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As I wandered higgledy-piggledy the old streets of Colchester, I met a strange person who stared, stared, and stared. He had a round face, and it glowed like the moon, black spectacles, roll-neck sweater and jeans. Dawn was breaking to the west, and I strode on my way, not wanting to talk, nor look, nor hear, but he lurched across my path and weakly smiled but did not speak. He stared, stared and stared, and I saw his eyes were red with late-night reading. He did not speak, nor did I, but I knew I had met a fiend, a youth of wolfish learning, so I did not speak and higgledy-piggledy I strode on my way through Colchester.
Somebody always turns up to light the light that sits on the table beside my late-night reading, my late-night reading. Is he the fat man in a suit I saw in Colchester’s lonely late-night streets or the replica of the lamp-lighter? Somebody or something, then, always turns up to fill the darkness with sparkling beggared coins. As I walked along Head Street with twilight bloodstained by near dark, I saluted the passing ladies. I should have brought my beard. Suddenly, I spotted a splendid standard lamp beside a stuffed dog in a side-by shop. I determined to purchase it (the dog not the lamp) and use it for a light. But, who to light it when I have it? I cannot as I do not exist. Something will turn up no doubt, to stand behind my black spectacles and inside my roll-neck jeans. But now I must finish my late-night reading, late-night reading, as it is too dark to read by my eyes. I do not talk, I do not look, I do not even hear someone bark a lonely bark in Colchester’s lonely late-night streets nor even in its lonely late-night dreams.
(written 1967 – published ‘Psychopoetica’ 1999)
PROLOGUE
The room was as quiet as a mouseful of pins. Angel had been invited to sit awhile… mainly because nobody was ready to receive her. The doorkeeper had released barely sufficient information, but she understood that the delay was likely to be minimal. Old enough not to take matters at face value, she feared the worst…a wait of at least a day or so, or even longer, much longer. The world had become a slow place. The new millennium had taken longer to arrive than the customary turns of century in the past. Yet, how did she know that? She hadn’t been there, had she? She shrugged… and prepared to wait. Her watch ran too quick and she had placed it in her bag, rather than allow it to mislead her. In the good old days, she would have been able to take advantage of such diversions as a magazine-rack, a television set or, even, full-blooded books. Now, of course, endemic slow motion was not conducive to entertainment…since it showed up all the seams and otherwise concealed boredoms. Even exciting plots dragged and drooped…which brought Angel back to Angel. She had a lifetime to ponder those distant eras of high romance and adventure when she had been, if not exactly fast and loose, certainly a trifle impetuous. Before that, her childhood had been full of endless summers…yet, paradoxically, childhood had fast fizzled out just as if Einstein had never been born.
DAY ONE
The most amazing fact is that, even though I am not yet old enough to write, here I am actually writing a journal, yet I don’t believe any of it happened this way…not that I can easily forget events that happened today…more that a newborn baby girl such as I has no more than a single event to record in a journal, even if she could remember it and, more incredibly, write about it…and, surely, one’s suspicions are aroused when the journal also purports to describe its very act of execution by a baby who is able to write. Whatever the case, merely let me say that I was born today. Being born, let me also tell you, dear journal, is not a messy nor a painful act from the baby’s point of view. Anyone who tells you different is simply rumor-mongering, reaping the chaff of hearsay and prospecting loose logic.
