He would not have gone into the parlour for his pipe, not even for a thousand extra reasons, if he had known that the women were in there. The curtains were already drawn, an angry log fire roaring straight up the back of the chimney. The bedraggled Christmas decorations, not removed from one year to the next, were swinging gently in the draughts from each corner of the ceiling. There was a tinge of chamber music, so quiet there was no point in it being played at all.
He was halted in his tracks by the frozen stares of the women. All wide by hip and beam. One was evidently his wife, over-dressed as usual in her mother's chiffon outfit with bumper brooches and bead necklaces. Next to her was that very mother, back straightened against the encroach of old age, with slumbering shrouds of night garb broadly winding its coils from breast, through lap, to floor and, perhaps, beyond. And, finally, the maiden aunt, the elder sister who never had the sense to allow her body to die before her mind did, and then it was too late.
He did see what was meant. Too late for all of them, him included. Smoke and sparks marched up the chimney like thoughts on the inside of his skull. Where was his pipe? The great corner clock trundled through its inner machinations before striking a series of gongs, conjuring up past dinners and distant conversations over the port and cheese. And the decorations trembled in the after-shocks, catching the dying light from the dusky curtains, catching it within every bauble, for split, scintillating seconds of held breath.
The women motioned him to sit. Unknown to him, compulsion itself had escorted him to this room. He had never had the choice after all, because this summoning was beyond any possible recourse to alternatives. He had never smoked a pipe in his life, of course. So why was he looking for one?
"Yes?" he asked, trying to prevent his own personality from showing.
"Donald, please don't be like that—you know that all we wanted was what was good for you," answered his wife. She pointed to the fire where, despite its sudden paucity of flame, the patterns of orange-fluted smoke were weaving images on the back of his mind, now more resembling unwelcome dreams than the inescapable reality of being Donald.
Then, his mother-in-law's sister took umbrage at the silence that had ensued. Even in her heyday, she had been one to hackle at the slightest embarrassment. So, if conversations, once set in motion, showed any sign of weakening or tailing off, she would re-invigorate them with a few scolding lines from her repertoire.
"About time you tidied yourself up, Donald," she said, more through her nose than her pursed lips.
Self-consciously, Donald tightened the knot of his dressing-gown cord as he looked into the wall mirror. Indeed, he thought, within the actual reflection of the parlour was where the darkness really bred. He could barely discern his wife's face and the fire was quickly becoming merely two eyes blinking.
The only person yet to speak rose from the upright chair, her stick wielded like a fifth limb. Bodily parts he never knew he owned cringed violently of their own volition. At the best of times, his mother-in-law was somebody he would like to meet on a dark night and carefully throttle with gloved hands. But she never left the house, fearing, she said, it would collapse like a tower of playing-cards, if she were not there to stare back at the hairline cracks of its walls. She never left her daughter's side, in fact, for very much similar reasons; Donald knew his mother-in-law, as a consequence, almost as well as his wife.
And, having waited a few dramatic moments, she finally indulged herself to say the following words:
"Donald, we have come to a decision relating to the past. We cannot forgive, but we can forget..."
The light in the room was breaking up like the memories themselves and all Donald could now see were blurred auras where the three cracked faces of the women had once been. Being auras, they gave off no corresponding echoes at all in the mirror. He could still make out his own shape, however.
The clock's loud tick had ceased; the eight day movement had expired. Dinner would be late tonight, no doubt. The Christmas decorations were also sacrificed to the darkness, but he could imagine them bearing the weight of night spiders, several of them so bloated they could hang low enough to reach out for the top of his head. The flames in the grate passed away like souls who'd just discovered they'd lost their host mortals; something or other could be heard clambering down the chimney flue, its haversack heavy with parts of its own body.
He shivered and made a fey whimper, as he sat in a suddenly vacant armchair. He wrapped the silk dressing-gown tighter around his calves, lifting—in the motion of what could only be called a seated curtsey—the pleats and flutings from the floor, in an attempt, perhaps, to tug them clear of the parlour's encroaching widths of skirting-board. Donald was never much of a man, at the best of times; a fact which he heard the shadows whispering. And piecemeal even the music weakened and finally died.
*
"I love whodunnits: not who did the crime but had the dream?" (Rachel Mildeyes)
As he presses his head close enough to the connecting door, he can hear our heavy breathing as if he is actually in the bed with us both.
However, strangely, the words which sporadically break the surface of our sleep, he cannot make out very plainly. He soon gathers, however, that the man and I are exchanging remarks from separate dreams: holding an almost logical dialogue about the nature of the nightmares each is undergoing, without awakening.
He turns the handle and push the door merely a creak, but surely loud enough to wake us. One of us merely stirs and says something which must have been out of context, since the other says:
"Who are you talking to?"
"Only someone at the door, but he's gone now."
How I know the intruder’s sex is a mystery, since even the intruder is uncertain.
"Good," replies the man.
"What were you saying?" I asked.
"I said that the twins were conjoined at the penises when they were born."
"I hope the doctor did not attempt separation, leaving them at least a circus act to perform."
"But it does make you wonder how Mother Earth could have borne such a monstrous pair."
"As a sort of punishment to the parents for having sex, perhaps."
"There's a lot you don't know about the Earth. Its core bubbles and burps, stews and curdles, with worse things yet to come up the chimneys shafts. In my dream, I can see the terrain peppered with the evidence of vertical tunnel openings. Even Superman cannot plug them all up."
"Especially as I've got the real Superman in my own dream." Having thus spoken in my sleep, I laughed to myself with a ricochet of snores. "He's with me now—tearing the frilly lace from my breasts. He wants me to bear his child."
We both grow quiet. Evidently, gaps in dream-talk are not so embarrassing as in real life. Nobody can blush in their sleep. But the intruder can see from a seeping glow in the bedroom curtains, hinting at a makeshift dawn, that the upper profiles of the bodies on the bed glisten with sweat. He dreads returning to his own bed where we have put him every night so far, in case his own dreams merge with ours. He is our child. Our changeling. Our foundling. Our treasured groundling. He is not sure which, except his flesh is ours. He is too young, perhaps, to comprehend even his most simplest thoughts.
Knowing us and calling us Mummy and Daddy in daylight hours is no help to him now...
Should he wake us? He fears the monsters which he might stir, if these dreams of his erstwhile “Mummy” and “Daddy” are aborted. So, he creeps on all fours (on all claws, as some dreams say) under our bed. It seems the safest thing to do. Our tosses and turns upon the spring-loaded mattress make him think Hell is where Heaven should be.
He must be half asleep, or half awake, really. He has to budge the chamber pot to make more room. He is a growing child, after all. The pot's contents slop from side to side for longer than he would expect. The Overgrunts of us two dreamers resume:
"I am climbing down one of the shafts. I can hear the core seething below. It must be the Weirdmonger bird taking an early morning skinny-dip in the white slime of Earth's innards."
"Be careful what you are doing down there, while I tell you about my own dream. I've become a surgeon and a monstrous pair has been deposited upon my slab. They're joined at the wing-tips. At each of my careful incisions, purple slurry free-oozes. They groan in pain, despite the sleep medicine I've administered. But how they know to groan alternately, never overlapping, is too mysterious even for a dream."
There is a curse from under our bed. The chamber pot has overlapped. His bum is more than a little damp. The mattress presses down upon his head with each turn-spitting of the bodies above. He cannot creep out easily now, since some of our bed-covers have slipped over the side, concealing the horizontal door. It should not be long till daybreak. Meantime, he can only squat, listen and lurk.
"I can see the light at the end of the chimney tunnel below me, a white mass of flickering tails. I dearly wish I could wake up before I get there."
"Let me take your mind off it, with my own dream. The next patient is not a pair of mutant twins at all. It's a woman, I can tell, but for various medical reasons there are several incompletions. Despite being pregnant—a straightforward diagnosis—I can find no way out for the baby. Evidently, it's my job to make one. And the only implement I've been given is a heavy-duty chain saw..."
As one of us sleepers hesitated, the other spoke up.
"The hand-holds have run out and I'm in dream free-fall. Too slow for real life, but far too fast for a nightmare. By the way, don’t use the chain saw. It seems too ... cruel. Isn't there an alternative?"
"I've got no choice. The clock tells me I've only a few minutes before the next operation is due. And that one is far more important. Waking up is literally impossible before I tackle it."
"What's making you do these things?"
"Shunting shapes of shadow in red, with eyes where eyes shouldn't be. But what about you? Have you reached the core yet?"
"Yes, of course. I didn't want to tell you, in case your hand slipped on the chain saw. But it was a great shock. The Weirdmonger is not a bird at all, but a huge deformed foetus whose bones are on the outside grinding against each other. It’s manky with mutant moss and crazed over with seeping cracks. It gobbles up human heads with legs in the necks from the swamp of white melted slug-meat in which both fed and feeders incubate..."
"A human foetus?"
"Yes, I believe so, but it has too many of its own limbs and other appendages. And some of its parts have formed too early, others too late. With the swatches of hair, it looks older than ordinary time would allow. But too young to live. The thick cuckoo-spit heaves back and forth, as the Earth shudders around me."
"It's incredible. There's also an earthquake in my own dream. The woman's body has slipped from the operating table and flaps on the floor like a fish. Its belly balloons further. Hard for me to keep upright, the floor angling back and forth like a frozen sea."
"I must be waking. I zoom up the chimney like a fire-devil."
"We'll soon be together again."
"Indeed, my love."
Then, our breathing grows less heavy, and finally ceases altogether.
Suddenly the one beneath our bed realises that the very bed now only tosses because of him underneath it. He has grown far too large for a believable child. His back humps violently, feeling as if its spine is jutting, sawing, finning...
He is still sliding from deep folds of darkness in the floor, as the waking process takes full purchase. He is fleshing out as the dreaming screws existence with cross threads. He is in two minds whether to humour reality with his presence. He is...
Perhaps he is Superman himself. But with a weedy name like Donald. Surely not.
*
Self-exorcism was tantamount to suicide, but Donald really had no choice. Unable to shake off the sounds, he allowed them to ring inside his head. Echoes garbed in bone. Meaning beyond what was actually heard—each blown-up ratchet of noise being a relentless ritual he could not escape. It was as if he were a child castigated for not forgetting the poem which had been learnt too painstakingly.
One way or another, Donald was determined to proved he existed. I often tried to comfort him by whispering sweet nothings in his ear. But, lacking the conviction of my actions, I failed to put my mouth where my words were. To Donald, I was a ghost pulling wide invisible skirts around him like hissing silk. Donald's youth, although never-ending at the time, was now too many years in the past. He still recalled, however, when he and his mates sneaked into the local flickering Fifties fleapit ... with the assistance of Donald's Uncle Bob which entailed releasing the ratchet bar from inside the emergency exit—to reveal, yes, an X Certificate film! A film for adults only! The blood began to race as the body took fire from the horror that stirred the brain. The forbidden nature of the activity was probably responsible, rather than the prospect of the film itself but, whatever the case, Donald felt literally more alive ... as if he were a vampire awaiting a friendly ghoul to release him from the confines of childhood's tomb.
The mask was identical to the face Donald wore beneath it.
"Masks are intended to be uglier than your own face. No point otherwise—especially at a Hallowe'en party."
Trevor Urquhart once said this to Donald with a tongue in his cheek, as he knew he knew he knew his real face was nothing to write home about—and it would probably scare strangers a rather shitty green—particularly those strangers of the gatecrasher persuasion.
It wasn’t Hallowe'en, in any event.
"OK, OK, joke's over," insisted Donald. "You'll be laughing the other side of your own face before the evening's finished."
If Trevor hadn't known Donald better, he'd've suspected something sinister in that loosely veiled threat. He could've even believed Donald wasn't joking.
The garden shed leant towards the house. Donald’s weekend guests had departed, leaving him nothing but time ... and a large rambling edifice of a house that he could not ever hope to fill with merely his own meagre existence.
The newspapers were still delivered, each too much to read. One organ boasted a headline too tasteless for belief: "FOOTBALL FANS RECALL THEIR DEAD." Donald had crazy, unforgiveable visions of corpses between those still alive, hanging like filled washing: pitiful puppets jerking amid the swaying chants.
The older Donald threw the paper into the fireplace, wishing it were not such a sticky spring.
The actual images on the cinema screen were always a disappointment to the young Donald. They were unconvincing, blurred, one-dimensional and, above all, not horrible enough. Mental arithmetic at school was far horribler by half...
Despite the woodenness of the acting, Donald could live with the disappointment. After all, he was with his mates (of whom Trevor Urquhart numbered one), all of them wrapped up in horseplay and bubble gum, chatting through the tedious 'marrying-bits' on the screen, pinching each other's bottoms to see if life was really a dream and, finally, the bursts of raucous laughter threading this Fifties' version of GROSS-OUT and SPLATTER
They had parties at other places, too. Other places, other times. Donald and Trevor, let it be said, were not gatecrashers, but, admittedly, it was a friend of a friend of a flatmate thrice removed who was holding the party in King's Langley and was doubtless not expecting them. They'd heard at least the smidgen of an echo of a rumour that "everybody" was invited. So here they were, climbing off the great M25 ringway in Donald's jalopy. Neither of them had been North of Watford before and they were eager to discover whether there was indeed life up there—as the saying went. They knew there would be a soupçon of a shred of dubious evidence that there would be life up there, but it didn't stop them chortling on the joke beyond its rather tenuous funniness, whilst the elastic band inside Donald's jalopy finally unwound, bringing them to an unceremonious halt in the car park of the Rose and Crown pub, where many of the guests would be tanking up in readiness for the long night's party ahead.
Trevor turned to Donald and showed all the badges he was wearing on his Albanian Flapjacket. Donald thought he must've belonged to every club and society going, including both the Foxhunters and the anti-Bloodsports association.
Well, Donald was once born into a Northern industrial town, from a family whose babies already emerged from the womb with coal-dust faces. He soon learned to fade into the background; the school blackboard was suitable for such self-denial. The family had so many upturned faces yearning for the food ladle, just one child was never missed: and the one never missed was Donald. The teachers, too, could hardly keep control nor count, by rule or under thumb, so one child less was neither wholly here nor there.
Although budding child artists drew chalk around Donald's shape upon the blackboard, as if investigating a whodunnit, the teacher soon rubbed it off; thus, the period became double history where all that was important was the fading past...
Now, "grown-up", Donald is amused and intrigued by memory of the far-off Fifties. He had been a right pondweed, then. But, he should remember at least one particular film, from which even Uncle Bob had to run out in sheer fright.
The day had started cloudy, with just an inch or two of dawn squirming along the far edge of the sea, like a giant orange tape-worm. Kites tried to tug kids upwards from the cliff-top. Donald walked along the promenade, weaving between the crippled deck-chairs, his mates no doubt already congregating around the fleapit's backdoor.
Amazing how daft the cinema manager must have been. What was the manager’s name? Something Crack? Emoss Crack?
Donald and Trevor went straight to the party north of Watford, one which started out a rather drab affair. Even the strobe lighting in the room dedicated to disco dancing was about as limp-wristed as my next door neighbour's dead mother.
Donald and Trevor carried out a few desultory jigs together, a preparatory jab of the hindlegs, but the hotel foyer muzak was not exactly conducive to a real shake-out. On top of this, there were next to no birds. Even Alfred Hitchcock's film had that Tippi Hedren going for it. Unless, of course, there was a room upstairs into which layable chicks had packed like kids in a Sardines game to escape Donald's ugly mask. In hindsight, though, it might have been Trevor who wore a mask. Memory is a mutation of several filters.
