled towards the swing-doors of the skyblock He looked upwards as if in the direction of gods or spacemen who had always been the bane of his life. Dragged out of a cosy bed at the unearthly hour on the other side of the world, with no hope of ever regaining such sleep for at least another forty-eight hours, he was not in the best of moods. He waved lackadaisically at the next participant, who happened to arrive behind him in an old-fashioned London omnibus … together with his retinue of personal secretaries and grooms. This was Battlefield Marshall - whose nameplate, following Cobb’s death, should have been at the head of the conference table. It was, in reality, lying unnoticed in the corner under the umbrella stand where it had elegantly slid during one of those arguments that too often beset administrative staff.
‘Hiya, Erak, we’re going to give those blighters a hiding today.’ Marshall twirled the ends of his moustache with the metal hooks screwed into the knuckle joints of his right hand. These were replacements for the fingers which had been chewed off by the controls of his spacecraft in his now legendary campaign against aliens during the Wars of Redress (after a clumsy (or crazy) engineer had left so many misalignments following an overhaul, it had been nigh impossible to tell the craft’s mouth from its belly button).
Erak yawned, opened up his umbrella and entered the skyblock, thus snubbing his superior (for the sake of his own self-satisfaction) but not enough to be noticed by onlookers. This ensured there was no need for retribution on Marshall’s part. Punishments and vengeances were only required for show: hence those wars so many years before.
Battlefield Marshall shrugged and smiled at the security guard (who stood within the central pivot of the swing-doors); servants these days had no wits, he mused, and all the fun had gone out of command.
Still, Captain Erak would need some sort of warning reprimand, for his oversubtle misbehaviour. But, this idea fled from Marshall’s mind (for want of company).
Cobb, himself fresh from disasters at the planetary poles of New Jupiter, limped towards the building on crutches (which seemed to be natural extensions of his bones). He had been granted a taxi (as soon as the relevant authorities had recognised who he was at the spaceport) - this had meant a charade of flagging it down in the Mall, telling the peak-capped driver (who already knew) where to go and, finally tipping him with a few Old Pennies from the pre-Seventies.
More surprised than anybody that he was still alive (after all, who could follow death?), Cobb waited for the swing-doors to be dismantled (much to the annoyance of its surly jobsworth attendant).
As Cobb mooched on the pavement, he reviewed his life (which in fact, had been little more than a series of events in brackets). Since the Disgrace Years (during most of which he was a child), he had stumbled between irrelevancies, earning stripes and titles as he went. He was now so important, so high up the dignified chain of command (with still only a few links left between him and God), he did not even need a title at all (unlike Captain Erak and Battlefield Marshall). Respect was his deathright, and he was determined to wreak it, even if it meant becoming a cyborg or, even, a full-blooded android with next to no human parts or, at the last resort, a real alien. Death had many stages, and Cobb was resolute in his desire to cross them by whatever means of man, metal and monster.
The hum of voices around the table rose and fell with each item of the makeshift agenda. The wall screen had by now entered Phase - and the many dots and dashes were interpreted quite differently by each delegate.
Captain Erak snored loudly, an ear pricked for any sign of the meeting coming to an end. He had nothing to contribute. The universe, to him, was not as it used to be in the good old days. Everything, but everything, had run to seed. Even beyond the known universe, other civilisations were at this very moment suffering their own version of the Disgrace Years (as his own had done during the Eighties and Nineties). Aliens were aliens by name only. He shrugged in his sleep.
Battlefield Marshall peered quizzically at his nameplate, wondering why he couldn’t decipher it. Words were never his strength. He could not clear his throat. The lung dust billowed round the conference room, showing that the oesophagus filters had been too glibly turned off to allow the free flow of debate and brainstorming. He prodded the bent skewer of his index finger up his nose. There was irritating rust up there.