DAY ONE THOUSAND
Diaries are a bit of a fad at the best of times. Still, having come to another round number of days, a millennium in fact, I have considered it high time for another entry. At least, this proves Angel still exists. But what sort of person am I? A baby who can write, well, I must be a pretty strange two year old, mustn’t I? And an even stranger adult yet to come, no doubt. But I must pull myself together. I have a serious part of my journal to write today…it being merely coincidence that it fell on the thousandth day of my life…and the figures of speech must be sufficiently elegant and, yes, weighty, to match the occasion’s importance. What occasion? Well, dear journal, you seem to be full of curiosity. In fact, your personality is decidedly…how shall I put it?…human, isn’t it? However, to satisfy your foibles, let a tiny toddler girl like me confirm that today marks the very first clear day of my future grown-up memory. And what is it that I shall remember so clearly from today? A see-saw on the hillside, bathed in the shafting sunset, and a man who purports to be called “uncle” pushing me up and down from his end of the contraption. I hooted with delight as I felt the thinning tug of Earth’s gravity at each thrust into the empurpling heavens. “Angel, hold tight!” he shouted in cascades of echo, brimming with transitory joy. Yet despite the clarity of memory, various questions will remain. What had we been doing up to this point? Indeed, what did we do afterwards, how did we get home to my blurred parents, whether I slept in a cot or a grown-up bed with no sides…and was I fed a cheese supper to account for the dreams I know I am going to have tonight but, like many dreams, since forgotten? Well, I shall never remember even though I happen to write this entry between supper and bedtime, so very tired from playing in the hills with “uncle,” my head spinning round and round until the great flouncing tides of sleep sweep in and expunge a toddler’s excited confusions about a very special day...
DAY TWO THOUSAND
The time has arrived to get on with the rest of my life. After the three dates above, dear journal, I know, I have forsaken you for yet another thousand days, or is it nine hundred and ninety-nine? It is unclear when millennia are supposed to begin and end…yet does it matter? The unquestionable fact is that I am five years old… but my ability to write English on your pages has not significantly improved, if at all. However, emotional responses to my own thoughts have matured apace and I can even begin to comprehend the predicament in which I find myself Angel is a freak: not exactly one of those infant prodigies…since they retain a foothold in childhood… their brains merely holding a lot more room than most for intelligence, logic or artistry…whilst Angel’s brain, yes, my brain, does not even belong to me! How can I explain it better? Simply let the words speak for themselves. I’ve nothing to add. So, turning to the rudiments of my life, the one called “uncle” has vanished…under a cloud, as it were. I don’t understand why, but my parents (far less blurred than my previous entry) tell me a lot simply by their inclination to say nothing about him. I have a recurring dream where “uncle” appears, slopping up what looks like buckets of blood, lugging them between bedrooms and the top floor…where the landing light is always out. But who has ever heard of dreaming in real colour? My common sense tells me it is impossible. Not much else to record at this point in time. I wish I could go to school like other kids where I might get some things out of my system naturally…using plasticene… playing team games… and with teachers far more human than my parents seem to be, and than you, dear journal, come to think of it. I shall give you another rest and, by implication, you, too, dear Angel.
DAY TEN THOUSAND
When I re-read the childish handwriting in the first few pages of this exercise-book, I am amazed at my own duplicity…and, yes, ashamed. I admit it… I come clean, dear journal, O such mockery of a dear dear sweet journal…the fact of the matter is that I have pretended…yes, pretended…a twenty-seven year old shelf-sitter who wishes she was someone other than Angel, even if it is to be a precocious five year old whom she never was, never will be…I’ve bitten the pencil to the lead, clumsily fisted it…a mock pram-squatter etching out the scrawls and scribbles of an ancient language...like a cave-dweller. But what can I expect? Hieroglyphics were always meant to outline the raw emotions of last races as they tried to find themselves, weren’t they? Don’t bother to answer. Angel won’t mind.
DAY TEN THOUSAND AND ONE
“Angel won’t mind.” The number of times I’ve heard that said. I’m not exactly trodden on, more squelched to pulp under hob-nailed feet. One day I’ll stand up for myself. The last fellow who dated me ended up exchanging me for a blonde. The fellow before that raped me, even before I’d met him. He said he raped me in a dream…one of his dreams, that is, not mine. I’ve yet to meet the fellow who rapes me in my own dreams… assuming he’s a real person in the first place. Anyway, for the time being, I’ve given up real men altogether. Life’s more controllable in dreams, you see…marginally. So, I’m taking the extraordinary step or writing this journal on consecutive days for one simple reason. I saw “uncle” this morning… as clear as clear can be. He’d grown older in the last twenty odd years, of course, but, striding from shop to shop, his whole demeanor was basically unaltered. I watched him from behind a corner…if corners have behinds, which I’m sure they don’t. It would make more sense if space were two-dimensional. Time adds the vital third ingredient, giving edges their behinds…and me the room to maneuver. I followed him from edge to edge, wondering whether I should accost him. After all, if it weren’t for him, I might have been a normal human being… not one full of complexes and fears and all that emotional shit. I might have actually grown up properly. But he disappeared into a crowd and, as I write this out, I blame that very crowd for his camouflage. People are their own conspiracies and take scant account of mere individuals like me. And people (yes, you!) who happen to read this journal in the future, behind the corner of time which is my death… well, they should be ashamed of their mass carelessness. Most men resemble my “uncle” in the best of times…surely, the crowd didn’t have to go the whole hog of uniformity. Still, I’ve written it down…got it off my chest…made a clean breast of it, as it were.