In any event, every guest at the shindig wore trousers and hugely dated floral kipper-ties. Not one badge between them. Not even one backslapping howdyado from a hale and hearty host, eager to make his guests feel less ill at home.
Eventually, Donald gave Trevor the nod. Back along the M25, to see if they could catch up on a bit of real nightlife in more familiar territory. They felt like fish out of water or rats without tails, or at least Trevor did. Donald, well, he was just Donald, as inscrutable as ever. They walked off the dance floor and thus from the limelight of the small torch which the DJ was flashing upon them from his console plinth.
Another day, another world. I had been staying with Donald in that large house with a shed. Donald was sure I must have left my spirit behind, to test him with taunts. He had criticised my enjoyment of modern paintings. In fact, he must have fancied me, because he felt the uncontrollable need to monopolise my company, even if it were to argue the toss about Mondrian and Klee. Munch's Scream. Jackson's Pollock. And episodes painted in words.
My face was blotched with too much sun—the garden here getting it the whole day round, as if on some shuttling equator. Perhaps, at night, Donald dreamt the vertical sun...
Donald told me that a blown-up colour photograph of my face would not look out of place on one of the Tate Gallery walls, between a Bacon and a Braque. Equally, I would have been the ideal model for Picasso in his more cubist period. Needless to say, I had not relished his chat-up line. Needless to say.
Donald recalled the face of Emoss Crack quite well, someone who was often to be found playing the amusements in the pier arcade or chatting with the flat-capped man in the booth who sat behind copper-penny towers of loose change. The amusement machines included "Allwins", where silver ball-bearings rattled round a vertical display in the hope of slotting into the "win" hole rather than those "lose" ones which outnumbered the "wins"—a bit like life, really, Donald mused. Spindly cranes that, despite all the skilful jiggery-pokery in the world, could never grip the pack of cigarettes with a ten bob note wrapped round it. The penny slot clockwork ghost-houses where skeletons popped out of various cupboards to scare the pants off you.
Suddenly, at that almost forgotten party north of Watford, Donald and Trevor were accosted by a bright young spark who called himself Aretha Franklin.
"That's a funny name for someone who looks as if he's just walked out of one of Hitler's gas-chambers."
In saying that, Donald did not make it clear whether he meant a victim or an usher or even an usherette.
"Hark who's talking. With a face like that..." (Aretha pointed at Donald) "...I bet your face wouldn't win a beauty contest against my arse."
Trevor looked quizzically at Aretha's backside, but could find no clue as to why he (Aretha) had made such an outrageous statement. Donald’s arse was a sight for sore eyes in its own right.
Donald was standing no nonsense from the likes of the Northern upstart and he immediately swiped a hefty kick at Aretha's arse.
"That'll change the odds somewhat—I hear judges don't like bruises on the merchandise."
Or that's what Donald would have said, given half the chance, since, in the event, his leg was left stuck up at right angles, the foot sunk to its ankle between Aretha's buttocks where the trouser seat had disappeared with the merest ripping noise, leaving the weltering cheeks literally to munch up towards Donald's calf. Trevor tried to steady him as he hopped precariously on his free leg.
As the others watched this amazing fandango in which they were participating, Trevor noticed the arrival of the Bad Crowd. Every bash has got to have one, even those further South have their fair share of Bad Crowds. But this lot was the worst he'd ever seen. Plug Uglies to the bone. Undergrunts to the letter. Donald's face was not even in the same league. They seemed particularly horrendous from the contrast with the female gender they actually wielded. Fresh from girl talk, no doubt, in that Ladies Room which Trevor had imagined earlier, they waved red-stained panties as if this were some preliminary to a mating-dance.
As soon as Donald was old enough in the tooth to leave his family home, he left a note in the ticking parlour: 'Never coming back—Donald.' He never questioned the fact. Nor did those who managed to read it. How could they mourn the passing of one who had never arrived in the first place?
The school closed its gates with a resounding clang. Not enough teachers. Not enough pay. Those who remained huddled in the staff room like old dufflecoats. Some even crawled into the dark mine tunnel at the blackboard's maw. Absent kids clambered back through the barred windows and marked themselves into the mouldy-green registers. Then snuck under the desks, rather than have to watch the black-turning wheels that lowered their fathers and elder brothers to the coal-face: golden sunshafts spinning, slicing slowly between the spokes from the sky's screaming edge. Coal-mine cranes and pleasure piers were not the closest of bed-fellows. I wondered if Donald had concocted those tales of his youthful days by the seaside...
Meanwhile, dark infant shapes imperceptibly silted into the floorboards as spilt ink would.
Emoss Crack often chatted to young Donald about Life, the Universe and the future arrival of electronic games to the arcades. Little did he know that Donald was one of those kids who infiltrated his theatre to watch X films. Emoss Crack was a big man, with a beer barrel that squatted in his belly and with a beard even bigger than Uncle Bob's tussocky one. Emoss Crack loved his picture house. He showed Donald his green worms, which he used in fishing from the pier. And another worm which he didn't.
To come clean, Donald's really an alter ego—despite his face.
Onanism made manifold.
Trevor’s jalopy could only carry one person at a time, in any event. Aretha Franklin wasn't all that bad looking, despite his earlier misgivings—and most of the Bad Crowd eventually skulked off churlishly, a trifle crestfallen, back to the Ladies Room where they could exercise feminine logic and exchange sanitary pads for face-packs.
Trevor had a tinge of a fling with Aretha, but he soon trundled South alone, guided by the stars and the M25 lights.
Years before, Donald found his mates already mustering at the back door of Emoss Crack's cinema. Trevor Urquhart was listening to a wasp he had trapped in a matchbox. But then the emergency bar slipped and Uncle Bob ushered them in with a finger pressed to his lips. They scuttled on all fours to the front row and slouched in the tip-down seats so that their heads could not be spotted from the back.
The lights dimmed, as if on cue. Excitement was keeping the bellowing laughter inside. The wrinkly custard-yellow drapes slid sluggishly aside to reveal a towering off-white screen, still bearing the faint blotch of a thrown ice cream from a generation before. They were so close to the screen, their necks ached with peering up at the gigantic black and white faces. Now I have gone, along with all the other guests, Donald moved from room to room, only to find my spirit had gone to the next room along. The sounds lived on ... in the cellar ... in the attic ... in the boarded-up rooms ... even in the shed. It was as if he were his own past. He could not shake off its fading clutch. And sounds meant more than words.
Young Donald, though, years before, was off to the Big Smoke, becoming a silent cog in a vast meaningless machine. Shining face bobbed behind a new desk, one with screens and buttons, speaking-tubes and filing-clips. Known as a clerk: inadvertently discovering viral blanks in programmes and enigmas in aborted dreams.
Donald speaks to me now, in the same voice as I spoke to him: the timbre raised one notch: the meaning down: the passions dulled. My cutting-edge is only to be expected, following his ill-considered remarks about my pointilliste face. He meant them kindly, however. But the words come out in cruel order. He thought I liked modern art. Its challenge. Its unstickability. Its collage of nightmares. Why was I so upset, then, about my face being compared to modern art? And my skirt as an abstraction of non-Euclidean width?
Donald looked down at feelers and saw them drip: so much melting flesh and bone. Donald's father had chipped inside the Earth to pay Donald's keep: simply for this?
Whether an even younger Donald dozed off in the cinema that day because his mates were unusually down in the dumps, or because the X film was especially lack-lustre, he cannot now recall. But he woke up with a start, to discover the screen still flickering. He squinted to make out where the tenuous story-line had led. Incredibly, he was shocked to decipher the huge faces of Uncle Bob, of Emoss Crack and of his other mates—faces that reached from the littered floorboards to the high angel carvings of the mock-gilt auditorium—faces that were groaning slo-mo orders at him—faces with slimy green worms crawling over them. But, surely, the film was in black and white.
Donald never returned to Emoss Crack's fleapit. Uncle Bob slid from his life without making it too obvious. His mates (Trevor Urquhart excluded) grew up faster and quickly vanished on ventures that were quite beyond his own ambitions. And the grown-up version of Donald is hooked on electronic amusements, juddering with the joy-sticks—with most of his skull engulfed by a pure blackness whence not even a lobotomy could free the mind. He remembered those huge faces on the screen when he saw, many years later, the Bad Crowd and a white-bottomed simian calling itself Aretha Franklin.
The grey matter of his brain had by now turned a noxious green colour ... with a stench, thankfully, to which the nose was noticeably immune. Some say Emoss Crack is every filthy creature in every modern splatter film. Of course, he is now shrunk within televisions and home videos, arcade games and computer screens, these having taken over from street amusements like hopscotch & hide-and-seek ... and taken over, too, from those wondrous black & white days of childhood when fear was delicious and even one's own cinemascopic dreams had X Certificates. But the Weirdmonger, what or who was that? Donald shrugs. Reaching the top of the house—or the nearest to the top without removing shutters—he gazes down into the garden where I once prettily sat ... amongst all those others whose names he now forgets. The garden shed's shadow moves. The sun stays still, like the moment.
Underwear he’s hung on the line: it twitches sporadically, as if gathering for some form of life as lift-and-separates.
Hearing another's fumble at the shutter, he leaves for yet another room. The sounds are joy, the sounds are pain, and who can hope interpret them? Like all modern art, the meaning is lost and so, thankfully, purged. Forgotten like the shapeless world.
Donald would force himself back into existence come hell or high water. He had lost the pretty girl with the sweet way of whispering to herself of ghosts and lost love. If only I'd had her wits about me at that strange weekend house party, I might have learned why he called me Rachel Mildeyes. Surely, surely, I did not become his wife, the one with the surly mother and aunt in wide skirts? Only time could tell.
Whatever the case, all those years ago, even Donald’s address was a blur, although he hoped I'd recognise the leaning shed—if I happened to pass it in the street—or if I felt that peck on the cheek once more—or the brushstroked pubes.
The screen on my office desk was a pointilliste dream of evil green pixels. Insurance or accountancy data tracing an electronic audit trail to form the cubist outline of Emoss Crack's face. I then dashed to the loo to change my mask as well as my pad—a sanitary place where soul musak in the pipes was worse than silent—and always there like white noise.
North/South and Past/Future are the co-ordinates of sleep ... but Night has hidden cranes to pick us, pluck us from our beds.
"Life is a cross of pleasure piers in surrounding black seas..." (Rachel Mildeyes)
*
Why was Donald obsessed with St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London? He had representations of its doomish domish outline plastered over his bedroom walls. His dreams featured it as a spiteful surrogate shape of Donald's own moonfaced dome. And, at weekends, he travelled across England's green pleasantness, seeking such pictures in curiosity shops, amid rare maps, secondhand books and antiques. He also cut out chance appearances of the cathedral from the daily papers, colour supplements and, even, old editions of "War Illustrated". The legend was that the mighty edifice had withstood several wars, whilst surrounding buildings had been destroyed, reconstructed and redestroyed. He researched its history, gathered yet more photos past and present, depicting it from every possible angle, for the purpose of plumbing its secrets. Yet he had never visited the cathedral itself, never plucked up enough courage to see it in the flesh.
Yet today was the day. He needed to travel along abandoned byways, to the darker reaches of the City, beyond the leaning chimneys and past the huddled downtrod twouptwodowns that had replaced the commodity markets. By surface, then underground. The bus driver clipped his ticket with a frown and told him to hang on for dear life to the silver platform bar as he took rat runs through the back doubles of the outer suburbs—and would drop Donald off further than the bus had ever been before. I happened to be standing beside the steering booth, hanging on to the driver's every word—desperately longing for the casual off-duty hours when all such bus driver groupies would be presented with a Degree in Flirtation.
"I've not had much call for request stops this far for many a year," shouted the bus driver, as he fingered the nugget diamond in his ear lobe with one hand and lurched the large steering-wheel with the other. The bus careered down empty carriageways, trying to hit would-be passengers as they staggered along the shattered pavements waving vigorously in desperate delight at seeing a solitary double-decker. Years waiting—and this one did not stop! I, the bus-driver groupie—our hero noticed—had a neat bum.
Eventually he jumped off upon a dark-spanned bridge, swung round by one of those bus-stops with catch-nets into some black Thames-side. Shaking himself down, he looked momentarily into the water's surface, the leading margin of the grey morning rising above the ruined once renovated dockside buildings and granting just enough light for him to see his own wide eyes sullenly peering from his reflected moonface. His temples seeped bankrupt wormcasts of silting light and his mouth, opening and shutting wordlessly like a gateway to some indigestible Hell, revealed a tongue like a fish caught in a net of its own reflection by this deadening, narrowing sea of London. He drew his finger through the turgid water as if tracing the outline of the true cathedral in its original glory, when all the carriages bore proud humanity through a sparkling jewel of history, further in time and essence from his own version of the future than anyone could then possibly imagine. Even as recently as just before the first Great War, the story of St Paul's Cathedral, as depicted by the now unknown G.L. Prestige, was one of earnest honest endeavour, good housekeeping and unselfish worship of a God who knew what the future held and did nothing to prevent His own eventual non-existence. But the cathedral's outline soon rippled out of existence, despite the stagnant water actually bearing its imprint for a second or two and, for several hours, within its slowly surging undertow.
Donald felt the currents of the river through the composite bone of his massive skull, yet despaired of ever touching them, because it was time itself that hid such currents rather than merely the distance to their effective depth. His blood flowed quicker round his body as he rose at last from the side of the curdling Thames. He felt the back of his head and wondered if it would explode before he had the chance to see the great cathedral in the bone. And, eventually, he entered the London Underground system and, after carefully studying the symbolic map plastered all over the tunnel walls and inside the train itself, he plotted his course for St Paul's Station somewhere on the red line. He sat next to an old wide-skirted woman who looked like an incredibly ancient version of the earlier bus-driver groupie; and she tried to strike up a conversation with him as soon as the train started to surge and rattle between the black walls.
"Do yer 'member those ol' shops, where mess-idges and loose change whizzed 'bout 'bove yer 'ed, in long tubes. Well, when I'm on one of these things, I feel I'm a bit off someone's shopping bill on the way to being cash-eered!" He nodded half in agreement. He was in no mood for trivialities today of all days. This was supposed to be the most important journey of his life, a fulfilment of many years of self-confessed obsession, like an earth-worm on its way to the surface. "This tickler part of tube is the longest 'tween stations, did yer know?" He shook his head absently. He nervously fingered the folder of pictures he had sampled from his collection, so as to prove to himself later that it was truly St Paul's by comparison. He was disgusted by the individual at his side, as she pulled a pink-stained wad of snot from her swollen nostril. "Some say, once 'pon a trip on this ol' line, you're on it for a lifetime!" She cackled obscenely and smeared her finger across the window. Her bare arm was no thicker than the bone that held it up. He had an uncontrollable urge to hold up one of his pictures, as if it would keep evil at bay. But the train was now slowing, no doubt pulling into a station where he might be able to get off, all being well.
The platform was lit with candles; and dark passengers thronged the edge of the line where the sign "Mind The Gap" was hidden by the many shuffling feet. They were evidently positioning themselves for boarding, double-guessing where the sliding doors of the train would end up in relation to the platform. He strode to the door, clasping the pictures to his chest. But as it hissed open, the onflux of fresh passengers forced him back in their eagerness to board. He fought against the flailing limbs, but to no avail; and, as the train slowly drew out again, he hastily grasped a free strap to steady his shaking legs. But it was not a strap, but the tongue of one passenger who had been forced up to the ceiling by the sheer force and number of the rush-hour crowd. The man smiled at Donald as he released his tongue and grunted; "They ought to put on more trains at this time of day." And talking about gaps, there had been one in Donald's mind, too. He had been sprung, he knew not how, from the train at Bank station; and, without bothering to change for St Paul's, he decided to walk the rest of the way.