Cobb surveyed the others from the safety of his own self confidence. If nothing else, death could give him that. These other men were a rat race apart, he mused, grown up to accept such shenanigans with a pinch of salt. Worlds elsewhere were being blown to smithereens upon their very whims within whims. At the same time, between the confines of this room. the intrigues, side-treaties, gangings-up, singlings-out and the subtleties of the evertentacular agenda were quite beautiful to witness. The individual sitting on the floor taking the Minutes would no doubt be struggling with the apologies-for-absence, late arrivals, early departures, cross references, minidelegations, sub-committees, tangents and oodles of any-other-business.
But Cobb knew they all missed one thing, one vital POINT which, if they’d known, would have made the whole meeting POINTLESS: each attendee thought that the others were at least halfway sensible and SURELY capable of a modicum of constructive ratiocination and, by natural inverse extrapolation from such a basic over-estimation of human nature, literally condemned each one to a greater stupidity than his fellows.
Another nova glowed upon the screen like a diamond nugget. Obviously, that Battlefield Marshall fellow couldn’t tell his arse from his elbow (or his mouth from his belly-button), as folds of flesh ore oozed from his nostrils. The blighter had pushed the wrong knob on his personal armrest console (or perhaps it was altogether the wrong armrest).
When Cobb had gained a new wisdom from his own death or had indeed become that metal Messiah which had always been lodged within his flesh, he now KNEW that human inefficiency was the sole cause of universal entropy... NOT vice versa, as history and science had always taught.
HIS would be the job to enlighten other humans: that was why he just HAD to beat death at its own game, to persuade the powers-that-be of this core message. Blame was to be apportioned, true, but man was man enough to take it upon his broad shoulders. Man needed to know, so that man in turn could be dealt with appropriately… IF it was not too late.
But then Cobb died properly for once... despite the failure of his earlier dress rehearsal. Well, they always say it will be alright on the night.
The man taking the Minutes, whoever he was, seemed pleased that the humour in the situation had long since disappeared - it had never been appropriate in the first place.
Battlefield Marshall decided to see to the cloakroom arrangements, to ensure that the correct tickets had been pinned to the correct coats. He passed the flowering of umbrellas upon their stand. He felt cleaned out.
Captain Erak still snoozed, but his dreams were at least clearer than his life had ever been. Tiredness no longer mattered.
Cobb slept a new life where Time nor Minutes counted. His shed body was left like a lion’s cage.
The other delegates argued on, oblivious, as the disco lights on the wall screen flickered through the wordsmoke of the conference room. If only one of them would be inquisitive enough to pick up the late Cobb’s own unofficial hastily scribbled Minutes, then at least the huge choking cloud of humanity would end up having a silver lining.
(Published 'Strange Attractor' 1992)
The lake was magicked by the moon.
The wind tickled the trees; the same wind teased the silvery carpet of watery light. The dinghy emerged from the rippling shadows, its two crew members silent with the breathlessness of expended energy. They had raised their moon-dripping oarblades to allow their previous effort maximum play on conflicting forces ... of which a floating corpse was one.
It lay just below the water’s silky sheen like an impression of a full-length oil painting. The face grinned upward, set thus by the moment of death itself. The legs wagged gently to and fro as if it were really swimming. The arms, weighted by the jewellery on the hands, acted as a couple of claw anchors snagging upon the lake’s pearl-pebbled bottom.
“There you are!” hissed the one who sat taller than the other.
“You sure it ain’t an impostor?”
As the moon went under a cloud, the corpse’s body vanished in a conjuring-trick so sudden any chance audience would be momentarily stunned into utter silence.
Both ghosts had indeed failed to identify the corpse as their own erstwhile body; so neither could yet claim they had hunted down one single parent-in-death…
As the Flying Dutchman of a dinghy itself disappeared, the bank’s reedy clumps gathered the everpresent wind like sarcastic elfin laughter.
(published 'Peeping Tom' 1993)
The clouds are churning around the cone of Mount Catanak, with clutches of overlapping lightning sparking continuously within the roiling masses.
Further up from these stretches of the River Mercy that taper towards this dead volcano, huddling along its bank, where an incipient wharf is being constructed, is the township of Parsimony: 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 river, surround its community.