DAY TEN THOUSAND AND SIXTY SIX
Today seemed as good as any to resume these entries. There are a helluva lot of blank pages to go…as here’s trusting to long enough life to fill ‘em! Perhaps I’ll have to up the rate of entry. The room is quieter than a mouseful of pins. That’s a strange expression for me to have written. I don’t know where it came from… some book I read somewhere, I suppose. The doorkeeper told me I wouldn’t have long to wait. I’ll believe that when I see it. These days people have to wait for the delays themselves to start! It’s at times like this one begins to ponder the past…all of those endless summers of childhood…the crazy romances…and the various misadventures which began as something far more important before they fizzled out. There’s nothing in this room to help me pass the time…only a few still paintings on the wall…and the uninteresting furniture. So, it’s useful to have my journal book with me, whiling away the hours by telling the hours…until night comes.
EPILOGUE
The room ran with rats, all pinning hopes on vultures’ dreams. They do not teach anybody anything these days, the solitary man thought. He shuffled sheaves of hieroglyphics in the hope of them falling into a shape of sense. Sluggish time dragged like tides of sleep on shingle: Einstein in prison, like Galileo. The man pulled the past apart, word by word. Then he lugged pails back and forth across the landing, for slopping out. Later, he sat on the cold floor, rocking back and forth, back and forth, to the rhythm of ancient childhood games, dreaming of a pig-tailed girl called “Angel” above him in the empurpling heavens. Eventually, the doorkeeper turned off the man’s light, to mimic day-fall.
(published 'Samsara' 1996)
The footpath through the forest looked as if it had outgrown itself for at least the turn of two centuries.
If I had not known it was a right of way from Barymance to Stromper, I would have taken a different route. I pulled on my rubber nettle-waders to mid-thigh, providing as much protection as possible, and followed as best I could the map with which the hotel had provided me.
The line of the path on the chart took the form of a series of railtrack symbols, tracing an endless snake from the Town of Inns called Barymance to the seaside resort of Stromper, twining between the grid of number-alphabet designated squares which the mapmaker had deemed suitable for the coordinately unwashed such as I.
The only line, in fact, on which to hang the dirty underwear of my misplaced sense of direction was bedded in the trees like a ridged veining utilised by nature to transport sap from one end of the country to the other. It was a communication cord that allowed forest root-creatures to talk to one another, a historic path helping the fixed green things breed in and out, at the same time as giving man’s own Earthfree limbs the opportunity to find routes between.
I mused on these matters as I found myself in deeper and deeper forest conclaves. The birds at the top of the trees had grown silent, pent up with foreboding, tracking me with their right-angled stares from above clenched beaks.
My new wife had gone by water to Stromper, in one of the river paddllesteamers which often took fares into the bay itself. She would have already arrived at the sea-front hotel, drinking gins and tonic in the bar with other men who could only admire the curves of her young body. The sun would at this very moment be setting like an eye disease - casting those saltblood waves of flame that careered, creamtopped, towards the beach. She would have almost forgotten her husband who had chosen the more difficult path to reach Honeymoon’s end.
She had no feeling for the forest. I had none for the sea.
The darkness commenced at the level of my feet. The sky seemed to hang fire, hugging to itself any last reflections from glossy flickering birdwing, like a jealous lover of light. The branches appeared to pulse with a heartbeat of the Earth only the dusk could reveal.
Soon, I would not be able to perceive the face of the map: the tell-tale character lines, the frown of the contours, the earlobe tattooes of the landmarks, the ley-lines upon the palm of the river delta, the cross in a circle denoting Stromper, the edge of coast upon which that town was situated coiling an unreliable division between sea and land.