Tragically, most of his pictures had been lost in the crush—the last sight of them being a scrunched-up ball being passed hand to hand as if in some outlandish form of American football or childish playground taunt. Never mind, he had one left in his breast pocket, depicting St Paul's during the last war which had left it unscathed despite the blitz destruction around. It depicted the dark silhouette of the dome, smoking ruins in attendance like the human damned kneeling before a huge shrine. Gradually, he shook off the experience on the Underground and, squeezing his eyes against the bright sunlight, he trod the mazy streets of the Square Mile: in eager anticipation of the great Dome rearing suddenly from behind a more normal building, to stun him with its imposing comeliness. But the streets were narrow, the banks' signs almost touching each other across them; the corners only bending into more corners; the people faceless, no doubt mindless too, bustling from door to door; and the day was becoming hotter, unseasonably so. He saw the ghosts of financiers, in their heyday, before the Great Currency Meltdown put paid to their souls as well as their bank accounts. Like the babble of multitudinous auctions, he heard the characteristic calls of brokers, jobbers and underwriters echoing behind the gusset of time which history had constructed across its own guilt-riddled branches of the possible, the probable and the never.
He squatted on the pavement in sudden desperation. He stretched out his legs, so that the passers-by had to walk over him, but a few stood on him, perhaps deliberately, and yet others kicked him in a desultory fashion as they rushed to their next appointment. He stared at his last picture, and a tear welled from his eyes, dripped to the end of his nose and, eventually, fell upon the picture, creating another yellow mark on its surface. Only to be followed by another and another, until the paper was nothing but pap. He was hungry. He had lost his packed lunch on the Underground train in a spiteful pass-the-parcel game. But he still had a bit of tongue in his pocket and a wad of sauce which he had thought fit to retrieve from the train window. After gnawing on these to keep body and soul together, he struggled to his feet, only to find that dizziness was up there with his head. He steadied himself against a bank's wall, but only to find another one of those gaps.
He fell with a spinning of his arms into a side alley, the light at the end of which became nearer with each domino toppling of his careering body. His nose picked out cleaner smells, the noise of traffic disappearing fast into the background. There was pine and birdsong in the air. His nostrils twitched, his tongue too big for the mouth to allow the lungs full rein in their vigorous bouts of drawing upon the sweet freshness. Acridity was simply a memory. At first, he thought it was the beginnings of one of those City squares long lost to the common office worker, with a trilling fountain at its centre. But it was turning too big for that. His mind in abeyance for the interim, Donald travelled through a tall forest for maybe hours until he came across the church, not a City one with its dowdy spire and underbuildings long unnoticed even by those with real eyes in their heads, but one with a clean-hewn tower of Normandy stone poking above the treetops. When he staggered out into the clearing, his eyes widened at the sight of a large lake taking upon its glossy rippling nap the sheen of the vast sun-filled sky. The church, squatter than he had imagined from its original sighting, was not far from the edge of the lake, around the further shores of which the forest gathered in.
He usually accepted surprise in the course of things. But a working church in the middle of literally nowhere (a nowhere which was in turn literally in the middle of the world's busiest City) was even too much for his open mind to encompass. How he had assumed it was a working church took a few moments to fathom out. He could just discern, built into its south wall, what looked like a large oaken water-wheel which spirted the lake's contents off each moss-stained blade as it sluggishly turned. Since he had earlier lost his bearings on the Underground, he was uncertain as to whether it was indeed the south wall. He thought the lake must be forcing the wheel round, until he realised how ludicrous the thought was. But, then, he had not yet realised how even more ludicrous was the concept of a church with a creaking, dripping water-wheel as part of its construction.
With most of his mind back in gear, but not fully appreciating the layers and degrees of unbelievability he had needed to travel before taking matters in his stride, he soon found himself walking through the doors into its dim interior. Unaccountably, he recalled a holiday he once had in France when he had a quick drink at a wayside bar-tabac. A stuffed cat had been mounted on the wall, with its arched back of striped fur pointing out into the room. He had not thought anything of it at the time. But, now, in a church, there was a life-size figure of a man nailed to a cross of two tree trunks. This Christ icon was in fact an embalmed corpse, or so he believed. He wondered why this had not been done before. He had seen many such mock crucifixions in parts of France, some in fields like scarecrows, some outside villages, protecting and engendering growth, but they had all been statues carved from wood or stone. It seemed so natural, though, to utilise a stuffed man—perhaps a deceased local dignitary or whoever—so fitting, so honourable for the one who had passed away to be embalmed in such a fashion.
Donald thought about this quite logically. Until he realised that what was going on around him was neither logical nor healthy. How could he have rationalised it so coolly? He turned round inside the church. The high ceiling was flaking away and covered in map-like patches. The décor of the many side-altars was at once gaudy and tawdry. There were countless confessionals in every dark corner, curtained in faded purple. He could not imagine who had sat in those spirit-closets cleaning sin from their breasts into the leering ears of the priest. There was no parish in the forest from which such people could come—or go back to. He turned to tumble out through the doors of the church, just as he saw one of the purple curtains flinch in the wind. Unaccountably, despite his terror, an almost mystical vision blossomed in his fluttering mind—a cross between Our Lady and myself; and I was that bus-driver groupie, if you’d forgotten.
Only when he was running through the forest did he wonder how he could have thought there might be a wind inside a church, when there was no sign of one outside it. That was surely ludicrous beyond words—even beyond that Underground ancient woman he might have glimpsed poking out between the purple confessional curtains, like a stick puppet being wielded by nobody. But the other end of the alley was coming at him from the opposite direction as if he were entering a black sauna. The streets crowded in on him with all the fury of forests foregone. Even his quest for St Paul's Cathedral had momentarily gone out of the window. He just wanted an Underground Railway sign, one that would seem a symbol of religious calm and redemption, preferable to the very Christ on the Cross.
There was that old woman again, gesticulating—pointing round the next city corner. So near but too far for him to go on his knees. The run had taken more than it had given. He somehow knew that the Dome of St Paul's would be there, and he resumed his yearning to view it in its bare splendour at least once, if only he could just pray hard enough. The Dome would certainly have massive windmill-sails criss-crossing themselves in the vast sky. Doubt was not one of his strengths.
He staggered to his feet and, stretching his arms out, he pretended to be a Second World War aeroplane, buoyed up more by thought than muscle—and headed for the corner round which the stick-woman had disappeared. There, rising like a behemoth moon above the rim of the newly built slums of Cheapside, where the hardened breeds of post-historic man shuffled and shambled between back-to-backs, the head-to-toe bedsits, the chimney arches and the ancient begodden churches, yes, lifting like our hero's own wide face above the cot of his own dying son, came the sublimity of St Paul's Cathedral. Now, the new child, the new hope, the one with the big head became the abandoned Egg of Eggs in the Cradle of Man. He now had the chance to trace the true form of the cathedral which he had previously seen in dreams and mere photographs.
Indeed, the Dome itself. Donald was in awe. This was the one moment which made the previous part of his life worth living. But, unfortunately, not the rest. He heard the flapping. From somewhere beyond the Dome, a mighty bird seemed to be settling to the ground. He could not see what made such a noise—it was probably Concorde. His teacher back home had once pinned a picture of the wondrous jet-liner on the blackboard. But this particular Concorde sounded as if it had leather wings to exercise. What eventually loomed above the dome was the Weirdmonger. Its face was the Devil's own Hallowe'en mask, with skin in leprous folds, wild staring eyes swimming in pools of blood, champing beak of yellow splintered bone and wattles of purple-veined fat. Its nose was indeed like Concorde's, but some of that selfsame snot which had smeared the train window earlier in the day dangled from it, surpassing by far the produce of the vilest fount of slime in the ranks of nastiness.
(A) The ribbed, webby wings suddenly filled the sky, as if the earth itself had unfurled them. Thankfully, Donald, who had seen St Paul's Cathedral at last, swallowed his own cancerous tongue and choked slowly to death.
(B) He looked away in grievous disgust and walked towards a derelict bus shelter. He had decided to eschew the Underground. He could not help looking back at least once—to discover that the cathedral must have been nothing but a figment of someone else's dream. A new Stock Exchange stood where the monster had been. London evidently remained a city of false pretences. Donald spurned the old woman (who now looked incredibly similar to his future mother-in-law) as she tried to slip her hand his.
(C) He looked away in grievous disgust. I slipped my pretty hand in his, as he began to head back through the rat runs towards Thames' dark side.
(D) There were no Pick-and-mix endings at all—only real life or, at best, more back doubles...
*
The goodnight kiss upon the down of Donald's lifted cheek was a tender, if slobbery, one. He offered his arms to return the kiss, but she had already departed to her own room next door. He forthwith stumbled between dreams.
The high season's fair teetered on the brink of full swing. The helter-skelter, the sprung linch-pin of the proceedings, towered so tall, no child of even the strongest blood would care to slide along its coils. The heavy-duty scissors snicker-snackered as the local dignitary made several false starts at cutting the ceremonial fair-ribbon. Despite a patchwork greyness swagging the sky, the cheeky hide-and-seek of the dipping sun helped the townsfolk enjoy its day away from the seaside.
Toward evening, the Ferris Wheel was cranked into fitful stirrings by a sluggish sputtering engine and became an earthbound spacecraft of illuminations. As the crazy-looking stall-holders shrieked their games over competing tannoys, Donald threaded his way between complete (and some incomplete) strangers to reach his favourite bell-tent: THE FREAK SHOW. Multi-spotlit in a solemn sun's last twirling shafts, Emoss Crack flung the trip-switch to the sign bulbs, as if in anticipation of serious darkness and hopeful that punters' eyes would travel faster than legs. Emoss Crack sighed. He knew that Donald would be the first.
"Hello, Donny boy." "Hiya, back." "It don't seem a year—never does, but bet you've been breaking sweat, muck-raking." "Yep, it's not fair."
Emoss Crack laughed at Donald's joke. The boy was indeed one year nearer manhood. Almost big-boned enough for ribbing. But not quite.
Donald could count on a nod through. He had been mucking out the menagerie since dawn: his ears still ringing with the outlandish music of snorts and brays. Free entry would be his reward. He wondered what new exhibits would be waiting for him inside. Today, he was confident of seeing even "under the stone" specimens.
Emoss Crack did not accompany customers to the inner sanctum. The beauty of the adventure was its unguided nature. The stench of beast permeated. The straw on the ground stuck to Donald's boots, till he felt he was a living scarecrow, stiff-limbing it past the cages. At first, some of his old favourites were mooning at him: huge rubbery heads, better here than locked away in those large-chimneyed Victorian asylums. At least they served a purpose in a Freak Show. Others were more normal: a middle-aged man in a business suit, his mouth wrapped around an iron bar; women in wide floral frocks, picking and prodding at themselves; a trio of other frightful women with unspoken scowls threatening to come after Donald during the remains of his life, to play a part in it; ingrowing children whose looks could kill; torch-eyed cats prowling between the cage-bars; large, huffish dogs worrying at the large bones (littering the sawdust) for their marrow rich and brown; shaggy creatures on their hindlegs with genitalia like innards sticking out of low belly-wounds.
Donald was then enticed into a regions where he had never dared step foot in previous years. Here it was quieter. The darkness was constituted of a series of swaying, overlapping shadows. The silence, sown with currents of heavy murmuring and piping chitterchatter, was either too low or too high to be otherwise. Then, among the striations which a fast rising moon cast through the mast-pole's top rigging, Donald saw the insect people. They swarmed like running stitches across the swelling insides of the tent and he closed his eyes and dreamed of the stubbled cheek of one Lemuel Gulliver.
He had seen enough, but not quite enough. From some force far stronger than coincidence, he picked off one of the tiny wriggling creepy-crawlies, placed it on his eyeball and watched for its face to unsheathe from black armour. It looked like his mother's, just as he remembered it when he was smaller than her. He felt it nibble its way behind the eyeball. He had seen more than enough. He ran for the exit—only to find it an entrance. People still dizzy from the helter-skelter swept him into the mirror-maze, where they jeered and pointed at the snorting, braying features of other more freakish freaks by far—until, in mindful hysteria, they audibly ripped their own faces from the heady rawness which lay rippling in seed-beds beneath. Complete strangers, however, had indeed grown incomplete. Donald saw them swimming in their own blood, the husks of their left-over bodies crackling as they back-stroked like empty glove scarecrow-puppets: pip-boned prunes steeped in their own juices.
He abruptly found himself back in the bed, where the spacecraft moon cast barred cot-sides around him. "Don, are you okay?" He heard his mother's call from next door. "Yes, Mummy, I'm only having a bad dream." He knew when she had fallen asleep again, from her arrhythmic snickering snores. There would be a lot of mucking out of the brobdingnagerie for Donald tomorrow when he stopped dreaming.
*
He was called Redmoon. Donald originally came across him in a dream.
Redmoon was a concert pianist, of the first water. Donald can remember Redmoon’s fingers curved upon the keys, their nails long uncut to give the notes extra bite: every line and facet etched with the prehensility of dark genius. God, by comparison, would be a huge white sagging barrage balloon floating tetherless across endless turgid oceans.
Donald woke with the dream still plastered to the back of his skull, where his brain had sprayed it with all the force of cinemascope and X certificate images. The wordy pretentiousness stuck, too. At least for the duration of the Sixties.
He then met Redmoon in real life. He was introduced to him at a party: evidently not as old as Donald had thought in his dream.
. "How are you?" Redmoon asked, as if they'd met before.
"Very well, thank you... Excuse me for being rude, but are you a pianist?"
Redmoon glanced down at his own fingers and Donald noted in the darkly fizzing lights that the nails were long and yellowy white.
"I play the piano, yes, but only for my own amusement. But how do you know?"
Donald shrugged and asked him to dance. Their small talk had been close to either grinding to an embarrassing halt or entering dangerous realms.
As they jabbed their hind legs sporadically to Mr Kite, Donald heard him, during breathless interludes, mention a few composers he liked playing, especially Scriabin. Donald nodded although, of course, he had never heard of the composer.
They parted on good terms, both of them promising to keep a weather eye for each other at future parties.
The following night, Donald dreamed of him for the second time. On this occasion, Donald was nearer to the front of the auditorium, standing amongst several others as they jostled to obtain the best position nearest to the pianist. The orchestra's tuning up was particularly frightening, but Donald put this down to the dream. The audience suddenly broke into cheering uproar, as Redmoon (for it was indeed him) had marched to the podium with the conductor.
As the noise subsided, he squared himself on the adjustable stool, after having flapped out his tails from beneath. He made a few running chords along the slipstream of the keys...
He turned towards the crowd. Donald was captivated, convinced that Redmoon was staring straight at him with piercing white eyes. Redmoon began speaking about the music which he was about to perform. Some of the audience asked him questions on style and interpretation. Most unusual. Pre-performance talks were quite common, but separate from the musical event itself, customarily held in a different venue an hour or two before the doors opened on the concert proper.
Eventually, Donald found himself asking a question, much against his better nature, even though he was conscious of the impatience of the orchestra members and their conductor (the latter being a maestro in his own right).
"Would you like me to buy you dinner after the concert?" Donald asked, his voice croaking with nervousness.
Redmoon smiled and nodded. With some relief, Donald noticed the conductor raising his bâton...
Donald awoke, bitterly disappointed that, after all the preamble, it would never be possible to hear the music. Redmoon's description of it was more than just a little tantalising.
His disappointment continued at the next party. Nothing to be seen of Redmoon anywhere, unless he was one of those neckers in the dark corner. But if he were hiding, it could only be because he wanted to avoid Donald. Donald recalled the dream ... and the wicked smile.