One of the town’s youths, known mostly as Murky Mannion, 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 Parsimony and Mount Catanak. 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 must of Parsimony 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 Superman comics, but Clark Kent 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 Uncle Hairlip... 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 Murky within the blackness of the classroom chalking-board where it was said Uncle Hairlip 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. He envies the warmth seeming to emanate from the township...
Suddenly, all the lights go out in Parsimony in one fell swoop of darkness. This followed a particularly bright shaft of lightning that arched from the peak of Mount Catanak 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 Parsimony has not yet been wired up for electricity; the authorities are gradually working along the river communities starting from the harbour town of Misanthropy-on-the-Naze, illuminating each township along the way like Christmas trees, in great ordinations of currents...
Parsimony is due for this eucharist of electricity coma the 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 Murky and the town, thus obliterating its homely beaconing?
He shudders bodily. Shivers in the encroaching damp coldness. Alone in the world, the only flea left alive on the body of Robinson Crusoe. 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 the Uncle Hairlip hauntings and tauntings).
The lightning is now so fierce, playing at the lips of Mount Catanak, that he begins to doubt whether it is lightning at all. He even doubts his own identity.
He sees that the lightning is now so intense it etches the glistening roofs of Parsimony against the sky, so whatever squatted between had moved... But the lamps are still out, not even his little sister’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 town.
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, gruesome 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’?tre of any boogie man worth his salt.
The night wears on. The lightning fizzles out, as if sucked to the Earth’s core by the funnel of the dead volcano. The mighty River Mercy 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 the township. For several more hours Parsimony just teeters on the edge of one big awaking. And during this coda of the night, Uncle Hairlip, Curfew Watcher, shambles back to that den so carefully, so conscientiously constructed by the one he has just skinned with fright.
Published 'Auguries' 1989)
Eric needed another opinion. He had been expecting a letter by the second post, but it had not arrived. So, he was in a bit of a quandary: whether to follow his natural impulse, and kiss her, or make an excuse that he'd got sore lips.
Her wide wet eyes spoke volumes.
She told him about the postal strike.
(published 'Purple Patch' 1991)
Rogan seemed as if he had been roasted, if not charred, in Hell. He wasn’t racially black, as such. Simply because his skin was a certain colour did not entail anything beyond that fact. Indeed, Rogan’s brother was white - and white, here, meant an absence of colour rather than a creamy pink. Rogan’ s brother was also the Devil in disguise - or that was what so many who encountered him in the course of their lives believed, without the prerequisite of believing in the philosophical possibility of either a God *or* a Devil.
I assumed I, too, was one such problem child to whom reality, if not parents, had given birth. I often saw Rogan, the black one, when I strolled through the gloomy parts of the West End for no obvious reason other than the fact I found myself there. Most of those creatures of the person persuasion which wandered there were at least a darker shade of shape and the shadows hid them even when there was no force to cast shadows nor obstacles to throw or, even, deflect shadows.
Rogan’s reckless brother may simply have been Rogan’s well-cast shadow - and, at first, I found myself attending to the wrong brother after allowing myself, through a daredevil proclivity, to commune with one of them - not that, at the time, did I believe I was actually daring the Devil. Perhaps I taunted the Devil in my own soul, but that I had stirred Rogan as opposed to Rogan’s brother from his sleep in the palace of dreams was more luck than judgement day.
Rogan told me to sit where his shadow sat so that we could chew the fat together, since he guessed I was as eager for thought as food. Our head-to-head was a heart-to-heart interrupted, sadly, by someone I was soon to know as Rogan’ s brother. The latter loomed from the yellow lungfuls of Chinatown like a ghost - saying he was on track for Limehouse and would we come? Rogan answered him with an echoing shrug, returning to the priority of prattling with me. The brother hovered fixedly, hoping to make a threesome, his icy eyes speaking misread volumes of silence. The best was he’d go away without having first come.
Maybe I was deceived as to the real Rogan. The act of hearing him talk was indeed so self-sufficient I did not even listen to what he said, companionship being the sole motive I had in defying childhood’s instilled fear of strangers. His brother stood naked in clothes - the only words to describe his outfit, in striking contrast to Rogan and myself both of whom had things appended that made limbs look vestigial.