My wife had unbuttoned her blouse to the navel. The heat was coming off the sea, despite the night. Upon the balcony, men vied with each other to buy her drinks. And vied with women too.
I felt older than the forest. In fact, I AM old. This was my first marriage and, unless I could rediscover the forest path, also my last. I had fallen in love almost immediately, upon meeting her at a social gathering arranged by my dear mother. Although the whole thing may have been a match-making exercise, there was plenty I could have done about it. I need not have gazed at her innocent ankles nor the supple fleshy valley between the bones behind the knees above the calves below those topless thighs. I could have asked her outright to come to my bedroom so that I could explore her body with my inexperienced hands.
And she would have come, too.
That would have got it out of my system. But because of my foolish hesitation, the mystery remained and grew, became all-important, semi-religious. And, in so being, marriage was the only answer and prerequisite, the only outlet for my stifling scruples.
The wedding was simple, celebrated by a priest who happened to be my uncle. He had laid my hand upon hers ... the first and probably only occasion that our flesh touched ... and told us we were man and wife. My mother had smiled ... beneath the tears.
And so to the honeymoon. I had arranged it in my usual hamfisted fashion, digging out travel books and hotel guides, finally discarding them all for Stromper. I booked the paddle-steamer, a cabin suite for us two alone, a dance band to play outside our cabin door, rare cocktails to be delivered to our bedside, huge breakfasts for appetites far bigger than ours ... things arranged so meticulously, but with no real awareness of their effects or implications, as I was to realise far too late.
She was too young to encompass such an intense one to one relationship:
all she really needed was the company of many men and women; she sought nothing but laughter, voices, looks, innuendoes, peccadilloes, cockadilloes, canoodles...
I discovered this too late.
However, I did board the paddlesteamer with her, but subsequently stowed away in the catering firm’s empty crate as it was loaded back on the dockside. I watched the paddlewheels churn foam between the arms of the harbour, the craft disappearing like a wounded spider into the broken bloodyolk of the horizon.
In disgust, I threw the map away into the darkness of the forest. It was not even of this area.
I wrapped my arms around a tree-trunk which rose like a long huge brazil nut towards the sightless disoriented moonyellow patch upon the night sky. The wind had risen; the branches above kicked and pumped, much as the limbs of my wife would thrash when someone in Stromper settled upon bedding her for me. And a root of the tree coiled easily from the Earth, to gain my body upon its turnspit revolving endlessly but imperceptibly with the age-old cycles of Mother Nature.
#
The birds revived into their dawn chorus of words, telling of one who had died from heartbreak and had left his last message in their beaks.
(published 'Ammonite' 1993)
“I am not exactly who I am.”
The middle-aged woman, who must once have been young and pretty, shifted in her rocker, setting the shadows moving rhythmically around her. This was Madge Mudge. (She’d always been known as Madge during her heyday but then she’d met John Mudge, fell in love despite herself (and his name) and ended up wedding him) ... and, now recently widowed, she wondered what it had all been about. The sound of her whisper out of nowhere had broken the relentless silence ... only to be followed by another on padding feet. It was her cat Feemy. His real name was Blasphemy, but she’d always thought Feemy to be an endearing shortening.
Feemy looked up at the corpse of John Mudge on the trestle table, only that very evening professionally laid out by the village deadlocker, sea wrinkled hands poised in mock prayer on the upper chest. Then, Feemy, with only a cursory preliminary arching of the back, pounced upon the midriff of his one time master and curled into a ball. The over-loud purring filled the clockless quiet with a refreshing ruminative shape.
Madge could hear the distant crumbling waves along the pebble strands as yet another storm threatened. The village was one of fishing smacks, squalling fish-wives, rank fish smells, tall black fishing huts striating the coastline hereabouts like night sentries, fishgreen groynes stretching into the curdled sea whereon little boys with their makeshift rods fished night and day for sticklebacks, hanging fishing-nets like veils for giant maiden aunts with monkfish faces, washing lines of fishhooks, too many things with fish in their names ... and the upturned boathouses...