The next time he slept, he merely collapsed into darkness, with the sense of fingers touching him all over. Yet, it was too blurred and forgetful to warrant the name dream. He was still obsessed with Redmoon's inscrutability. Redmoon this, Redmoon that. Donald was bemused, in love and, peculiarly, wistful.
The next day, Donald tried to contact some of his friends (fellow guests at this season's parties, of which I was one, if I recall correctly) but none of us could recall Redmoon. But, Donald said, Redmoon had been the soul of the party. Surely nobody could have failed to note his striking pose, the glistening dusky face. How could Donald be so mistaken? Even now, he recalled the feel of Redmoon’s hand like claws as Donald twirled him round in an old-fashioned jive. The famous composer's name which Redmoon had mentioned as enjoying, however, had gone completely from Donald’s head. He wished he had written it down. But it was too late.
Nevertheless, he did dream of him again. This time, sleep was conducive to dreaming, he knew that straightaway. As soon as he planted his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, he felt Redmoon creeping up from the background. On all fours, Donald imagined. Or on his belly.
The first scene was a restaurant. The two men only had eyes for each other, so the waiters had to make do with cursory signals as to our wants. The menu lay between them on the table like an unread score. The candlelight brought out the matt swarthiness of Redmoon’s skin. His eyes were gentler than Donald ever remembered. His fingers were hamfisted away from his piano, more pedestrian. He dropped his cutlery with unsightly clatters. Dreams only speak of visions, not sounds, Donald realised, thus easing his own earlier disappointment at not catching the music before waking.
Whatever its ingredients, the meal was strangely unsatisfying. Afterwards, they left to go to Redmoon’s home. As Redmoon paid the bill, Donald promised to meet any further expenses of the evening. Eventually, after much toing and froing, they arrived at a large rambling house on the edge of the city ... with several staircase chimneystacks silhouetted against the moon-stained sky, like surplus lumber that couldn't fit into the house's countless attics. The spiralling iron fire-escapes strangled the two end towers with the Devil's own jewellery. Dream talk, again. Donald shrugged in his sleep.
They had passed, on their way, a huge liner in dry dock still being worked on by overtime repairers at the dead of night. Several derelicts were sleeping nearby in the heat of the spotlights. Having reached the house, Redmoon took Donald by the hand through the vast front entrance into a gorgeously draped hallway, where a toady helped us off with their capes.
Now being indoors, Donald felt he should instruct the toady to take their capes to the derelicts who would need them more.
Donald was shivering. He awoke to discover the covers had slipped from his bed. The pillow was sodden with tears ... his tears. He could only hope against hope that the next night would see him dreaming again with a vengeance.
During the day, he purchased an ounce of Three Castles and a packet of Blue Rizla. He needed a good smoke.
Towards the middle of the afternoon, he wondered if there was in fact a building at the edge of the city similar to Redmoon's house from the dream. Donald had never seen one with so many tall smokestacks, far too many in truth for the number of rooms they serviced. Mouth to mouth resuscitation, he mused. And the fire escapes so plentifully supplied, too. Surely it would not be too difficult to ascertain the whereabouts of such an edifice.
He was due to attend another party that evening and he determined to make enquiries with some of his more outlying bosom acquaintances. In the dream, which was now fast disappearing into a forgotten memory, Redmoon and Donald had travelled to the house in a black taxi. There should be an underground entrance quite close, Donald assumed, the city being undermined with regiments of tube tunnels and Victorian sewer systems.
The party was a dead affair. People laid about half-drugged to the gills. One crazy individual, whom everybody called Emoss Crack, told Donald stories of his youth which he threatened would make Donald’s hairs curl. Donald looked for Redmoon, not really expecting him to be present at such a lousy gig. Emoss Crack's ramblings were something he could have done without, but he humoured Emoss Crack with grunts and nods.
Then he saw Redmoon. He was standing by the bar, in close conversation with myself. His shining skin sent pins and needles through Donald’s muscles. He could not get up from his squatting position near Emoss Crack, for his legs had gone dead. And even if Redmoon could, would he welcome Donald’s intervention?
There was a police raid. He even forgot Redmoon in the havoc. Luckily, Donald was released with a caution, because he was, for once, clean as a whistle. They couldn't stand a charge up on Three Castles, could they?
Amid the milling turn-out on the pavements outside, he suddenly recalled Redmoon ... and myself. Could that two-headed, arm-wrapped shape glimpsed disappearing around the next turning be Redmoon and I? Donald followed quickly, brushing aside Emoss Crack's invitation of a walk into the city centre in search of a late-night club. Instead, Emoss Crack tagged along with Donald, much to his annoyance. He did not have the heart to cut him dead.
Eventually, Donald collapsed into his own bed. Emoss Crack borrowed his bedroom floor, as he had done once before.
Dreams would be hard to come by that night, especially in Donald’s current frame of mind. However, gradually, he was back in Redmoon's house. Redmoon sat poised before a Grand, smiling round at Donald who must have been sitting in an armchair, artfully positioned so that he could benefit from both the best acoustics of the chamber and an unobstructed view of Redmoon’s arched hands upon the striped reptilian keyboard. The moment Redmoon’s tapering fingers touched, Donald’s hair stood on end. The music thrilled him beyond measure. He realised this must be Redmoon’s own composition, because it spoke Redmoon in every semiquaver. Donald was privileged to be an audience of one as a song of pure genius was played for the first and last time. Donald was no longer the lonely lost soul who lived inside his head in real life.
The fingers, each one a bone in drag, moved across the pulsing keys. Redmoon’s face, even in the full light of the art deco lamp standard, was a shadow of itself. Each drop of sweat was as black as a spade on an ace.
The music's beauty was unbearable, its ugliness unimpeachable. Donald yearned for it to finish, so that he would be able to approach and tentatively fondle Redmoon’s body, Redmoon Donald’s.
The keyboard became a sweat-slicked hide, swelling up so that Redmoon’s fingers actually moved inside it, as if he reached for the innards of some serpentine creature. Thus, the bizarre harmonies sounded from within their heads, not from out inward—as dreams dictated.
Piecemeal, the music tailed off, with an ending as unsatisfying as the restaurant's food they'd only just consumed. Donald vaguely recalls leaving the music room and climbing many flights of stairs, Redmoon’s talons exquisitely embedded in Donald’s palm, as he led him ever upward.
Donald heard others making an unsightly clattering upon the fire escapes outside but could not tell whether they went up or down. They shouted something about a pirate uprising, but he couldn't be sure.
He fell into Redmoon's arms as he dragged him into a vast four-poster, only to be swaddled by silk sheets. Donald never saw the creature Redmoon must have become, but only felt it like a child at a party guessing what the mystery object was in the otherwise shapeless bag. The act of sexing insects wasn't a starter. Snakes on heat were two a penny. This dream cost a million souls to stage it...
Donald woke to find himself pinned to his own sodden mattress by Emoss Crack. Donald let him have his way, because love is stronger than hate, and less lasting.
Not long afterwards, the Sixties abruptly ended with a lurch towards blander decades. Donald assumes Redmoon still drifts from party to party, no doubt fibbing about being a concert pianist and owning a large house in Hampstead. Donald can no longer have dreams ... or, at least, dreams he can remember afterwards. Yet he hopes Redmoon can dream of him.
*
He picked at the bones, feeling hungry enough to lift them and beat his own brains out. That would certainly be a longer lasting method of assuagement than simply sucking on their residues of marrow.
Then, the door banged loudly, as if such an interruption was delayed purely for this crucial moment of contemplated self-annihilation. There was either someone with raw knuckles on the other side of the door or the door itself demanded escape from frame and hinges. And if it were the latter, what the cause?—wind being the most likely, implied by the empty sounds in the chimney-flue or, at a push, the door was as sentient as the bone-picker and desired its own share of self-annihilation.
"Come in." He concealed the bones behind his back.
The door opened with a grating croak, to reveal a figure in white. The whiteness was not as a result of clothing, nor even the billowing wisps often associated with spectral phenomena. What was certain, however, the knuckle theory could easily be discounted. It had no hands and, probably, no arms, even it did have the hands. In fact, the figure was not human at all, despite its vague leaning towards a human shape: some features that looked as if they could be rearranged to form the most beautiful face the bone-picker had ever seen, together with curves, arches and angles that indicated shoulders, buttocks, belly and breasts, the most extruded parts forming vestigial limbs down below.
"Yes?" He surprised himself at the way he used a formal language at all, to address the visitor, let alone English. He was not even sure about his reflex attitude of regarding it as the viable entity which the word 'visitor' required. The most logical response was to ignore it, since the chances were that it did not exist in any shape or form. Ghosts, he could believe—just. But, this? It would have over-stretched credulities far more gullible even than his own. Yet, the capability of existing at all, even as a human being, necessitated limitless permutations of spirit and chemistry converging in space and time. Thus, nothing could be believed and everything doubted, even doubt itself.
The figure of white, with imperceptibly growing elements of a first person singular within its pre-formative mind, evidently desiring its own share of self, swept into the room and sucked upon the ready-picked arrangement of lonely bones.
I saw the door yawn shut.
*
The blue blanket, in its role of makeshift curtain, clung to the surface condensation of the window. It bore an archipelago of stains, imaginary worlds where the non-sleeper was able to cruise ... during those endless hours at dawn and dusk, when his thoughts would otherwise have slipped back into the viler self-made geography of his mind.
Only yesterday, he had met the one person who would ever mean anything to him, if indeed people could have a meaning. Me. He still heard my voice in this very room:
"It's time to say bye bye, Don."
There was no reply he could summon.
He had found me in the small supermarket down the road, where the few cans left over from the last rush looked lost amid the empty spaces upon the shelves. He was after tomatoes which, in cans, were so different from those of a fresh variety ... in their blood soup looking for all the world like bodily innards. He told me that he was making lunch for himself and he already had more than enough to go round two mouths.
As we left, the checkout woman sitting amid a cascade of pleats said, "It's a rum old game, innit? Nobody can eat nothing, these days, with all the scares.."
Donald smiled knowingly. "People'd rather starve than risk an unknown disease that can eat away at their bodies..." he suggested, after an embarrassing silence.
"Yes, I've had to put government stickers on everything ... it cuts into the profits so..."
We left together, hand in hand ... for what had people in common but companionship in such times? We carried on a fitful conversation, until we reached his flat. Realising that the key had been left unintentionally inside, he forced entry, at the same time as trying to conceal the ease with which he did this. He did not want me to know that his occupation was tantamount to squatting. These days, nobody did anything to earn a living, for even money could not buy what one really needed in life.
Lunch was to be from a casserole he'd had simmering for months. I turned up my nose as he revealed the churning brown gruel with unrecognisable lumps floating. He took the ladle from the wall, stirred it noisily and then returned it to the oven.
Even sex was out of the question, because I'd watched the news, the same as everybody. Nothing was safe, he agreed. We did take a few nibbles at each other in the kitchen, an action which was almost erotic.
"Dad's told me that Mum died from him, you know?" I said, as I walked over to inspect the blanket. Towards the bottom, it was fraying, each teased out fibre ending in a slowly forming bubble of damp.
"Have a go, if you want. I don't need any till tonight," he suggested, gratuitously. The water authorities had long since been privatised and, it was said in some quarters, that they pumped undiluted acid rain to the taps, in the hope that nobody would end up noticing.
He then understood that falling in love was not a lost art. How could he have offered me a suck of the blanket, otherwise?
"Come in..." He lifted aside the grubby lip of sheet, demonstrating how dark and warm it must be within. "We don't need to do anything dangerous, just cuddle and comfort..."
"No, it's too late. How do I know whether I can trust myself?" My voice shook with emotion. I recalled the exploratory nibbles in the kitchen, still sucking on the bit of spare ear-lobe which I pressed against my bare cheek-lining with the tongue.
As he picked his teeth with a fingernail he'd only cleaned out fully that very morning, he could hear the distant wail of sirens. Ambulances steered clear of starvation cases, because the drivers wanted to avoid both the temptation and danger inherent in near-dead bodies. Thus, arrhythmically, they could be heard on their endless course on the ring-road ... their fuel caps open to the streaming air ... for when the pandemic chemical stews filtered back through the ragged rainless clouds of black smoke, everything but everything buzzed and honked.
We did dance to Aretha Franklin. The terrible tragedy was that I kissed him goodbye, tongue to tongue. Tragic in more ways than one, since he then couldn't say how much he loved me before we separated.
He slept soundly for once and dreamt of man-made disasters, himself on the point of becoming unmade man ... only to be woken by the blanket flopping to the floor, too heavy for its hooks.
And the light flooded back.
*
We would have been together twenty odd years.
He maintained that couples like us grew alike, physically as well as mentally. We debated the subject like a pair of screeching puppets. But, eventually, in the long drawn-out nights, when neither of us could sleep, I accepted his point: that the rising of the same words, the same mutually confessed thoughts masquerading as the most odd coincidences between us, were merely ingredients in the inevitably bland stew of existence. That said, I manufactured squabbles for seasoning such a stew. I refused to believe that our faces and bodies were also, bit by bit, coming together in full-blown skin to skin, skirt to skirt, socket to socket contact like grafted plants; this I could not countenance, let alone the remote possibility that we could be taken as siblings: lovers as twins. My mind's inevitable crumbling away, however, fetched flinching spasms to parts of the very carcass wherein I lived and which I had tried to defend against all marauders, summoning the appalling visions of a single tiny peppercorn lost in the coldly insipid slime of Hell.
In a quiet corner of the city, to which I fled in a fruitless attempt to escape myself, I felt the street lights were dimmer now than they were when I was a house-bound child. Hunters of the small hours, with no more than the dark slots of summer to tour the up-market estates of the city's outcrops, the shadow-shaped dossers hoped against hope for imperfections in the suburban mansions where I used to live: a catflap or pigeon hole or rabbit hutch ... but returned with worthless swag. I couldn't make ends meet, if the cull was just a darts trophy or a clapped out video machine that nobody even bothered to clean out come morning or a toaster with a plug that didn't fit the sockets in the city pavements or an astrologer's almanac that contained the wrong positions of the planets for the inner city or a gold-framed wedding photograph showing the drunken faces of two rival families beaming on either side of a bride and groom.
I shrugged. It was about time I had a go—no point in dossing round here much longer, beneath the houselights that flickered on and off from the high-rise windows. One day, I thought, the families would leave this forest of towers, their queer belongings like growths on their backs, for the relative safety of the tube station platforms: like a re-enactment of an era of joy and privation that a war had once brought.
I and my adopted kind lived off the scum slowly sliding along the gutters of the street or off the more sluggish birds having inadvertently spiked themselves on park railings: and, when the towers were abandoned, the older dossers would be able to uproot their feet and bottoms from between the gently hissing office heat-vents and enter, en masse, the tall buildings that even now were busy disguising their brick and mortar as mocking scrawled abstractions of art.
Thinking over the various repercussions of evolution without selection, I wandered into the outer suburbs where trees still grew, nourished crap and root; but they did not conceal, even from my blurred eyes, the detachments ranged like armoured troops with wide bedroom eyes. Their front doors were raised like drawbridges and, sure, I felt, their owners were literally trapped inside, like costly characters in an organic soap opera that still had an eternity and a half to unhatch its multiple Chinese-box dreams.