I later remembered Rogan’s words and, consequently, was able to chew over and deduce their meaning, having a sound memory (as opposed to the more commonplace photographic one that some stupid people wielded instead of intelligence). Rogan told me, then, that I was a kindred spirit, so kindred he had indeed lived my life vicariously. He knew my loves and hates. My sorrows and meagre joys. Even each change of mind, as I wended my faltering path between misplaced memories. If I had listened at the time, I would’ve asked why I hadn’t, in turn, lived *his* life - vicariously. He’d’ve nodded and given me the answer. He was nothing if not uneconomical with the truth.
Eventually, I slipped off, without noticeably going. The night was like an atomised mirror of blackness from which shapes took their reflection. My own shape straggled eastward, but even Limehouse was power-cut - except for the ghostly white shadow I shed for strangers to deem stranger (and fearfuller) than themselves. Perhaps I was a hero with horror as his honorific. More likely, I *was* the brother.
(published before - but where?)
"Yes?" said Nadine and Berenice almost together.
Patricia at last mustered the words to her mouth: "I've
just realised ... the new craft of our husband, it's called ...'The
Reyn-Bouwe'..."
The other two had not heard, as they were still preoccupied with the loathsome insects they had discovered beneath the stones.
It was almost Midday, almost Noon.
As the three women entered the room, they were surprised to find it covered in stones and lumps of larger rubble. A painting on the wall was the only decoration, depicting a ship in a storm; Nadine, as she peered closer at it, saw that the ship was called 'The ReynBouwe' and was evidently sinking. She spelt out its name for the benefit of the others.
“Who's the painter?” queried Patricia, half-heartedly. She thought that the ship's name was strange … strangely familiar.
“Can't make out the signature."
The woman who had not yet spoken was decked out in a soft-horn hat and heavily made up with turquoise under-eyes, a parasol hanging from her limp arm.
“What a mess!” said Nadine, turning to view the despicable floor. Patricia was admiring the marigold-window, in the wall opposite to the painting, which cast slanting lines of light through the dusty air.
“Berenice, come here, though," urged Nadine, who was now turning over stones in the corner furthest from the window. Nadine, like the other woman, seemed in her mid-thirties and, although not as smartly dressed as the other two, was the most attractive. Her hair was fastened with a butterfly clip, but wayward wisps seeped out like smoke.
The stone she had turned revealed a wriggling knot of unrecognisable insects buzzing somewhat at the disturbance.
“Ugh!" Berenice flinched off, waving her parasol like a sword. Patricia turned from the window - a little white flake clinging to her lip like a remnant of food - and stared uncomfortably at her two companion., She needed to speak but evidently she was finding it difficult to make her mouth formulate the words; she just made embarrassing sucking noises.
Today was Sunne-Stead.
Many had gathered on the quays to view, through optic-scopes, the temporary fixity of the planet's heat source. The spaceships had moored to their pylons for the duration, well out of the way; the Holy Stone had been cleared of tourists to allow the scientists to set out their telescopes and sextants at its topmost tower. Their other contraptions hung like intricate scaffolding from each cornerstone and gave the three women, who viewed the scene from their room, an impression of a clock-house that had been turned inside out.
They had indeed intended to view sunne-stead from the marigold-window. The moment came and went. The mighty star, rising from West to East, shuddered to a halt, poised in the white hell of…
[Cramped up, squashed in and breathless,
The crowd are silent,
As British Summer Time
shifts reality's belt one notch.
Suddenly, completely unpremeditated,
They lurch forward, in unison,
And sing the National Anthem.]
…the sky for what seemed almost a minute and, then, returned East to West.
The three women held hands in serenity for interminable hours, drawing as much spiritual significance as was possible into their communion. It was a frozen tableau, a mistress-piece and, as the heat gradually went out of the day, as dusk met dawn in the same quarter of the sky, their alabaster skin crumbled to the floor; and, if darkness came then the room would echo with the initial clumps of falling stones followed by the increasing clatter and final crescendo of collapsing masonry.
The night sky was a Queen Catherine Wheel of the world's interplanetary traffic, dodging in and out of the star-speckled wastes.
