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empty space
“I think, deeper than memory, there is something indefinable which triggers us into a perspective and a hopeful leg-up towards recapturing the past. For example, I have had wide experiences over the years (many tears and laughter) but very little seems now to be directly accessible; yet upon an ‘event’, I can often nod sagely and recreate ‘memories’.”
They were the first words of the body which I was inspecting for possible habitation. Its selling-point.
‘Vacant possession’ I understood it to be, if one employed the old parlance of Real Estate … vacant, of course, except for the thought expressing itself in this way of speech. I decided to query the paradox. Yet, naturally, the party selling the body for habitation was the body itself. Unless houses or other similar properties had become autonomous, they had always needed a third party for any transactions to be viable.
Which reminds me – years ago, before I can even remember, I was indeed a house; my bricks a jigsaw of my boneless skeleton; my roof a hot tin one; my chimney a vestigial stand for aerial spokes and unwanted thoughts; my rooms the soft spaces of the heart … and the ghosts simply emotions that made me the me I was.
I screwed up my face in a surrogate scowl. I was rather bemused by the unspoken concepts that had seamlessly derived themselves from the initial pattern of speech. “Soft spaces in my heart?” I laughed. I had a big heart.
Laughter is never the laughter that laughed last. Torn from my throat like soot from a chimney.
Legged-up into the flue from the hearth’s grate, I blamed the old days for my predicament as a child sweep. Someone, though, was sweeping down the other way. Someone or something.
(Published 'Not Dead, But Dreaming' 2001)
empty space
The park was surrounded by silos and gleaming metal pylons, with puffs of electric-blue smoke escaping from the enormous silver canisters which floated in the metal-grey sky.
“Didn’t you know I was coming?”
“If I did, I would not be here, would I?”
“I don’t know how to take you, Parket.”
“Take me how you like, Sprake, but do not read any meaning into my words, because I guess I am not even talking to the likes of you.”
Sprake squinted quizzically at his companion on the park bench. The opening gambits were expected to be tentative, feeling their way towards less insubstantial statements fitting for a Summit Meeting between dossers.
Parket wielded an empty whisky bottle, at which he looked wistfully from time to time. His dowdy clothes, which had not even seen better days in the best of times, belied his well-spoken, rounded-out articulations of speech. His brief had been merely to test the ground, since the man called Sprake may have been shrewder than given credit for. When the world teetered on the balance, not even half chances could be taken.
Sprake carried a brief-case, evidently brand new, in real calf leather, with his own embossed initials. Taking a gold key which was tied to the string around his waist, he inserted it into the lock and, after hiding his fumbling with the combination numbers, he opened it with the sound of falling domino trip-tumblers and the crack of fresh-cured leather.
Parket noticed that Sprake’s garb was an army greatcoat, stinking of mothballs even out here in the cold air and veritably green with well-seasoned mould. His tie seemed as if it had not been unloosed for at least fifty year or more and his shoes, if they had once reflected the beaming faces of children in the polished uppers, were now hidey-holes for scuffed demons...
“If you’re not talking to me, what’s all this bother then in actually moving your lips and letting noises out?” weasled Sprake.
“Good heavens, man, do not take what I say personally,” laughed a perky Parket.
“I cannot hold with such high-faluting talk. I’m a man of means.” Sprake moved his oily hair from in front of his eyes as if he were shutting back the cover of a book.
“I do not doubt it, Sprake.”
Sprake had never considered Parket doubting it, so he wondered why the other dosser was making such a song and dance about not doing so. He rummaged in the briefcase and, after a period of heavy tutting, produced from it a scroll done up with red sealing-wax and a ridiculously large bow of blue ribbon.
“You know wot I have here?”
“I do not doubt it, Sprake.”
Sprake appreciated the non-sequitur: “Well, supposing there may be some doubt, Parket, I’ll put it on the record...”
“No need, no need.”
Unknown to the two dossers, several other faces were dodging in and out of the old park rides nearby: grimy, unsmiling, pointy faces which leant forward to tease out at least some clue as to the words passing as a real conversation. A lot seemed to hang on this meeting, more than the individual importance of the two participants added together.
“This here is a charter.” Sprake pronounced the word “charter” with care and some pride. “A charter for world peace". He elongated the vowel in such a way as to give a further meaning to the word “peace” which it really could not support unless he mistook it for a different word altogether.