I later told the story to the creeping, mumbling shadows on my return from the outer parts. My education had been nurtured by a lore more articulate, if shallower, than that that of the streets, so I found the words:-
"There was an ancient air-raid shelter in one garden, with a secret cubby, a nun's-hole, where the bones still stuck out of the ground like spring saplings. I followed the smuggler's route, at first, but no whiff of seaweed nor tang of salt surf, only the sound of TV channels, filtering along these underground inlets, like babblings of water along pipes to the boxes they fed—a twittering aviary in my head. I made entry shortly and stared at them through a tightly hatched square grill. In real colour they were—evidently a married couple, with hands joined. They stared glassily at me, and I was amazed to see that their two hearts pumped as one, outside their chests, in unison with the love-making which went on behind their backs, in a stretched sausage sort of way. They soon grew bored with me making ludicrous faces through the hatch, which I had done to scare them off to other parts of the house—to allow my itchy fingers to scuttle like spiders among their keepsakes. But they got up, as one, and without even a glance of communication between them, prodded one finger downwards in the most obscene gesture imaginable and pressed something just below the hatch. And all went blank..."
My story tailed off, since I could not exactly recall my come-uppance, though I vaguely remembered meeting various other people along the tunnel systems, including those two-dimensional cut-outs masquerading as chat show hosts.
I had returned to my confrères, with jagged shards of glass sticking out of the top of my head, like a prison wall. All I had for my trouble was a flask of deodorant in one hand and a sauce bottle in the other ... both of which dissolved into wafted motes of thin air when I reached reality amid the towers.
Donald was there, listening to my story. Having tracked me down to this innermost pit of the city's soul, he kissed me. We had grown closer by means of separation and, later that night, he lovingly prized out the splinters from my scalp, before they became embedded deeper towards the brain. And then we prepared ourselves for a eternal rest in a vertical punch-and-judy coffin. The slots of darkness were thankfully lengthening. Its skirts widening.
*
He enjoyed wandering into the dark side of the City and frequenting bars where rogues and slatterns were said to gather. During working hours, he spent the time in an office breathing conditioned air. His job was to collate and staple sheets of paper: thousand upon thousand bearing cramped lines of esoterica. He did not need to understand more than was good for him, because his working hours were mainly in and around daylight.
Come night, it was quite a different story. Even in the City, where the street-lights blew ragged holes in the otherwise impenetrable darkness, Mystery welled up from every unsuspecting quarter. Words on a road sign became a symbol for man's gruesome reserves of communal imagination. Advertisement hoardings grew cinemascopic visions of Hell, into which one could enter and enjoy for what they were. The traffic's crawling rear-lights were a raging disease on the face of night.
Donald put his stapler away. There was nothing else in his desk, this being his only tool of trade. Even during daylight hours, he considered himself a skilled worker. He reached street level by means of the downward lift, dreading that the pavements would be amob with home-goers. Tonight, though, was different. Either he had been late in packing up or, for some reason beyond any reckoning related to daylight considerations, the usual hubbub had shifted one ratchet too soon down the commuter tunnels. The nights were indeed drawing in, but surely not that quickly.
So, tonight, he found it easier to reach the outskirts of the City, where the Council's attempts to wish back the tides of night were fast giving up the ghost. Eventually, it was only left to the dimly-lit curtains of tower blocks to cast a grimy gloom across the drizzle-sheen of pavements. The soles of his shoes seemed to become stuck when they inadvertently bridged the cracks between the paving-slabs, as if some septic glue was seeping up.
Why he felt the need to enter these realms was in itself a mystery to Donald. Surely the City, when on its wrong side of daylight, would be sufficient to assuage his hunger for even more mystery and misadventure. No. He needed things far more insidious and decadent and tactile and, basically, dreadful. It was the dark side of his very brain, otherwise detached from the rest, which was the hungerer, perhaps. All very well—but, at the end of the day, it was his body that needed to undergo the incomparable dangers, so that his mind could be nourished like a limbless rottweiller inside his head.
He forged on, heart in mouth. There was an unlit singles bar only just a few hundred yards ahead, telescoped between the ranks of bricked-up buildings of Dockland.
In his younger days (and nights) parties were always in half-darknesses, when low-key smooching and canoodling and snogging and, at worst, heavy petting, had been all the rage. Now, the fashion had grown quite ludicrous, with boppers and jivers and rappers bumping into each other, bunching awkwardly, triggering quarterless rumbles. Amid the overlapping pitch darknesses of the disco strobes, only different in subtle degrees from each other by shades of black, this bar was not exactly welcoming to him, but its very unwelcoming nature became its resistless attraction. He hoped to latch on to someone with whom to chat, someone more or less like himself, someone else who had ventured from the City on a similar errand.
Uncertain of the company he kept, he tentatively forced his way into the bar, elbowing through the unseen masses. Each autonomous scrum of people threw out a single body, which then tried to form another ravening enclave. Later, people were coupling off like constituents in a microbiology experiment. He could hear body-popping all round him. He may even have been the catalyst. Essentially a loner, albeit yearning for some kind of completion, his game was relishing the rough, raw margins of his own body, revelling in the teetering danger of being unaccompanied and unaccompanying.
Abruptly, the main light was switched on.
Bloodshot panic was in all eyes. Mercifully, slow adjustment to the sudden illumination eased the shock. Gradual focusing and squinting however revealed that everyone had grown so damnably old since those first parties in the Sixties which had been held in bed-sits and one-bit communes. The relentless head-bang noise of the music had crawled back into the perfect egg of silence whence it should never have been hatched.
The culprit must be found. That blighter who had switched on the light, like a silent fire-alarm of deafening proportions, must be punished, since no-one wanted reminding of the death in their faces.
He found himself leaning against the rocker light-switch, all eyes turned in his direction. This indeed was the purest terror he had always sought. He smiled in quiet satisfaction. Being one of those few workers allowed into the City for their semi-skills, he had often seen his own face reflected in the meticulously polished metal side of the heavy-duty stapler. And he knew, he really knew, that it must be his own relative young age that was infuriating the party-goers.
He gloated and simpered as they proceeded to make his face something worse than merely old, with their uncut fingernails, but someone or other switched off the main light, before it became too bloody, returning the place to a raucous ruck of dark bodies. It did not seem to matter, since Donald, from his position on the floor, could not have seen very well what they were doing to his face. Which was a pity.
The sound of his ripping flesh was rather nicer than the music, however, he thought, but did not say.
*
The boy sat on the clifftop, aware that, in fewer years than previously deemed possible, most of the rambling house behind him would slip ungracefully into the sea—not through the usual coastal erosion, now more prevalent than ever in modern mankind's living memory, but rather as a result of some dreadful malaise that affected minds as well as matter: a global warming of the heart.
He turned round to see the little girl who used to be me approaching him from below the large chimneyed shape of his family's home, the garden of which stretched to where he sat. The servants would be hanging the washing over the ocean, soon enough. He laughed. He then saw that I rolled a hoop with a stick. He cringed upon imagining me following it over the edge into the crag-tossed waves shimmying below.
Donald woke from the dream. Dreams were either recurrent or obsessive, depending on the guilt you felt, whether the dreams controlled you or vice versa. He was a man now, as was immediately evident from the womanly shape sleeping beside him in the bed. He had once been that boy on Earth's burning deck-edge. An eye of a storm explained the lack of wind as well as the troubled ebbing and flowing beneath the jutting rock where he'd sat, but did not explain my forking strands of hair that flailed like deep-rooted prisoners...
"Are you awake?"
A thankful interruption. But a stupid question at the best of times, whichever of the bed's two inhabitants asked it.
"I'm Ok, don't worry."
And, next morning, as he prepared breakfast, I was heard pacing about upstairs. But he had heard ghosts making more noise—a strange thought to have, but particularly so when he didn't believe that ghosts were physically capable of making noises. But then my near silent downward tread along the stairs gave him pause for second thoughts. He guessed I could be a foundling, a changeling, an elf, a fairy, a mermaid, but definitely not a ghost. Ghosts entailed a faith he didn't possess.
I was his first sexual partner for as long as he could remember. I turned up last night, hair dripping, eyes swollen and steamed up like goggle-eyed glasses, oilskins wetter than his mother's kitchen used to be on wash-day. The knock was insistent, yet gentle. Past empirical evidence showed that he never had visitors, so he was perturbed by the interruption, not that he was actively doing anything worthy of interruption.
"Yes?"
"I need shelter."
Still outside, I looked up at something that was too dark to be called sky, whence endless dotted slats of hail sliced down. His house stood alone upon a lonely stretch of coast. My being a mermaid was within his ability to believe but, glancing down at my stockinged legs, this possibility was not even a starter let alone an outside chance.
He allowed me to enter. But now it was the following morning. And, yes, breakfast was the task in hand. He considered the one-sided conversation last night, with candles burning when the power cut out. The only information he possessed was that I had argued with someone—that the tent was flooded—and despair, in so many words, was now stronger than my fear of strangers. Hence, my appeal at his place: the only habitation I could find.
"You are lucky not to have fallen off the cliff, young lady," he had said.
"I suppose I am."
And, the following morning, when I eventually made my appearance downstairs, I admitted how foolish I had been. Daylight was a great force for equilibrium.
"I've just looked out of the window upstairs and I see what you meant!" I shuddered at the thought. Or, at least, at some other thought I kept hidden by more routine ones.
The cliff-edge was so close, he often considered it a neighbour, one who was in the process of sneaking bits of his land and replacing it with nothing but the compensation of a better view of God's ocean. He indeed never ventured into such a duplicitous outside. He was a xenophobic, a condition, he thought, that affected many people without them truly realising, a view to which he proscribed because he was even more fearful of open spaces as closed ones, a fear that prevented him from meeting people to use as evidence for such a theory. For him, excursions represented the downfall of civilisation, if not the cause of the depletion of the ozone layer. If everybody stayed in their houses, a lot of dreadful things would be avoided.
"How would one live? And the loneliness would be unbearable."
I had faced him, you see, with the illogic of his position. Last night's candles drew out my face whilst the heavily made-up eyes sank back into the darkness. It was strange how quickly I had made myself at home, apparently shrugging aside the fretful evening I must have endured before reaching his sanctuary. I even indulged his philosophical ramblings and tales of his coal-mining heritage, as the storm raged on outside in the night. But what of my erstwhile camping companion? The question remained as unasked as it was unanswered.
Yet, now, as morning dripped with residues of what night had poured, I found my tongue more readily, rather than pander to Donald's pretentiousness and self-centred concerns. Stationing myself across the breakfast table from my host, I seemed intent on allowing my own claustrophobic storm to break. However, I was hungry. Munching, with food in the mouth, became easier than talking, but did not prevent dialogue completely.
"I am sorry to disturb ... your way of life, Donald."
That was the first time I had used his name. I sounded as if I was embarrassed in so doing. He waved a hand which, if he intended it to mean think-nothing-of-it, in fact meant nothing-at-all. The previous night had abandoned us to the collusively selective memories of what had passed between us in bed. There was an instinctive, yet unspoken, fear that part of him was now part of me. Or, even, vice versa.
"This place reminds me of when I was a small girl..."
He nodded encouragement, as if he had long painstakingly memorised my lines of speech better than he had his own. Perhaps, he was already aware that he had very few lines left to speak. Soon, no doubt, I would depart to find the remains of my tent—of my companion—and of whatever else remained of my life in the precarious outside.
"I was brought up by cliffs—in a house my uncle kept—my parents died in the desert when I was small."
Those words of mine, I guess, reminded him of the small girl who rolled a hoop towards the cliff-edge. But that, surely, was his past, not mine. Why was he mixing up two pasts? The question, however, actually existed this time—asked, if unvoiced. He shook his head in one last desperate attempt to shake off the tunnel vision. Or, rather, coal-mine.
"My uncle kept me indoors all the time—he said the cliffs were too dangerous for me to go out playing. I just had my dolls to be playmates, and we raced raindrops down the windows..."
Could cliffs be dangerous? Wasn't it what people did near them that was dangerous? Like women, Donald thought. He still couldn't believe what had happened between us last night. He had indeed undergone two-headed sex before, but the distance of time and the subsequent accumulation of once latent complexes, together with a perspective that was more like that of a spiteful God than a rightful recollection of his own, had created a hot-house of his mind, inducing far worse diseases than any normally laid at the door of sex.
Then, of course, there were the dreams. But not dreams exactly, but real events with Donald as the main protagonist, if not master of his mind and memory. There was that occasion when he was in bed with someone much younger than himself, someone with a flat chest and willowy unpractised limbs that flailed without control. He felt as if he were bursting something from the inside, careless of the squelching he created with his own magnified body upon a much smaller one. The ever-increasing squeals of delight—or were they of pain?
"Are you in pain?"
This time the question was voiced, if unanswered.
He returned to the present moment or as close to the present moment as the previous night could be. My face had started to droop, first with eyelids, then the rest of my appendages: an impression caused by the wilting of the candles in their sockets. The storm was slowly abating. He had long forgotten the feel of freshness on his face, having not ventured beyond the front door for how long? He shrugged. He had already been through his life, describing it piecemeal to me, omitting parts of which he was ashamed or which shame had made him forget. He spoke of merely the mundane moments, mostly those matters that did not matter. I had nodded in tune with his expectations, hardly speaking at all myself. Perhaps, our eventual resort to his bed was as a result of my inability simply to say no. No, it was not as simple as that.
"You see,” he said, “I've become a hermit, not through religious reasons, but mainly because I enjoy the fever of walls, even on the coldest days. But I'm not a masochist, either. I merely feel that restrictions are a benefit. Everybody only has a certain amount of good in them, so if kept in small spaces, there seems to be more of it."
He sensed my question: that if good could be contained and thus strengthened, what of bad?
"I know what you're thinking," he said. He couldn't imagine how the conversation had reached such depths of deep-thinking. We'd started off with small talk. He supposed his words derived from the very green-house effect he originally intended the words to describe.
Then came the kiss, snatched in the dying candlelight.
Who'd kissed whom? We were too taken aback even for the question to be still-born. Both of us were surprised, if that were possible. Yet the mutual lack of surprise made common sense, in hindsight. Love was one of the most impulsive emotions that were humanly possible. Sex, by comparison, was a sluggish sweaty affair, with a sense more in common with the heady closeness that the storm failed to disperse, magnified by the confines of his house. Love was better represented by a stolen kiss than stolen limbs.
Kisses, however, were never ends in themselves. He recalled this axiom from his active youth, yet, to him, tonight, a kiss was quite enough—especially with a stranger like myself. It then dawned on him that both of us had reached such an edge of emotional brinkmanship without either knowing the other's name at that stage. He had not even questioned the background to my arrival at his house. His parents had always warned him against talking to strangers, let alone kissing them!
Then, a second kiss. Not a stolen one this time, but generously given as well as taken.
There came a knock.
One knock in a single night was incredible enough, and that had already happened with my own knock of arrival—but another one? But, as it arrived during the second kiss, neither of us heard it.
He had by now noted my appearance, each of the separate features which caused his attraction to me, if not the reasons for my attractiveness itself. My large round face, whilst not diminishing the lovely landmarks upon it, certainly brought out the worst of otherwise winning eyes and lips that were friendlier towards the teeth than vice versa. My hair was an unremarkable frame, but equally remarkable with its evidence of unprofessional cutting. The rest of my body was demeaned by the clumsy choice of tight jeans and baggy blouse, both of which I still wore in a dry condition as a result of the impeccable oilskins now laid out in Donald’s over-sized scullery like empty sea-creatures. The candles made the generality of my appearance as uncertain as its uncoordinated details.
So, the night's second knock was ignored. In fact, the knocker would hardly have felt it upon the bone-tips of the knuckles, it being such a light knock—as if the intention was to be unnoticed. So why knock at all, let alone twice, as eventually became the case? The second, if anything, was less noticeable than the first.