One man in particular climbed the tow-path of the city's central pylon from which several craft dangled like dead horses, He found the one he had been seeking - 'The Reyn-Bouwe' - the name was painted in all-weather gloss on its side. He inserted his limbs into the contour-seat and launched himself towards the inner circles of the cosmos. Pulling and pushing at various levers and gloating over just as many dials, he found himself spinning like a dying fly towards an under-sky where the sunne was about to lift its screaming rim. But, not being able to control the machine, the fuel burst and flew up into his face … like being sick on a funfair ride. The over-sky had turned turtle below him and he was diving, nose down, towards the last zenith, Desperately struggling with the release harness in his seat … fumbling for the mercy-ejection device, he lurched between what he believed to be two sunnes in violent love with each other. He was surely dead.
The last fragment crumbled to the floor; and the marigold- window had been shattered by a shooting star … or at least a crumb of one.
It was almost Midnight, almost Moon, and a slick of slime slowly slewed across the surface of the painting from a cake of wrigglers nesting in its frame.
From stone to sun and back again, there were other lives and lovers dodging death and damnation, But in the utter darkness of inner space, who knows whether there is a vast face between the two giant eyelights. And where's the mouth … for eating … for breathing … for speaking …for kissing? ~
(Published 'Works' 1989)
Dear Daddy,
I’m missing you. I always do - the access Mum lets you have is never enough.
What’s the news this time? Well, I had to go to the doctor’s on Tuesday. Nothing serious. Mum says it’s my age. I had to wait ages and ages at the surgery. Something to do with an emergency. When the doctor eventually arrived, he seemed all hot and bothered. But, strangely, his hands were very cold.
Not much else to tell you. School’s still a drag. I expect I’ll pass most of the mocks, except for Biology, of course. God didn’t make me to be a scientist, I suppose.
Anyway, much love to you and Rachel. Tell her I think she suits you. Can we go to the Water Palace next time?
Mum sends her love, despite everything. See you soon,
Janiseed. xxx
Dear Jani,
Thank you for your letter. Sorry I couldn’t make the weekend as planned. Rachel’s mother is still on the danger list, but the specialist says she’ll survive one way or another.
Talking about doctors, they’re never as busy as they make out, I reckon. Good job life’s all about targetting. If they had to do an ongoing survey, knocking on doors for patients ill enough to treat, instead of only depending on people coming to them, they’d be hard put to it. But with self-targetting by clients, their jobs are so much easier these days. On the other hand, as an insurance sales rep, I’m faced with door-stepping every day. Doctors (and their ilk) don’t know how lucky they are. Still, I target from the other direction, I suppose, ever since I started getting leads and referrals. I recently gave up cold calling altogether. Still, if it hadn’t been for cold calling, I’d never have met Rachel. It’s an ill wind ...
Anyway, much love, Jani, from me and Rachel. How’s Benjie, by the way? I expect he’s getting too small for you now. I hope Mum is well,
Lots of love,
Daddy. xxx
Dear Daddy,
So sorry, to hear about Rachel’s loss. Mum also sends her condolences, although she never met her.
What you said about cold calling makes sense now. I never understood when I was younger what your job really was. It seemed strange to spend one’s life as an unwelcome visitor to people’s houses.
I didn’t quite understand what you meant about targetting. I suppose that’s something which can be related to religion in a way. Does God wait for people to die or does he go out looking for them? By the way, I’d put Scripture in the same class as Biology, as far as the exams are concerned.
Benjie died a few months ago. I thought I’d told you. We sold his carcass to the knacker’s yard. I’d got browned off with riding anyway. Mum said it wasn’t being terribly kind to my figure.
Well, Mum took me to the Water Palace, in view of your difficulties. She says you are welcome to more access, when I told her that I thought you should see me more often.
I think that’s all the news for now. Oh ... I had to visit the doctor again, but the wait was less of a pain. Fewer people ill, I suppose. But I DO wish he’d warm his fingers more, before examining people. Still, you can’t have everything. See you soon, & love to you and Rachel,
Janiseed x
Dear Jani,
So sorry to hear that you needed to go to the doctor’s again. What IS wrong with you? Mum hasn’t written to me about it, so I won’t fear the worst.’