Parket was not to be out-done by surprise props (even though his own prop was already out in the open). “And do you know what this is?” He pointed to the empty whisky bottle which did not bear any label or sign of identification other than its glass and characteristic shape.
“A bo.. .ttttel.” Sprake accentuated the consonant to show he had breeding (and no favouritism towards vowels).
“Not just a simple bottle, Sprake. It is an *empty* bottle - and you do not regularly find many of these about, do you? You will have to go a long way to find an *empty* bottle. Full ones are two a penny.” Parket pointed at the surrounding electric pylons hung with what appeared to be bottles of fizzy lemonade.
“An emptttty bo...ttttel, then.”
“Yes, Sprake, this is the emptiest bottle you will ever see. Never has there been an emptier bottle.”
The prying faces had now been joined by the broomstick bodies they owned and were grouping nearer to the park bench, many of them straining to hear the fateful, if haphazard, words.
Parket continued: “Give me that charter and I will put it inside the bottle for safe-keeping.”
“Let me see your Kree-Denshalls...”
“In the beginning there was the Word. At the end, there were merely Credentials.” It was almost as if Parket were making it up as he went along.
“You reeeelly are him, then? I didn’t believe it, but you are him, no mistaking.” Sprake had not wanted to appear ignorant of any passwords or codes and handed the charter to Parket who forthwith threaded it into the narrow neck of the bottle, surreptitiously leaving just a tab of ribbon poking out. The pointy faces were now so close they lurched like puppet-heads on poles between the co-conspirators.
After shaking hands, Parket walked back along the path which wound between the pylons and silos towards the park gates. Sprake remained sitting and, with a further crack of new leather, snapped his brief-case shut with a flourish. He lay down on the bench using the brief-case as a pillow and snored himself to sleep. It had been a hard day. Working towards world peace was very tiring.
Even Sprake had forgotten that the *real* charter was still in his brief-case and the cleverly crafted duplicate was now in Parket’s empty bottle. If Parket discovered this trick, which he must when the future dictated, there would be Hell to pay. But it was all worthwhile: for the sake of just a little quiet, a little peace to snooze and forget the troubles of the world about him.
Even in his sleep, he was sure he had taken out the right charter from the briefcase. How could *anyone* doubt it?
The faces on broomsticks spoke, each with a line from a conversation yet to be held, or never to be held, or was held once in a different past to this future.
“Do not doubt it, Sprake, do not doubt anything.”
“Each of the two charters was a replica of the other one except perhaps for the words inside.”
“You know what was written on the charter, Sprake.”
“Mere figures of speech but I forget exactly what.” Sprake often spoke to himself when asleep.
“But we thought you were a man of means, Sprake.”
“Right on, I always mean what I *do* say, even if I wonder sometimes whether I meant what I *did* say.”
“You’re a man of impeccable credentials, Sprake.”
The snoring grew louder as the parkland darkened. The scarecrow shapes, now fat with shadow, shambled off to see if they could find Parket.
In anger, Parket threw the empty bottle at the nuclear power station complex into which the land had long since grown, hoping for a lucky (or, better still, unlucky) strike.
He had time, however, to fold the blank charter into a ship shape and launch it upon the viscous meniscus of radioactive slurry which the park’s paddling pool had already become. He did not notice the lolly-stick children launching toy tanker-boats from its margins, amid pointed laughter.
Parket had been wrong since at the last the world lacked credentials.
(Published 'Alternaties' 1993)
empty space
The starving man crouched like an insect with raised elbows, dry tongue flickering…
He held out a wooden bowl containing a few dull coppers seeping sickly lamplight from their milled edges. I had been walking for miles in the oppressive heat of the City, night catching up with me still within the confines of the centre . . . I was attempting, in my innocence, to walk straight out of the City, but the place was far larger than I ever imagined. I hit upon a likely alleyway to sleep out the rest of the dark hours which, hopefully, were shorter at this time of the year. It was leaning against some restaurant’s backyard gate that I found the starving man or who, at least, I assumed to be in the process of starving, from the haunted look of his demeanour.
“Jus’ one coin, gent, not too much to ask…”
He croaked, more in tune with the constrictions of his throat than the empty echoing husk of his belly. His bulging eyeballs were partially engulfed by the surrounding wrinkled-fanned folds of flesh as he swallowed hard on the noiseless words he found impossible to utter in continuation of his initial attempts at communication with me.