...in one of which Madge now brooded. It was big enough for two people and a cat. But hardly room even to swing it. Put in one more cat and it would have been tantamount to a children’s game of Sardines. As the night wore on she crooned a shanty:
“My love he was a shine-eyed fisher,
A king of my heart, joy of my loins,
But he went to another to love and kiss her,
So he slipped ‘tween two waves groins,
And now lies on my table, his eyes are coins...”
She hummed the rest. John Mudge had indeed drowned at sea and been washed ashore quite near to the village totem pole, his mouth open on a flapping fishtail tongue. The sound of the mournful dirge, as they dragged him a trench through the sodden pebbles towards the wooden-stilted jetty, could be heard even where Madge helped cram her own ears with Feemy’s paws. She knew John’d been with Mygold the night before, been wrapped in her tidal embrace, so it was only fitting that he had met the only true death of a fisherman. He’d deserved every bitter salt-swallow towards that murky end...
Madge looked again towards her husband, no longer bearing Feemy who had skulked off somewhere, jealous of his master’s peaceful sleep. In the flickering sea-light, the corpse seemed to breathe as if it were an actor on the stage only playing dead. Mygold should be dead too, unless she was to live for another day, another love, another wife’s loss. Madge’s crooning forgiving lullaby lasted till dawn’s blurred edge. And, by then, Madge Mudge was not exactly who she used to be.
They found Mygold’s deadweight balanced precariously atop the fish-swallowing-fish totempole at first light, where it had clambered to die.
The little boys had a good crop of sticklebacks that blowy day.
(Published ‘Chimera’ 1990)
At first there were three sweet sisters in childhood. Then one of them died of diphtheria -and the others, Alice and Esme, missed her deeply. For a time too, in their touching innocence, the pair of them pitied God needing to look after such a mischievous imp as their dear, dead sister.
Still, there was always a silver lining in their thoughts, if no silk edging to their rough blankets. In their really young days, all three had shared a double bed which became - with their femininity filling out - only fitting for two. Their mother scolded the two survivors when they ate too much, for she took reckon of the mattress springs, and money was spent all too easily on such creature comforts. It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that the lights were kept dim which - with grime building up on the nursery window - meant that Alice and Esme had to pore over their improvement books with reddening eyes. Their only affection, each other.
As compensation, their mother allowed a tiny light to flicker during the depths of night. Esme preferred it that way. But Alice thought it made everything more frightening, for the resultant shadows moved piecemeal across the cracked ceiling, the rocking horse travelled from child to child across the generations of its past, and Alice even imagined the ghosts of bodiless wings entangled in the butterfly net which leaned against the wall. In those days, hunger could act as a soporific so, before long, even Alice was snoring, with only dreams to fear.
As time waxed, the girls grew older, in spite - as well as because - of the meagreness of their condition. Esme eventually caught a cold from the years of suffering Alice’s nightly nervous tugging the bedcovers off her. It would be hard-hearted to blame Alice, but there was no doubt that her actions resulted in Esme incubating a sniffle, then influenza with, eventually, fevers building upon fevers - and at the peak of those body wrenching nights, Alice was moved from Esme’s heaving side to the mother’s room. Alice recalled listening to Esme’s rhythmic screeching lungs even a corridor away. Then Esme died, as the dead sibling had once done before her. The family doctor pronounced Esme gone, the faint heart having given up the ghost after finally fluttering for just a few breathtaking seconds amid the trammels of the butterfly net.
Mother shed a few tears, but then took businesslike control of affairs. She allowed Alice a short while with her dead sister, to say goodbye. That was the way things were done since even soft-heartedness must be recognized, if but briefly. The nursery had the usual night lamp beside the bed, making ripples down the rhyming walls. Esme, if one can call a corpse by her name, was resting in carved repose, no longer concerned about the scarcity of covers on her side of the bed. Her hands had been positioned in prayer, as she used to do as a child at the end of the school day, like a closed, fleshy moth. Her near womanly face was composed, peaceful, forgiving.
Alice was scared. She had been too young to appreciate the significance of death, when the earlier sister had become dead so young. Now, it was the shock of stillness. Abruptly, the corpse that had been Esme sat bolt upright in the bed, hands still poised, its shadow shuddering in the shape-shifting gloom. Even the rocking-horse ceased its light prance of pretence.