Well, it’s a long story, so I’ll keep it short. Rachel and I have been visiting her relations round here, following the bereavement. No sign of bombs and terrorists. Reading the papers in England, you’d never guess this is a really beautiful country over here. Anyway, we’ve discovered Rachel is rich Well, we’re both rich, I suppose. Her mother has left us a veritable fortune. Who’d have thought she had so much stashed away in different accounts? Well, the less we go into that, the better.
The long and the short of it is that we’d like to share some of this windfall with you and Mum. As Mum seems to have stopped writing to me, can you test the temperature of the water, to see if she’d accept a gift? I want most of it to be put in a trust for you. It’ll help you through University.
Incidentally, I was very upset at the news about Benjie. I was very fond of him. And you were so excited that Christmas when you found him in the stocking, as it were. I can still picture your face all lit up with joy. Like an angel, you were to me. That memory will live with me forever.
Don’t know when I can see you next, hoping you’ll understand. But you can write to the above address. It’ll reach me eventually.
Your loving Dad. X
Dear Miss White,
Thank you for the kind letter. I had of course seen Daniel’s death reported in the newspapers, even before I heard officially from the authorities in England. I am not sure whether you knew - but he was born a Catholic. Such an irony makes a mockery of the whole affair.
I wanted to take this opportunity to state that I never held a grudge against you. I am sure you already realised that fact, despite the guarded tones of your letter.
Like you, I shall miss Daniel desperately, even though I had not actually seen him for a year or so. It was merely KNOWING he was a living person somewhere on this spinning world of ours that kept me going.
Now to the difficult bit. You asked me to tell Janiseed what his last words were. Well, daughter and father happened to die on the same day. I cease to think of it as a meaningless coincidence, but as a tragic divine irony. The anguish of these heartbreaks was far more than merely double their otherwise separate effects, as you can imagine, from their cumulative force. I understand Daniel’s death was a painful affair, and I’m afraid Janiseed suffered terribly, too. I can only recover by thinking beautiful thoughts of both of them ... and of you.
Kind regards,
Alice Bishop
PS: I cannot possible accept the enclosed cheque, in the circumstances.
(Published somewhere before - currently investigating where and when)
DEAR UNCLE HAIR LIP.
WOT I RITE IS WOT I THINK AND I THINK YOU LIVE INSIDE THE BLACKBORED WATING TO GET OUT TO GET ME AND I LEEVE THIS BY THE CHORK DUSTER SO YOU WILL NO I AM ON TO YOU.
REGARDS, MURKY
Dear Murky,
I am writing this from inside the blackboard and it is quite difficult as I am writing it back to front, if you see what I mean.
When you have a dream and there is something nasty in it, that is me.
When you have an irrational fear, it’s me that makes it make sense.
When the teacher smacks your bare bum with the yardstick, it’s me sitting in his brain making him want to do it.
When your body gets out of control and when you do dirty things to it and when the stuff sticks to the sides or comes out too soon too quickly, then it’s me champing at your vital bits, making it all happen.
Sorry, run out of space, where the blackness ends. Make sure this is rubbed off before the others arrive.
Not yours, but mine, Uncle Hairlip.
DEAR UNCLE HAIRLIP,
IT WOOD NOT RUB OFF AS YOU HAD CHORKED IT FROM INSIDE. THE TEACHER GAVE ME A CLOWT FOR USING IN-DELL-ABLE CHORK, HE SED. WOT MADE IT WURSE WAS I DID NOT UNDER STAND WOT HE SED. I DID NOT UNDER STAND YOUR MESSIDGE EEFER. LIFE’S LIKE THAT TO KIDS, AYNT IT. IF YOU WUR EFFER A KID IN THE FURST PLACE. SORRY ABOWT THE SPELLING. WORK MEN TOOK THE OLD BLACKBORED AWAY TODAY. IT WOS NO USE WIF ALL THAT RITING STAYING ON IT.
MURKY.
(published 'Psychopoetica' 1989)
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