“You can’t eat coins,” was my only rejoinder.
He seemed to derive a new lease of life from my tentative humour. “Yeh, but you can save ‘em up for the good ol’ days, can’t yer?”
“I don’t think those old days will ever arrive. How long have you been starving, anyway? Has it been a long haul, or have you had meals in between?”
“I’ve been force-fed many a time, but I’ve come back down ‘ere and sicked it all up . . . put me longest feeler down the longest part of me throat...”
He pointed at a glistening pile of melts further along the alley, fingering between the surrounding cobbles.
I sat down beside him, trying to ignore my own disgust. I opened the ruckbag which I had been toting like a hunchback from the cathedral areas of the City: offered him a disused sandwich which was still weeping wild honey at the sides: on finding him unreceptive, I gobbled it slowly myself, in the hope of wakening his taste buds. True, beads of cuckoo-spit eased from the corners of his mouth: even his long nose began to dangle a thickening green-veined froth. However, I could not tempt him, even with a walnut whirl that I had stashed below my spare pair of boots at the bottom of the ruckbag. It was then that I decided I could only sit and listen, in the hope of receiving some enlightenment to which my plod had brought me, perhaps accidentally, but more likely, as I thought at that time, by some devilish device of destiny.
He went on: “I don’ wan’ none of yer walnut whirls, sir, I just need money to hoard, so that I can invest it with time. Food’s no use to me, for I wan’ to sup on interest. My mind’s ablank t’otherwise, ‘taint it? You’ve got to have an int‘rest, a good yield growin’ from me bowl into the sky...”
I saw a shaft of yellowy light reaching from the bowl skyward... or, if I imagined it, I still saw it, nevertheless.
“...I ‘ave innards feedin’ off innards, like all critters with bony spines do ‘ave ... and the more int’rest they ‘ave, the more those innards whip about inside, cleavin’ one t’other, chewing each other’s ends and enticles, feastin’ off the oozin’s that the tubes’ self-syphonnin’.”
I had to interrupt. I could see that he was more intelligent than him self-imposed, mannered consonant and vowel elisions would indicate. Could this have been the New Man to whom the natural course of the world had finally brought us: someone who could live off his own thoughts, rather than the false metabolisms dependent on the injection of edible structures?
“Are you sure I can’t offer you something to eat, before you...”
“Die? I’ll not die, old ‘un.. .“ (I was not then old, but I knew what he meant.) “. . .except when my brain’s prime for swallowin’ by ‘tother innards that creep up into me head from me bowel-systems...”
At that point, his eyes fully appeared again in all their bulging glory, as the flesh folded back, almost out-shining the lamplight and the rediscovered moon.
I rose quietly, ensuring my departure did not disrupt his nirvana. I left the walnut whirl by his side, just in case...
empty space
Ricky lived in a house wherein his parents had spread seed for more than a generation. He was the prime stock, the elder brother, the one who, however long in the tooth, would take over from them when the death threat had worked itself through various layers of red tape.
The other siblings, some of indeterminate age, if not sex, clustered at the foot of the television, mooning up at the screen. They cared little for the future, except for the scheduling of programmes. However, a girl among them, Lucinda, had only one eye for the flashing screen in the corner of the parlour: the other eye being for the more hazy, slightly less understandable, gradually more noticeable flickerings in the opposite corner by the hallway door. Being the early Fifties, reception was brilliant in neither corner. None of it was in colour, of course.
Ricky knew about the master bedroom in the higher reaches of the suburban house, where his parents kept themselves to themselves. He was the only one allowed into its sanctity, where sleep was punctuated with fitful lovemaking: coitus quietus. Indeed, the movement of their limbs in the half-darkness was - to Ricky, as he came upon them from the landing - a cannibal's slow-simmering thick-cut stew. Breathless after the ascent of the steep stairs, he was eager to tell them of yet another sibling's arrival, yet one more set of eyes to feed, a further reason to buy a bigger television to prevent arguments over viewing positions.
The parents waved him out of the master bedroom, indicating the paltry postal order left on the tallboy by the oriental wardrobe: as if that were the end of their responsibility: and Ricky, with hangdog face, slouched back down the stairs towards the lower floors.