Esme’s words hissed out: “I can’t go away. God won’t let me. And I am so very tired. Help me, Alice, please help me. Help me go where I can truly rest.”
Alice replied as if to herself: “This must be a dream. I will wake up in a moment, as I always do from dreams...
Esme’s voice answered, bristling with irritation: “It may only be a dream to you, dearest Alice, but it’s oh so horribly real to me. Think on that!”
Alice smiled, before she calmed the corpse’s tongue with her own.
(Published *Darkside: Horror For The Next Millennium* Darkside Press 1996)
There were three drummers in the empty hall. The backdrop had an indefinable colour (like most colours worth their pigment), a uniform mix of turquoise and navy blue and bottle green. The floor was earthy, yet smooth. The six feet were really large for the rest of their awkwardly angular bodies. Thick corded arms double-jointed in akimbo angles of percussive attack. Drumsticks with large red business ends: huge lucifers with phosphorous bobbles. Drums themselves - red-trimmed oil barrels of near purpose-built perfection as tympani - trying to escape the neatly thick red straps strung across knotted shoulders and cartilaginous chests. Six legs mingled in clumsy straining stances. Trousers of dark colourlessness. Skin of insipid bronze. Faces intent, staring; haircuts sculptured (except one which straggled across the brow); all archetypically macho, too, except, perhaps, one of them, or two, because, half-hidden by taut drum-strap, was that face with floppy strands of hair. None were exactly ugly nor breathtakingly handsome. A tableau of dark knotty hues. I had caught them 'in flagrante delicto', before they broke a silence of generations. Pity none of them could speak Latin. A dead language. Muffled drums. Unknown warriors. I slipped out of the empty hall. As I made clear to you, initially, it had been ever such.
(Published 'Star*Line' 1998)
His head was a camera, or it seemed like it to him; he saw everything as if framed for a motion picture. He had been given a certificate 18, when he reached a relatively young age, but now, with the years piling up on top of each other, even that was not sufficient to cover the scenes he sought out.
One day, he discovered a backstreet of his home town he had not previously explored in which there was a tall disused warehouse with a faintly glowing signboard on the vestigial gantries: he could just peer through the misted up lens and see the letters spelling out WAX MUSEUM. He tried to pan round but his feet were rooted to the crumbling pavement and his neck had stiffened: he felt a movement on his shoulders as if a creature had lodged there, squinting through a slot in the back of his head. Whatever it was, claws were penetrating his overcoat and finally his flesh, fastening on to the blade bones like steel. He tried to shake it off; it was all well and good to imagine being a camera but here he was actually being used as one by some frightful inhabitant of the night.
His eyeballs revolved in the sockets, and the WAX MUSEUM sign flickered out of freeze frame, scrolling like an old fashiond black & white television of the fifties. He desperately needed vertical hold: but that was the least of his worries: before long, he found himself going into cinemascope and edges of the scene he had previously not been able to view encroached and fluttered in from the sides: things like wriggling hairs and, then, insect feelers which often used to blemish projections upon the flea-pit screens of the sixties. The technicolor oozed back, and a blood-red haze gave the whole vista a dream-like quality. Like speech bubbles in comic strips, this was a token of dissolving ready-reckoner reality, a symbol of beliefs being suspended...
The whole vistavision screen was now acrawl with translucent moth-wings beating faster than the spread of the frames. He could no longer make any assumptions about his own sanity. He turned his eyes downwards as far as they would go without detaching the optic nerve, to see his cylindrical nose extending forth from his face: zooming in on the entrance of the museum: where he saw a camera filming him filming it: but surely it couldn’t be a real one, because it seemed to grow wonky and misshapen the more he stared back at it. However, he was pleased on discovering eventually that it was a female camera: but, as their noses came together across the street in some primitive ritual of a kiss, all he could see was the utter emptiness of his own blackscreen soul.
That’s when the thing on his back extricated itself from his bones and scuttled off somewhere, abandoning the tickertape of the film to flap uselessly... as it reeled off the spool and tangled up the inside of his skull; since it left no other room in there, his brain slithered out of the ear like a white worm in search of another lair.