Now, it was morning, and the tables were turned. I made all the conversational running, as if my sleep, fitfully disrupted by increasingly feebler attempts at sex, had reinvigorated my perspicacity. I wanted to dissect the blurred outlines of the previous night. I was not an abruptly matter-corrupted ghost that had been storm-tossed by being suddenly riddled with flesh, blood and bone. I was not a mermaid thrown up by the raging sea. I was not a fairy who only knew how to speak in forgotten songs of dream. I was not even a careless camper who had abandoned her companion when the going got tough. Who was I then?
Could I be that small girl who Donald saw careering towards the cliff-edge in company with a toy hoop? If so, many years had passed since then. Yet I had changed more than he had changed. But, of course, since then, even change itself had changed. And a changeling with its own sea-change...
I broke off. The panes of the kitchen window broke the sun-shafts where they were most vulnerable, as if we were in a brick-oven that had its heat source outside of itself, being beamed into it by a sky that was covered in blue, like the sea, but lighter and smoother. He extended his hand with the fingers uncurled, feeling less weighty than feathers, to touch my petal cheek—and he wrenched backwards as he was stung by the reflex scorch of baking flesh. Her eyes melted down the face like tears, stitched with a mixture of simmering blood and belching marrowfat. The earflaps folded back like chicken-wings being basted by scalding skull-tossed brain. Bones poked through the clothes like volcanic crags, punctuating the flow and counter-flow of the seething melts, grits and lights of flesh. Tabs of gristle waggled like tails, much like bacon rashers in a frying-pan's force of fat. Lungs spinnakered from the mouth to become balloon-birds expiring upon the air—and other organs extruded from natural and unnatural orifices to become bloated fairies in dizzy despair. Her legs welded together, searing through the stocking-grain like pinky grey slime threaded through with purple veins—and both legs became a flailing fish-tail that knocked the kitchen-table over, spilling scalding body-fat into Donald's lap, together with fresh stewed tea.
He ran screaming to the door, then to the edge of the cliff—seeking assuagement for phobia—pursued by a bowling ringworm of wriggle-cancers that had at last escaped their prison in the womb, where he'd originally spirted them all those years before when the innards were still clean, young and much much smaller.
Was this dream or reality, I pointlessly ask myself? The question perhaps was asked but not answered, as he knocked a rock and kissed the entrance to his bowels. The knocking rock of his head echoed on for open-ended aeons of self-punishment, amid desiccations of fish and flesh.
*
Donald usually went to bed in my body.
Dreams were like swimming through gluey blood and skin, desperately trying to keep his head above the curdled folds of flesh.
By day, however, he became a ghost. He left his home at home. Along with all the other commuters from dream to real life, he sought a working train which would take him, without mishap, to an end-of-line station—where he could latch on to an individual of his random choice and haunt its bodily home which it had brought to work for the duration of the increasingly endless day that Donald would have otherwise had to endure. He preferred irritation to boredom.
A she today, he was soon to gather. A she who happened to be me.
Using the windows at the front of the skull, he could peer down at the papers on which I was currently working. But, what was that? He kept scowling at my colleague Trevor Urquhart a few desks away in the office—perhaps he thought I wanted to ask him out. Donald wouldn't have truck with such peccadilloes, so he forced the muscles at the back of the neck to relax, so that we could return to the proper business at hand. However, he misjudged the neck's elasticity and it abruptly flopped over, as if it were hinged at the middle. The head thumped the desktop, knocking over my cup in the process, the contents of which, luckily, slurped across the green blotter-pad—with a strange geography of stains.
"Are you OK?" The voice belonged to my boss, unseasonably released from the manager's office aquarium. My head nodded.
For the rest of the day, Donald left me very much to my devices. After all, he knew best in the circumstances. But it was more than just an irritatingly hairy ride on the flesh fairground. Donald felt he had no taste nor discrimination when choosing hosts and companion minds.
I had a headache. Since leaving the train which had taken me from my home in Coulsdon to London Bridge Station, a feeling of nausea and heaviness had seeped from the attic basin to lower sumps of thought and feeling—not that Donald would have expected me to be in tune with such a way of describing my unaccountable spiritual predicament. I shook myself like a sopping wet mongrel. This must be what a woman experienced at the wrong time of the month, Donald found himself thinking without really thinking.
The office lighting blared. Since the Conglomerate had decided to move, I simply knew that I would never be able to endure those air-conditioned office wastes. A one woman Sick-building Syndrome, that was what I feared I was destined to become. The light fitments were dysfunctionally concealed behind false ceilings. Each disorientated department had its own identical 'bay', where the open-plan design caused confused faces to scrutinise each other across the wide clerical areas, rather than knuckling down to the core work. Line-management sat behind tinted glass partitions, not unlike frogs in aspic, sporadically blinking as they kept watch on the their office 'young'.
I considered myself too old to be watched. Yet, today, it was not age that irritated me, but thoughts that kept coming unbidden to my mind. Usually, I accepted my lot in life: poring over meaningless actuarial statistics of mortality and morbidity—whilst growing towards the old age pension that waited like a little yapping monster at the end of time's telescope which I often held up to my eyes the wrong way round. Today, in short, I saw everything for what it was: close up: in skin-pore detail: Trevor Urquhart's pimply face...
I studied the coffee stains which I had so carelessly prevented from spilling. I felt the back of my neck, discovering nodules I never knew were there. The green blotter had already dried into ... a face ... yes, that was what it was ... a configured face ... not a pattern of islands which I'd never thought it was in the first place. As in those scribbling, doodling childhood games, I added a few biro lines to the otherwise haphazard blotches, smuts and smudges ... then, slowly, there gathered the features of one I recognised from erstwhile forgotten dreams. Unaccountably, I wrote "Weirdmonger" underneath, finishing the word with the automatic flourish of a signature.
Donald sensed a load lifted from his mind as he reached London Bridge Station in the evening. He had already struggled across the Thames, the legs like soft iron, a hand in a pocket to keep in place a hastily prepared ad-hoc nappy against incontinence. The other faces that floated with him through the adhesive air turned to neither side, whilst he kept a weather eye open to all quarters, expecting the worst. Distant Tower Bridge was almost sentient as it reared from the screaming orange oils of the sunset like a pair of siamese-twin creatures that cantilevered in slowmo progress through the slimy river gunk. Over a shoulder, barely discerned through a hairline crack in the back of the skull, was the gold-pulsing dome of St Paul's Cathedral, as if it were flinching from a ghostly swarm of second-world-war fokkers. The far-off entrance to Cannon Street Station was a gate to Hell, each trundling strand of traintrack-humanity loosely-coated with fireproof shells of costume jewellery.
Resuming attention to the frontward view, without turning the head, an eyeball ratchet-zoomed upon its red-veined stalk and managed to see, in the tapering distance, a blurred needle he'd once known as the Telecom Tower, but now it was an Unidentified Flying Object—albeit planted in the ground, unlike those that once floated above in Earth's tidal ether. But that was strange, because it was now commonly accepted that there was nothing surrounding the Earth but the known universe—which, to my mind, if not his, made UFO's obsolete.
Donald was glad to escape such a irritating mishmash of thoughts. He dislodged himself from my bony meat-haven and fastened himself to the back burner of the train as it sped southward. He could see me dangling my erstwhile crutch-pad from the window like a ragged army's flag of convenience—before, eventually, letting it fly off as an integral part of dusk's fading red moon. He later watched me getting out at his usual stop: home to husband and children where, no doubt, they would welcome me with open arms, blissfully ignorant of the weirdities with which I had been freighted. Though the overspill of blood within Donald’s underpants, without a wound, would take a lot of self-explaining.
As for the real self, it eased back into its own boring body in time for night—in some industrial wasteland, not far from my abode. This ‘body’ was an ancient metal contraption that had once served as a sleek British Rail train. One of us then submitted to an irresistible need for sleep and drifted amid the archipelago patterns of inherited history and Collective Unconscious.
Gradually, however, it was eventually to know, day by day, mind by mind, that its actual substance of existence was indeed a sump of universal mind-and-matter, one that was cruelly abandoned each night within a rusting sample of Man's futile industry, yet sufficiently compos mentis to recognise that it was the true gestalt, Weirdmonger itself.
*
The worrying thing about the area was that, despite being positioned in the same hemisphere as Donald's homeland, each night seemed to blend into the next one, with only a fleeting hint of dawn-dusk round about the time that his luminous watch indicated it to be midnight. In contrast, his homeland was roughly in line with the 20/20 day shift, where seasons only created a small adjustment in the ratio between light and dark. For the record, elsewhere, seasons were harder taskmasters and created wilder fluctuations from the norm. Such concerns should not have affected Donald—but, as the events still unfolded around him, he could not guarantee that irrelevancies would not become relevant and vice versa.
He was currently on a job for the Suspended Belief Conglomerate. Its head office was in the outskirts of his homeland, so that, when a child, he could see its tall buildings along the horizon like teeth of a comb. His parents said it was their ambition that he should become an employee of the Conglomerate, as soon as he was able to leave the house on his own two legs. Very good fluctuating emoluments and perks could be taken for granted. So, his awe, and even consternation, was overwhelming as he knelt by the bed and gazed at the distant pillars of his destiny gradually becoming snagged with the strands of night.
Later, of course, Donald was far more confident of his own identity. He had been with the Conglomerate for a few years, and he was entrusted with their most important missions. His parents were still alive; but the outbuildings of the Conglomerate's original head office had encroached nearer to their house, threatening compulsory purchase in the near future. There was no stopping progress.
He was now located outside his homeland, surveying the lie of the land for a proposed site of another head office, with the eventual aim of moving all the staff from one to the other. Cheaper than renovation of the original head office, the architect had advised. He had already called back on the walkie talkie that the only drawback he could establish was the constant darkness: but, since the air conditioning of the new head office would control light/dark as well as heat/cold, he could see no problem: as long as the staff had all facilities under one roof and the relocation expenses were sufficient.
Despite having been steeped in the Conglomerate's self-effacement programme for his working existence, he still had a soft spot for his parents. He believed the more he held back on criticism of this worrying area, the more it was likely that his parents would be left in peace. However, he could hardly recall what they looked like or what they may have turned into, and one of the vital ingredients of love, they told him, was visual communication between the parties. But that took no account of blind people—or, for that matter, people living, for lengths of time on end, in constant darkness: only at midnight, perhaps, could love flourish. He had conducted himself always in accordance with the Conglomerate's motto:
"Suspended Belief is your one great virtue;
For Dreams will never even start to hurt you."
And the other less official motto, which, apparently deserved neither rhyme nor recognition:
“Take a wife, then take also the wife’s ancient women relatives: those wide-skirted creatures who will ever be on your tail.”
He shuddered, both through the cold and the fearsome future. He sat between the dark masses of land and sky; he could not guess if his watch told the right time. Then, with the suddenness of a single brushstroke of luminous paint across the sky, he saw the first distant skeleton of an office tower in the process of construction—and disciplined Indian Files of hooded figures trudging towards it. Obviously, the Conglomerate had taken his walkie talkie messages more seriously than he intended. And even more abruptly, it was night shift again, for the short storm of dusk-dawn passed on around the world. He fell asleep like a child at the interface of two nowheres. He called out: his parents did not come. They never had a walkie talkie (except Donald as a toddler, of course). There was no stopping regress. He fell fitfully for sleep's enticing.
The night so far had been quiet, far too quiet. I cursed, for whatever happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep. If our baby started whining, then there was no hope even for a fitful doze. But the utter silence was worse. I sat up in the bed, brow glistening, ears pricking, worried that our baby would rediscover the squalls in its lungs at the slightest suspicion of its father sleeping. Donald snored beside me, although I seldom had the cruelty to describe his night habits, come the daylight.
Soon, despite my posture, I did drift off into some dream interruptions—about a cathedral with a dome and a man I loved more than my husband. I then paced what I can only describe as an alien landscape. The sun, if it ever had a sun, was not yet up, but a strange living fluid filled the air with an inhalable light. I noted that I breathed through gills in the sides of my neck and that I possessed a tail which dragged a trough behind my legs in the loamy grey sand. Someone had hung decorations from the sky and I heard the distant thuds of an impending storm. Before much longer, I came in sight of an estate house, like those often found when hiking in parts of Great Britain. Its windows were lit brighter than the pervasive glow, so I walked spritely to a lower bay window. Groups of people stood about in a large drawing-room, barely moving and talking no more than in desultory mumbles. One looked like my late mother. I somehow knew they were mumbles, rather than words, despite the intervening window-pane. One woman had a bundle in her arms at which, from time to time, she cooed and purred. Whatever constituted the bundle, it was alive, moving of its own volition...
Whilst I thus dreamed, Donald was abruptly awoken by a squawking. It was his turn to see to it. Considering that I was still snorting like a beached whale, he withdrew his body from the bed, pulled on his stringy dressing-gown and approached the nursery along the dark corridor. Sometimes, he wished I had taken up breast-feeding. That would have enabled him to stay in bed whilst I went off to feed myself to the brat. But then, on second thoughts, he cringed at the thought of the milk mountains.
The night-light was still flickering in its jamjar; the curtains seeming to move, as a result. The cot cover budged up and down, as he went over to the tallboy, upon which they had left the creature's comforts. Eventually, when he lowered the teat, he found the opening straightaway and listened to the suck-suck while the clear liquid filtered down. Gradually, its short sharp breaths lengthened, and the guzzling became more of a ritual than a struggle for life and death. He knew the next thing would be the shit, but he could live better with stench than screech.
He replaced the still unwieldy udder on the tallboy, blew on the night-light to tease out its life for the rest of the dark hours, tucked in the cot covers around the gentle rise and fall of the mound—and, unaccountably, tested the strength of the side-bars, knowing babies couldn't fly. He laughed at his own dozy thoughts. Then it spoke. Not with a babyish gurgle, but a shrill voice. It actually negotiated its tiny tongue around real words. Words Donald understood. Could find in the dictionary, if need be. Write down. He listened unintently, since surely this must also be dream—surely he had drowsed off whilst giving it a nibble of his engorged masculine tit.
"Can you hear me?" it whined, amid a streamer of black phlegm.
"Yes," he found himself answering.
"Dreams," it continued, "within the mother's womb are commonplace, many experts say."
"Are they?"
"Within the watery world of tubes and wide wrinkled hanging things, listening to the mountainous thunderflesh, a dream can form like weather."
There was no chance to note his dream's undreamlike quality, since a storm abruptly struck with the breaking of red-flecked waters and an irresistible thrust upon a tiny body. The G forces were so powerful, the body turned wrinkly and unsightly, its mind fogged with fear, beshitted with memories gone bad...
The Elizabethans had a fixation about Death. And that's how most of them ended up. But Donald travelled ways so straitened, so full of blind alleys, that he ended up in corners of a London where time did not seem to matter, let alone pass. He roams City churches, like a noon-time shadow, a black aura huddled up to the church wall as if tapping its spiritual power for a further go on the dodgem of life. The Weirdmonger first made his acquaintanceship when he was courting me. I was to be his girl and he wooed me even to the point of obsession. Other men often accosted him, by the scruff of his lapels, saying I was in no way his girl. But he preferred to believe in himself, not them. They were liars, in any event. You could see it in their eyes. My eyes, on the other hand, were wide open and I said he could see to the bottom of my soul, and he believed me. He understood me. He was secure in my simplicity. But, then, of course, he had not accounted for the Weirdmonger.
Donald and I, when walking out, often sat in the grounds of City churches, fresh from business lunches with the Exchange Brokers. Our favourite was St Paul's Cathedral, not least, on his part, because its dome looked like a woman's breast. I was full of ideas about my future career (as long as I could obtain the right contacts). Often, I expounded about the making of money and what I described as filling the space that a man inhabits with the irregular shape of a woman. But he knew me better than I knew myself. I was all up front but, deep within, without outward admission, I saw the Weirdmonger as well. I even believed I knew its name as Emoss Crack. Only Sensitives, Donald believed, could follow such fleeting hair-pieces which often darted up and down church walls like apprentice angels' dusters. People steeped in Stocks and Shares need not apply. Don't call us...