On the darkest landing of all, midway between the attic and the cellar, Ricky saw Lucinda in company with the haunter - a haunter being a full-blooded ghost that had "come out", without fear of the consequences. She had hitched her skirt to the upper thighs, lounging across several treads of the stairway, feet tucked up towards the buttocks. The haunter was equally relaxed, hanging from the false ceiling which a previous dynasty had built to prevent the stairs becoming frighteningly precipitous. Ricky could not be jealous but, being the elder brother, he felt responsible for any sibling's love life, especially when it involved the long dead. The haunter indeed seemed a trifle too laid back for its own good, as Lucinda coquettishly cocked her head in its direction.
"Be off with you!" Ricky boomed. The echoey darkness took the edge off his urgency. His voice became merely one more noise that time held endlessly in its maw: its only significance being in retrospect, when all the fateful twists and turns had been aggregated and assessed.
Ricky watched the black and white shapeless whirligig assume dominion over the stairway. The fuzz and static of false hopes, condemned, derelict dreams and misguided visions made the whole area throb with bewigged and bepowdered figures. Having escaped from a historical moment when heritage was only just beginning to possess self-perpetuation, these were the scions of the house, the long lost brethren who had knitted a whole skein of cousin arteries with few, if any, dropped stitches. It was a pity they had only twenty years in which to work and develop, since the house had only been built since just before the Second World War. During the London Blitz, ghosts had become more plentiful, but they were not of the right calibre, merely preening dandies, fancy dress pranksters and masqueraders of false-bottom history.
As ghosts always faded behind truth, Lucinda herself became another ceiling, straight as a die, a smooth white slope, with baroque scrolling as it turned corners: then mock stucco. Ricky descended to the television room and blew on the screen to brighten up the image. This was to allow the remaining siblings to see closer into the heart of things, where a tube swelled, a valve fluxed: a box of tricky delights: a cage of ghosts: and somebody banged on the ceiling to complain about the volume.
He sobbed, for Lucinda had never existed. Her death wish was never to be granted. If he had known she was never to be his sister, he could have tried to love her properly. He still had more dreams to live, after which he would become a haunter too ... and walk as if on air, between the box-cages which contained those who once sat outside staring in. Or perhaps he would be just another breed of ghosting upon the shimmer. Meanwhile, he knew that only real ghosts disguised themselves as white ceilings.
(Published 'Vedrolnir' 1997)
Fell shape flopped from fell shape, revealing nothing bar a core. Within the relative safety of the bed, I witnessed the falling away of form from form. Yet, if this were a dream, why was I sitting bolt upright against the bolster, rather than with head held fast in pillowy plumpness? Sleep was a sloppy mode, at the best of times. It had always been my contention that dreams should be faced awake. No flinching, no indulgent pinching of the faecal flesh, no doubting the necessary constrictions of dreams dire dirndl - above all, no false economies of self-identification. I could have been just about anybody. I did not recognise the feel of the bed whence I sat staring outward to the dimness beyond. I knew, however, the unwholesome shape I saw was the devil performing an unholy striptease. The core was the its essence divested of devilish accoutrements, yet imbued with its own sickly light. Each tier of tease had peeled back upon further hierarchies of enticement, pyramids of pecking-orders that even made a simple triangle seem sensuous. I blinked the eyes I saw with. Belief was behindhand. Core cleaved upon core ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseam. Eventually, everything was empty. Including the mind I thought with. So empty, one wondered if one wondered at all. The final fleeting flake of flame, the concluding core of cores, hovered over the covers. I raised my knees - or someone did - creating an upward urging union of blanked blackness. The flickering fleck of residual fire bifurcated, spun seethingly towards my knee-kingdom's nadir and teased through the tight-knit texture of tumbled toppings. Whereupon I felled the triangular timbers of flesh-cushioned bone and spread wide the blanket bath of body beautiful to receive the unction of the sizzling scissoring seed. Sleep slipped from sleep. Dreams drifted dreamward. Then, there was something similar to something strange. I broke the surface of someone else's consciousness, flaying back a soul's carapace as I did so. I was now truly me. No doubt about it. I was rich with self. No longer a need for identification parades of possibles or, even, probables. I was simply scissorish slivers of slime. Slick slices of soggy seed-atoms. Satanic sum of all human knowledge. The devil's aids - for prolonging life. As for me and my like, we are merely smidgin smears in the devil's panoply of prevention and cruel cure. Antibody. then, not anybody. As unctuous under-unguents understand the paths of woman - and her itching ills and valleys. Ad nauseam.
(Published 'Ah Pook Is Here' 1995)
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