It must have been a horror film, for why else would the place be called a WAX MUSEUM?
(Published 'Auguries' 1990)
Bricken Hall was the large house on the hill, during Michael's childhood. He sometimes half-looked up at it from the school playground, never questioning its presence and, as time continued, barely noticing it at all.
Like all towns where people are raised, he took many of the landmarks for granted, however they might have appeared to strangers - the quirks and nooks, winding alleys, architectural peccadilloes, long walls without entrances, squares with fountains amid the odd statuary, and the line of terraced houses where Michael himself had been chosen to live, with stylish out-jutting windows and carved ornamentation more akin to gargoyles than one would think typical of the Utility Years.
But he never really noticed anything at all. He played at being a steam-train along the lines in the pavements, as he wended the familiar course to school. Sometimes he decided that the blue-mottled paving-slabs meant death, so he had to hop over those for fear of his very existence (albeit a tenuous existence at the best of times). Then he reached Temperance Street where, if he had only realised it, the school was itself an architectural peccadillo, with it squat priapic bell-tower, endless red-brick walls, and two playgrounds, one for boys and the other for those who were at that time a mystery to him - they were called "girls", but that was all he did know, other than the fact that they seemed to dress differently - and teachers with pea-brain whistles, looking older than they really were either because of the strain of the job or the comparison with Michael's insultingly young age - and playtime when he had to pinch his nose for fear of the ripe stench in the Boys Lavatory, followed by games such as Denno and chants of "fight! fight! fight!", whereupon a teacher arrived breathless from the affrays Michael later learned took place within the sanctuary of the staff-room, to tear apart, limb from limb, those ruffians partaking in a catspit scrap, and other games, yes, like flicking cigarette cards so they flew off as bodiless helicopters into corners of the playground where, on different occasions, he sometimes sat with a crony or two debating the nature of existence (however tenuous) and whether "girls" had willies.
Those were the best days of his life. The horror was he could not later remember them with any degree of clarity. But, presumably, he did not need reminding that, one day, upon emerging from the Boys Lavatory, deeply inhaling the comparatively fresh air of the playground, he had looked up for once at the large house that stood on the hill. Bricken Hall, they called it. A teacher, during Gym that day, whilst the brawnier boys dragged the thick bristly exercise-mats from the bike-sheds and the weaker morsels toted the bean-bags from the Boys Lavatory, told Michael (as, the teacher said, Michael was the only trustworthy one), that Bricken Hall was haunted. Michael stared back quizzically, not speaking, for he hardly ever opened his mouth (except to nourish his tenuous existence with food) and, inretrospect, that was probably why the teacher trusted him so much. In later life, Michael could still see him, standing there, staring at Michael's three-quarter length trousers, which demurely hid his knobbly knees. The teacher's eyes were blue and younger than the other teachers. His horn-rimmed spectacles reflected Michael's own face twice over...
For several months after that, Michael was intrigued by Bricken Hall. He began to notice it more and more. He went to the library to read up about it, searching archives of local history, questioning the spinster type who stared into space at the front of the reading-room. She told him more things than any of the books could tell him. The books were more concerned with the personalities that had passed through the annals of the Town Hall (which, Michael supposed, if you had the time, would itself prove to be quite an interesting building to study, with its Gothic clocktower and yet unrepaired war damage). It was perhaps because he remembered more about facts when given to him by word of mouth (the eyes saying as much as the lips), that he literally ate up the sounds, recompensing in due course, he hoped, for his own silence. She knew what he needed to know, without really being asked. She must have read it in his face like an open book.
She said that parts of the Temperance Street School were older than Bricken Hall. Its bell-tower was, in itself, the oldest part of the whole town. And from the boys' playground (and no doubt the lavatory, too) had emerged some of the world's leaders, such as Disraeli, Cromwell, Churchill, Thatcher and so on. Michael ate it all up.
But, when he heard about Bricken Hall, his mouth gaped open and stayed like that for days afterwards. It had ghosts, true - many had seen them. Not only that simple fact, it had actually been built to house the ghosts that already populated the once bare hill.