On the occasion we first encountered Emoss Crack, Donald and I were sitting on the gravestone of a City businessman who had founded a Coffee House which later transmogrified into an Insurance Company Conglomerate. I was holding forth in his mock-serious manner to which he had grown accustomed. "If we could demolish St Paul's," I said, "that would leave room for a few more Futures Exchanges or Eurobond Dealing Houses—it's about time this City shrugged off the loose appendages of the past. There are not enough Computer Mainframes for the Unit Trust or Put Option mega-yields to be accommodated—it's a scandal—nobody will miss St Paul's..." I rambled on in my attractive satirical fashion, and he laughed in spirit with my words. It all sounded too much like a speech to be true. He loved me, you see. I was a poet at heart—like him. That was why he brought me to the churches. He wanted to cuddle me, too. He needed someone as sensitive as myself to cradle his head to a soft bosom.
Suddenly, he saw Emoss Crack, creeping like my image of an Elizabethan. The only one left. I was at first unaware of Emoss Crack’s presence, with my back resting against the gravestone. The creature’s open mouth seemed full of black ice-cream which it sicked up all over my power dress. It acted like an evil kid. A non-Sensitive would have said it was simply the night coming in sooner than the dusk. But we both knew that we had met the Weirdmonger, a representative from another age. I could not admit it, of course—I pretended nothing at all had happened. And, even when Donald challenged me with it, I merely shrugged and said it was only to be expected.
We encountered Emoss Crack on several other occasions. The creature dug at the graves, black elastic hose stretching back to the church wall like thick kite strings. It followed us along Bishopsgate and Fen Church Street, loping between the shuttered foreign banks in the guise of an urban scarecrow. It swung from lamp standards in the vein of monkey-spiders, its eyes floating in the dark sorbets of Winter. Yet I was, from the very first encounter with it, quickly promoted, not staying in any one job long enough to be discovered as a true Sensitive, as Donald knew (and still knows) was my real condition. I became Stockbroker General and instigated a whole chain reaction of fiscal meltdowns—but, as during an earlier war, St Paul's managed to withstand the decimation around it.
I have now begun to live with Emoss Crack and I do not have much time for Donald any more. It's like losing a mother, rather than a sweetheart, Donald thought. He still wanders the wedges between leaning computer complexes, where churches used to squat. I feel that Emoss Crack is good for me, Emoss Crack having once lived in the Alchemical Age of Queen Elizabeth the Second where fifties met nineties. The true Elizabethan. Emoss Crack was one who followed Dickens. And even Churchill. A contemporary of Thatcher. The real McCoy of an Elizabethan. That era of history has much to teach us, since women were in control and there's still nothing like their soft touch.
The last time Donald saw me, he asked me if I remained his girl, since he still had a crush on me. My mouth yawned wide to answer and black treacle stretched like split innards from tooth to tooth. Something moved inside my blouse. Evidently, Donald thought, Emoss Crack and I are more than simply good friends. But it's no good crying over spilt milk. He merely hopes that Emoss Crack and I will find time, amid all other civic duties, to visit St Paul's to disentangle it from the barbed wire with which the City Guild has seen fit to surround it. On the other hand, perhaps such fencing is to keep the Sensitives inside the Cathedral, safe from the outside world. And, albeit a man, Donald is the only one left outside with the soft touch. Meantime, either side of the dream, the baby blows kisses of black spittle, for him to suck.
Donald dreamed he had a new occupation back in the old days before real life itself became so dream-like—which was buffing up the drearinesses that seemed to build up when nice bright mornings drifted into the degeneration of late afternoons. He was on guard duty from 3.0 p.m., at which time darkness began to have the potential to wheedle its way into the daylight. So he grabbed his mop and bucket of sunlight liquid from the cupboard under the stairs and, by lunchtime, he had hung his uniform by the front door, with battery-lit buttons and luminous carnation in the button-hole. He placed his false ding-dong of a nose, bright red and bulbous, on the door-knob, to remind him to take it with him. But his mind wasn't in the right gear, somehow. He felt a trifle under the weather, despite the morning's sunniness. He looked from the window and saw a rocketship crossing the blue sky. It didn't look at all convincing. He looked down at himself and, come to think of it, and not to put too fine a point on it, he was not the fine figure of the man he thought he was. Who ever heard of putting the brightness back into twilight, anyway? He might as well go back to bed, he thought, because no doubt it's all part of a bad dream. But, too late, the rocketship suddenly slipped a gear, spluttered and finally stalled, crashing towards the house in which Donald stood and stared, now believing how convincing it was. Luckily it was indeed a dream (or else he did die and was subsequently dreaming whilst dead).
He looked at the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece (which his parents had arranged that very morning before light) wondering whether anything of such relative insignificance could be persuaded to take on a character larger than life. Tomorrow, his parents had been told, was to be his very first interview with the Conglomerate. He kept looking up and looking down, and each time he looked up, he felt sick and sicker. As if the motion of his head up and down was a flight of nausea on a tilting sea of air. Finally, he decided, too late, that he was, literally, going to spew. No time to reach the fire-closet. So he used the vase of flowers. Later, he switched on the TV set, but could not focus its flickering. He was not used to reading between the lines and a sense of nausea revisited the alimentary canal around which he was built. He sometimes felt as if he had vomit running through his veins, instead of blood. He failed his first interview, but passed a second one much later in life because the original failure became a valuable qualification, there having been a change of management. His parents would have been proud of him.
Indeed, he must have been dead, because he dreamed he was not Donald. He was them. He was us. One thing was certain, he was older. But not wiser. The street was quiet except for the occasional tube train below. The lamps joined up worms of light in the darkness. Yes, the street was quiet, the distant drone of a rocketship several skies away. The lamps were finally doused in the early hours: all that could be seen was the sole glow of a first floor window in a ramshackle joint—and it was in that room where the Conglomerate's business resided. The "we" that "he" had become climbed on to each other's shoulder's to view a middle-aged man at a word processor. He was so intent on his task, that he did not hear the sash-window slip its lead, nor our ingress to the room. It was not surprising, for we were quieter than the spluttering of his veins. Outside, the street was quiet. Inside, the room held for a split second a shop-soiled tableau of our frozen dummies. He must have been deafer than a china vase for he did not hear one of us tripping over the lumps in the carpet. We would have to be more careful next time, for any slip like that could have caused a havoc and a half. What a man! He kept up the nimble fingerwork on the keys, oblivious of us. One of us eventually looked over his shoulder and read what he was writing. It was in English, so we could not understand it. Outside, the street was still there, but we had completely forgotten it. Inside, we ranged wide, rummaging beneath the bed for valuables amongst his night soil, rifling his cupboards for any noon meat that was still sufficiently undecayed to be handled, cleaning out his pockets for mind drugs amid the fluff. Not that we were common or garden burglars. He must have been dumb, as well as deaf for, on seeing us, all he could do was point at his mouth. One of us laughed at him and the other laughed too. It was difficult to tell whether his tears indicated laughter or not. Funny that! Outside, the street had imperceptibly broken its bounds into morning—with everything, except daylight, which morning entailed. Inside, we had killed the man, for we could not bear his incessant silent laughter. It was so disconcerting. He must have been round the bend. His eyes were luminous. One of us (probably me) did the job well, cut his throat with his own scissors, took the adam's apple between the two blades and snipped. His death sicked all over the red screen. Illegible in life, illegible in death. Like the noises from the street outside, all leading hard and fast towards noon; people, cars, trains, kids, sirens merging into an inchoate groan. The rocketships had been grounded, of course, till it was official night time again. Inside the room, we finished searching his bits and pieces. Now, what should we do? Listen, who did you think he was? He talked to himself, you know. Dispose of the body, before it's an incrimination. Speak up, won't you, I can't hear, for the noise in the street outside, it's so deafening: like the spluttering in the veins, the blood of proud parents.
The sash window slid back of its own accord, yet he ignored it. He put the finishing touches to the words on the screen, English being a language with no hard and fast rules, merely taste and instinct and fear of the schoolmaster's cane. Better than flower-arranging. He was perhaps the only one awake in the whole silent Conglomerate of the worrying world; so busy, he was sure to miss the lightning flash that was both sunrise and sunset. A diptych of dawn and dusk.
*
The building, once a skyrise block, now sprawled along the horizon. Its central manse prodded the clouds with the short temper of a bed-ridden schoolmistress, whilst its outhouses and stables crept window- and entrance-less from either side, curving gently to fulfil an ancient ambition of the shellac snake swallowing its own masonic tail.
Knowing at once that this was the only part of the city which had been made independent of reality during one of the Tangential Wars, Donald had clambered here through stilted, stunted avenues of trees. Being participants in the Second Suburban civilisation, the inhabitants were glued to screens, screens which reflected only fuller versions of themselves. He need not bother them. He took no pleasure in surprising the unsurprisable. Time travel was to them only second nature in the fictional worlds they now thought they lived through. Yet Donald remained a hero in search of his heroism, even if this particular area of history was merely a way-station for other less insignificant, more heroic times.
"Who are you?"
He was startled by the brightness in my abrupt feminine voice. Wishing that he had managed to be the first to bring the same question to bear, he surveyed my face: wanton, vixen-like, with shirley-temple curls, and loins so thickly bushed, he wondered whether the voice had caused him to jump to conclusions.
"I am Donald," he answered. He would have added, "Donald, an Ulterior who has been commissioned by the Conglomerate of Futures to de-haunt that building", if he had not already learned the big lessons in life: say as little as possible: and don't tempt synchronicity. I looked unaccountably relieved.
He pointed to the conjoined crescent building, now etched in marquetry against the most stage-struck sunset he had ever seen. The edge of the sky was almost audible amid its various interfaces of tertiary colours. Not one single sun, but several, dipped together as a well-drilled chorus line, gradually silting into the dewy-eyed pastels and oils that this particular universe had seen fit to massage into its moving parts. These suns eventually came together as one, to take the curtain-call of night, their overall consistency fast changing from raw jam to wild honey. Finally, with a magnificent feat of prestidigitation, the now combined sun wore a black top hat which was courteously doffed for the final bow and, more quickly than Donald anticipated, became as big as the whole sky's bowl.
"Pretty, weren't it?" I said.
He nodded. He had not wanted to enter the building during darkness but now it seemed there was no option. Other than untested options.
"You will come with me?" he stated, rather than asked.
"To help clean it?"
He nodded again, knowing what I meant.
I took his hand into my slenderly fingered paw and led him along an unmarked path. My sparkling eyes told him that I could see better at night than him. His friends, who worked for the Future in the past, had obviously primed me and planted me here as his guide, and he was truly thankful for such sweet mercies.
The building had once been a large stately house. It was now unusual in one respect, something he had indeed already noticed but not sufficiently weighed. The side stables had no apertures of their own, which meant that they could only be reached via the main central manse itself. He imagined wicket gates leading from the grand entrance hallway into the bestrawn areas, where whatever unlikely beasts were reared did nuzzle and feed, hinnying gently to lull the other inhabitants towards sleep. The livestock was taken in and out via the ornate central doorway, since they had no stable doors to call their own. The marble staircases and costly parquetry must be peppered with their droppings. All this was his surmise, yet surmise based on the Future's map of hindsight in his possession.
Donald had indeed learnt, before embarking on this mission, that he was due to reach a cross-section of reality which was entirely independent of history itself. Unscarred by the Tangential Wars, it was thus teeming with such refugees and dossers that could not bear the brunt of chronology. It supplied haven of hindsight, even, for those who could not gain purchase upon any credulity elsewhere: for those whose outlandish exteriors were denied existence within most healthy precincts of time, since nobody really wanted to believe in nightmares. It was Donald's job to visit such pockets of resistance and rid them of any wrong-headed creatures inhabiting them.
He had no illusions. He was not brave. Knowing that hindsight was fighting from his corner, how could he possibly be defeated? Furthermore, he had a few old school-tie contacts amid the Conglomerate, now called FUTURE (Fate's United Timekeepers & Ulterior Reality Erasers). .
"I've got a key."
He could have hugged me. I knew my lines very well.
The double-doors swung wide open even before I could insert the key. Things were working out almost too well (despite the inopportune sunset). He was cruising upon a clockwork of well-oiled domino ratchets.
We stepped amid the candleflames that might have been lit to welcome us. The stench inside was quite unbearable: a heady ripeness which we could almost see hanging in the waxlight like honeycombs rotted right through. The dynastic oil paintings queuing up the winding gone-with-the-wind staircase dripped with a phlegmy-green pigment, particularly from the mouths and snouts of the depicted subjects.
"How do we get to the stables?" he asked, ever eager to get on with the job in hand.
I darted towards an antechamber and, by the time he had caught up, he found me scrabbling in the maw of a tall fireplace. The lizard-skinned ashes, he could just see, were sticky, and some dead flames were clinging to my behind like boiled sweets. He had always imagined corpse-fire to be more like flowers. This was the first time he'd seen it. Hindsight had never been able to deal with such impossibilities as cold fire.
With a teeth-grinding noise, I removed the back of the engorged chimney. Giving him my tail to hold, he followed into what he now took to be the stables. There were snorts and snuffles from every quarter: lambent eyes played peeky-boo with each other: feelers tickled his face as if he were on an old-fashioned ghost funround. How was he to see in such darkness, how cope with the exorcism of mutant reality with merely the sense of touch at his disposal?
"Are we in the stables, now?" he whispered.
"No, these are where the pets are kept. The wildstock is further into the side sheds."
He knew for a fact that he was not here to obliterate household pets. But he was now unsure whether I had learnt my lines correctly. Unaccountably, he half-mistrusted me.
With no warning, even to himself, he took his Lewis-gun and sprayed a splatter of ectoplasmic pellets in all directions of the sane compass, willy-nilly. The gnawing purrs and drowsing undergrunts became squawks and squeals of outright terror. The eyes extinguished one by one, each with a gut-wrenching sob. The noise screeched on: it could almost be seen as great swathes of darkness billowing like black flames of shadow: then tattering: finally silence. It turned out, more by Fate than Future, that he had managed not to hit me. But he could tell from the yellow wells that were my eyes rising up before him, that I was stricken with unconscious grief.
He felt my tail tug him on. Now I was not speaking. A female stoniness had settled on our relationship ... at least for a while, he assumed. More by Luck than Judgement, we reached the outmost stables by daybreak, tired and hungry. A silvery light filtered through the cracks of the wooden walls.
"But there's nothing here ... "
Only straw and a small empty manger, he noticed.
As he spoke, he swung his arms in unison, like a love-shy schoolboy. I stared at him fixedly. My cunning-looking features snickered. I tweedled my whiskery snout. “The saucy minx needs her rump smacking,” he thought. Abruptly, with a flash of my flanks, I leapt upon him, scrambled up his uniform (using the silver buttons as gains of purchase), wrapped him round the chest with my pulsing limbs and forced my snout into his mouth, with the fever of some passion he could not comprehend.
Donald, with an Ulterior's body, wielded a vast crosspult, one loaded with a chunky lump of frozen ghost-vaccine: sprung upon a band of elastic spiritfire—and several bodily hair-triggers ready-cocked. Whether he was snooked accidentally into judder-recoil or, whether, indeed, he himself tipped the balance in all conscious righteousness of motive, he did not, nor want to, know. Less by Fuck than Fudge, Donald's grapeshot ricocheted beyond reality's range and brought, if temporarily, cross-concertinas of event into play...