"What sort of ghosts, I hear you ask me," she continued (and he later could not recall what she had said precisely with that strange Welsh underlilt). "They came from all walks of reality, but the ones that linger most are literary. E.F. Benson stays locked up in the room in the tower, scribbling social comedies. M.R. James even today sits in its bookroom, illuminating clues upon all the fly-leaves, sometimes confiding with Carnacki who has recently taken to roosting up one of the chimneys. H.P. Lovecraft has left to go to a better place, but he has abandoned many of his more striking creations in the shuttered attic, where lesser monsters dare not go. Matthew Gregory Lewis ponders on why his Nun was bleeding and his descendants such crass people. Sitting in the kitchen polishing the silverware of his dreams, is one with a remarkable resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe..."
She rhythmically intoned the last name, almost too low for a woman to reach. None of it then, as later, made any sense to Michael, but it was all so perfectly mysterious; each word fell into place like a massive jigsaw that would keep him busy for at least a decade of Christmases.
#
He could not remember ever noticing Bricken Hall again. The teacher who had drawn his attention to it was never seen again. There was a rumour doing the rounds in the Boys Lavatory that he had been sacked for venturing into the "girls'" playground "out of season", as it were. Michael never even again noticed the hill upon which Bricken Hall had sat. Life took on a new urgency, speeding up, doing things to his body that he feared he would never understand. Events leapfrogged. Exams seemed all-important, for he wanted to follow in the footsteps of the famous Old Boys of Temperance Street Juniors.
He became older and, he hoped, wiser. He thought he had left that town far behind him, both in mind and body. The image of Bricken Hall did not cross his thoughts for all these years of helping his own children winnow the impossible jigsaws from the rest of their lives. But then I came to haunt you, Michael, with memories, memories which you perhaps hoped had slipped away beyond recall. I was a ghost from the unchangeable, if forgettable, past, bringing it all back with me like the black lace train of a funeral dress. I had come to teach you that the past was all-important and should not be filed way in that forgotten drawer which was full of old childrens' clothes. You should have riffled through the old yellowing photographs that your eyes once snapped - such as the reflections in a pair of glasses. I was to renew the mysteries of the opposite sex which, at the best of times, you never really plumbed. I was to show you how to tread fearlessly on the blue-mottled paving-slabs. So, whatever you might have done and was still to do, Michael, I was surely destined to live an existence (sometimes shy and tenuous, sometimes neither) in the shuttered attic of your brain.
Michael looked up for the last, and perhaps first, time and saw a shape waving from the top of a bare hill. He however barely discerned the glint of its glasses in the setting sun - or was it the naked sparkle of its tearstained eyes?
Published ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ 1994
empty space
Milk looked in the mirror. Looked again. He was a real sight. Milk was never the sight for sore eyes. A huge pimple on the glass with sprouting hair and embedded apertures. Milk couldn’t believe his eyes. Milk was not in the room. But in the mirror. Or so Milk felt. Milk didn’t look again. Not for a long time. Then frightened Milk discovered he wasn’t in the mirror either.
Milk woke up with a swollen head. It hadn’t been a dream. Surely, Milk never dreamed. Milk couldn’t dream. Couldn’t sleep, in fact. Mad people are people who stay awake. Madness and waking walk hand in hand. Sleep and sanity are tongue in mouth. Turd in cheek.
Milk couldn’t fathom it. The bed was smaller now. Milk’s mind bigger. Heart thumping like a door in the wind. Milk had slept for the very first time since coming into the world. Always in bed at night. The only civilised place to be. But sleep, that was another game. Until tonight.
Since his mother’s womb had disappeared like the back exhaust of a car speeding up a motorway towards a massive shunt, Milk had lain there at night, eyes bigger than stars. But not tonight. Milk had slipped. Into darkness. Then dreamed of a mirror. Milkmirror. And, finally, himself. Milkself.
Milk tottered to the toilet. Worked the flush to rid the bowl of the creature that had floated there during the night. But it wouldn’t budge. The water rumpled its skin. Sparkled the gaps for eyes. Plumped plimsoll-lines and tide-marks against the sides of the bowl.
Milk laughed.
Mirrors everywhere.
But nowhere for a soul.
Milksoul. Milkbowl.
The eyes wet.
(published 'Air Fish' 1993)
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