He placed me in the single manger, where I flopped lifeless-like, the maw in my furry belly having flooded with what looked like raw jam. Reluctant tears gleaming in his dark eyes, he curled himself up in the straw nearby ... waiting, waiting, waiting for the Future to send another to rescue him from these trammels of out-history.
Tenderly, he shuffled some straw over my body in the manger.
*
We talked, having unexpectedly been thrown together and then abandoned by two friends ... to stand—or, rather, sit—guard over all the luggage. And I smiled as Donald exercised his skills of word power in my hearing. And why he used words in an attempt to make us as tactile as two soft dummies thrown from the nursery by an obstreperous toddler—rather than abandon us to the more two-dimensional gossamer of memory—was really because, like all people, he had pretensions of existence.
Whatever the case, the meeting was a snatch of time which turned out important in the context of his whole life or, rather, his whole life to date—having stretched on, it seems, for centuries since those events although, in reality, probably only about ten years, if at all. Indeed, he was not present at the natural conclusion. And the reason why our pair of friends committed suicide remains blurred; the answer surely lies somewhere amid the events surrounding the luggage alongside which Donald and I were consigned—by those very friends called Trevor and Mary—to spend several hours' vigil.
If the plane had not had such a delay, we would not have been abandoned so long in idle prattling. Our two friends had departed for a concert in the park which both were earlier sorry they were going to miss. So the glitch in travel arrangements, shortly after we met up at the airport, was, in fact, a godsend for fifty per cent of the party. But strikes do not often bring good luck and, in the end, this particular strike (of flight controllers) was no exception to that perhaps shaky rule.
He cannot possibly remember the whole trend of his conversation with me, nor the exact words used even in the bits he does remember. I was one of those people who said things without first engaging the brain. Not exactly fleabites of small talk, but flighty, without being frivolous—friendly, if flirty, yet decidedly unpromiscuous—precariously the sensible side of confused. I spoke about the permutations of where we four had originally met. I felt my face, as if my carefully concealed signs of encroaching middle age were breaking through the crushed aspirin camouflage. My teeth were peculiarly long, two in particular, but not startlingly so to warrant mention or, even, notice. It is strange that he remembers my teeth at all. My teeth were, in effect, not my most striking feature.
As he trudges back through the foggy creeks of the past, he seems to visualise my face emerging from the bright-backed arena where the luggage of bereft travellers was scattered about like soft furnishings. It was a face with which any man, especially one as sensitive as he thought himself to be at that time, could fall in love at the drop of a sun-hat. Words defeat him, as usual. It is best to let them have their head. For, as a writer, without words, he is nothing.
Disrupted from his pointless revery, he heard himself talking. "Trevor? we knew him at University, didn't we? Flat-mates and all that."
"Same with me," I said. "I sat next to Mary in maths—and we hit it off—somehow! Next thing I knew—a holiday. Not in contact for many years. Talk about blind dates. Still, I'm sure we'll get along like wild things. You and me, I mean. Nothing to worry about with the others. Trevor's so easy-going anyway. Mary tells me she can wrap him round her little finger. I like men I can get my teeth into—not the wishy-washy sort. But I've had my fill of holiday romances. We'll be able to swim and dance and things. Nothing too heavy..."
I pointed towards a couple who were kissing and cuddling nearby, making their luggage bend into shapes it was not intended to. He nodded. He imagined me in bed. He had a phobia of women who could potentially undress him to the bone (and beyond!) and, if there was ever one who could flay him to the soul, I was the primest example, in his eyes. He was thankful that I sympathised with his need not to get too heavy.
Neither of us, it appeared, were ready for a full-blooded affair. That duty could safely be left in the hands of Mary and Trevor. Neither of us, too, would mind being makeweights or, even, lightweights. As he nodded, I smiled—and he winced upon sight of those two fine teeth as sharp as my painted finger-nails. I must have taken his expression to be a sign of disagreement.
"I hope you didn't think..."
"No, no, of course not." He was pleased to be able to shake his head at my inference. It was good to be on all fours.
Night came suddenly to the airport (despite the blinding lights), with people sleeping on their soft luggage or, at least, fitfully dozing, including myself. The air clung more sultrily than ever, as if the sun had greedily retained the heat for itself whilst it was up and about, but now had selflessly relinquished such heat to its worshippers.
There were some shapes still unsleeping, pantomiming about—children too fractious at the holiday's delay, or dwarves slowly circling in apocalyptic games of ring-a-ring-a-roses, some silently tilting back and forth on human see-saws. The various items of luggage assumed prehensility—but he guessed it was his imagination (or a dozing dream).
Later, when the other two were still missing, he took it upon himself to open Trevor's trunk to see if he could use it as a makeshift bed. It had looked more like a coffin during daylight hours. He peered into a chasm that swallowed him, a sleep too deep...
It was daybreak by the time Trevor and Mary returned from the all-night open-air concert, a little disappointed at having been part of a screaming teeny-bopper audience, whilst having originally expected a more sophisticated event. They had little dreamed that their favourite group—from a heyday too distant to call anything but an elaboration of nostalgia—would stoop so low as to prejudice their artistic integrity by reconciling so many common denominators in such a brazen fashion. However, this was completely forgotten when they discovered that Donald and I had vanished, their two trunks with us.
The rest of the budding passengers still lolled asleep across their own version of belongings, some with hard corners pressed into their lower backs like makeshift examples of mediaeval torture. Even the highly strung children were flopped over like slaughtered puppets. Planes turned over engines in useless attempts at take-off—or so it seemed, in the half-drugged realms of wingless Heaven to where Mary and Trevor had long since drifted, after administering devices to each other so typical of their earlier romances with needles. One old-fashioned puncture too far.
Indeed, like myself, Donald was not present at the natural conclusion, so cannot be sure of what eventually happened, or even if they died at all. So, he has invented the final scenario, in the hope that he may hit on an odd permutation of truth here and there. To wallow in meaningless words is far better than the strange slow-surging fluids that others of his kind usually feed upon. He is by now a fly-by-night in the guise of myself—ever since he slipped on my body as if it were his favourite comfortable dressing-gown discovered long-forgotten at the bottom of a trunk. You see, the most satisfying, if hardest, task for the imaginer in the art of imagination is imagining the imaginer.
*
He could see I needed to speak to someone of my own class.
Years a lady, and now I had to resort to nightly shake-downs on patches of dusty floor which considerate souls meted out by the inch. My name I told him was ——.
"Can I call you Rachel?"
"You may, but only if that were really my name."
"It seems to fit. You're like something out of Proust or Colette or Katharine Mansfield or Anita Brookner..."
"Or Baudelaire or Mallarmé... No, no, why should I be something out of anything at all?"
He could see I was irritated. The mane rippled like my sea, the face my beach of bleached sand. The hair was indeed greyer than fair, propped up at the front like a hedge in a nineteen-forties style, ill-fastened at the sides with beetling hair-clips. However, it was the look, the content rather than the form, that intrigued him most.
His attention slipped to my voice. He tried harmonising his own tones and registers of speech with the contralto echoes of mine: it was as if the sound were not taken from the chest but from my past, when I'd held audiences in the palm of my shell-like hand.
"Can I help you in any way?" he ventured.
He had discovered me inside a two-bit café near to a nameless place (an area between two well known tourist attractions of a resort city). I was sitting in front of a large wall mirror; so at first he thought there were two of me: twin sisters upon a sheen's breath, as the Poet once put it.
He sat himself at the next table, so close he could easily stare into my wayward eyes: the sea had already withdrawn leaving glisteny pools upon them. I was picked out by the awkward late afternoon light that entered between the posters on the café window. He simply knew I knew that he wanted to talk to me. And vice versa. Too old to be a pick-up, I should not have given him any qualms. I eventually answered him with not even the slightest turn-away of the head.
"You could only help me, if you'd met me twenty years ago," I said.
The remark was even more cryptic in the foreign language I spoke. He shrugged it off for what it was: a dream talking; hope expanding into the past as well as into the future, yet merely skirmishing with the seedy present moment.
"You'd think they'd clean up this city for the tourists, wouldn't you?"
It felt as if he were taking pot-shots with words: hoping at least that the target would stop wavering about.
"Yes, I stood in some finds..."
I held up my dainty foot at a sharp angle so that he could see underneath the high-heel shoe. He was astonished someone of my age could balance on such dagger-points, like a filler novelty act in an anachronistic vaudeville.
"Were you indeed a famous singer, Rachel?"
"More famous than some. But I'm now just an entry in a thousand discarded diaries."
"Will you sing a song I've written?"
He held out a tattered score. He'd carried it in his back pocket for as long as he recalled owning the pocket.
"In here?"
I turned to look at the waitress who was scowling at us from over the steamy counter.
"Why not? It may bring others in, and surely they need more clients than simply the two of us."
I saw what the score was. He thought he caught a half-smile hovering in my look regarding his secret joke.
"I see it's called Rachel," I said.
"In this city, one ceases to be surprised at coincidences," he answered.
I stood up. He then knew I was a Diva: for common songstresses of the old school simply squat sang.
He, for one, could only croon above his own finds.
I was not quite so old as he had originally believed. The dress shone upon my pedigree flanks. The breasts relayed the blurring flow of shimmer and sea-light. I hummed my voice into tune, as the Poet said, like a coterie of ambivalent musicians using tides as well as sounds for the ultimate accompaniment. But he never really understood poetry.
He tapped his fingers on the unpercussive table, finding it difficult to keep up with the other rhythms of the city around us, for the surface was tacky with ancient meals. He opened his mouth, as if that would encourage me to follow his in a composer's lip-reading, a listener's sight-reading.
I eventually sat down without singing the song, though he could have sworn there had been at least something in the air (not his song, but one that had been written by one of my past lovers).
"Did you not like my song, Rachel?"
"I liked it very much, my dear."
He turned to the waitress, seeking confirmation that Rachel had not sung it at all.
"It's got a nice tune, Mister, I'll say that for it..."
The waitress' voice was coarser than the Diva's, despite the youthful breasts upon the sound-box.
He turned back to Rachel, for somehow he knew he would love her more than any song could sing. But she had already disappeared into the gathering mysteries of the city's night. He heard the distant tolling of the engulfed cathedral and shuddered.
"...but you need a lady to sing it, Sir, rather than you," the waitress continued, as she sat back into the coffee-coloured gloom of the counter.
He barely heard the waitress trying to mimic his song.
He looked into the large mirror on the wall, but its steamy surface swam with an uncertain gloss: Usher's coastal tarn dimming in the man-made light of early evening.
He swayed out into the quiet street on alcoholic points, wondering why her name had gone from his mind. Nameless or no, he'd always love her.
*
He knew that they were not called lounges thereabouts, not even parlours, but front rooms. Of course, he didn't admit to being exactly obsessed about such matters...
He seemed to have been cooped up in the house since he could remember, permitted to sleep as long as he liked in the king-size bed on the top floor at the back. The sash window looked over disused railway sidings, and he could often hear the voices of kids pretending to be trains. In the distance he saw the signs of an ancient coal-mine.Very rarely, if ever, did he venture down the steep stairs. He sometimes thought he heard the undergrunt of mindless conversation elsewhere, and feared to meet such people. Women in wide skirts and hurtful mouths, no doubt. After all, they may be the ones who had kept him upstairs.
Most people who are confined can remember the contrast with the freedom they once enjoyed. He could only retrieve such blurred images with difficulty, fishing for shadows from the edge of the black industrial rivers that wound sluggishly thereabouts in the outside world.
It had to be admitted that he was somewhat obsessed with the whole house, which is not surprising, seeing that it had been part of his life for so long—he even began to believe he was born there. But why such an obsession should centre on the front room was a mystery. He imagined its decor. The paintings on the wall as run-of-the-mill favourites from the department store—in unreal colours. The seedy loose covers on the three-piece suite, with a design of over-large flowers. The shag pile carpet bearing a pattern worn out by hob-nail boots. The fire-tongs hanging above the mantelpiece, gleaming sullenly in the late afternoon's shafting sun. The ponderous ticking of the carriage clock. The disused monochrome TV with huge knobs. And the people, yes, the people, sitting round on the edge of chairs, balancing bone china crockery on their palms, plates of manicured cucumber sandwiches on their knees, conversing in what, at face value, was sign language. He had a recurring dream that one of these people had a common cold (and thus incurable), a fact which made it almost logical to believe that death itself could in this way be outlawed, with the body growing piecemeal into the actual disease from which it suffered.
He shook his head. He had never visited the front room. He was convinced he had been to the kitchen, helping a loud lady stir the innards of a large washing-copper. The memory was that of a small child, whilst the experience was somehow that of an empty-headed adult. He knew the toilet backwards and inside out ... but as he had never been able to reach the chain, someone, he presumed, must have flushed it for him later.
One day, he determined to reach the front room, like a more outdoor type of individual might have wanted to climb a mountain. He left the landing where the stairs led down into a dark pool of light. He crawled backwards on hands and knees, so that he could avoid seeing his own shadow. He employed the stair-rods as a steeplejack would when upon a tall chimney, since from his bedroom he had seen such smokestacks striating the horizon as they rose from the dark mills. He eventually reached the ground floor, where light seeped through translucent roundel windows set into the front door and settled towards the hall ceiling as if it were warmer than the darkness. He stretched up on his body's hind-legs and, with the gait of a clockwork toy, reached the closed door in the side of the hall. Gritting his teeth, he grasped the knob and turned...
Inside, as he gingerly first-footed, he was incredulous to see that everything was indeed as he had imagined it. The dowdy carpet. The tasteless furniture. And the clinking teacups, the set square sandwiches, the dusty lace, the lugubrious clock. The silent signs of people. Even the lump of black snot pulsing and clucking in one of the wing armchairs.
Then, with a shock, realisation dawned that all the tawdry department store paintings depicted images of himself in various stages of abstraction. He couldn’t be fooled. He had not been staring into the long wardrobe mirror for years on end, for nothing. As he peered at these questionable works of art, he could well recognise the way his own saliva drooled from each corner of the lips. Then, the gathered guests (or hosts) raised their heads from slurping the tepid tea spilt in the saucers, and they all winked in recognition. He winked back, since they all were myself at various ages. There was relief that the wide-skirted creatures were missing. He was indeed relieved, also, to discover that he was not obsessed with the front room, since the front room was surely obsessed with him!
He sat on a vacant stool and sipped at the tea, not even wondering who had passed him a cup. A goods train with its voice breaking trundled by outside. A distant factory hooter sounded its spectral foghorn. He looked at all the others looking at him: zombies of himself at various points along the spectrum of ennui and stifled passion. He shuddered from bone to bone, wrapped in the seedy loose covers of his own flesh. He thought he heard rustling approaching along the hallway. He shivered. He thought, also, that he must have a cold coming—or a mind going...
*
The town centre was near empty of shoppers. Its covered walkways echoed with the cold steps of no more than a few others.
Fitful waste paper, in all shapes and consistencies of stickiness, had managed, piecemeal, to climb from the wire containers ... and this, despite the wind, if anything, having dropped along the funnels of the precinct.
Trails of quarter-inch proud footsteps, bearing the cross-hatch pattern of heavy boot-soles, were avoided by end-of-day shoppers, gingerly picking their way between them towards the exits.
Darkness, even in these shop-windowed cloisters, crept relentlessly towards the last late-night shopper. And there always was a last shopper, who provided the only bait for monsters born from the common-law marriage of bestiality and sundown.
Today's last shopper on a spree was myself. I screamed before I saw any monster. I had read my big brother's horror books, Stephen Kings, Clive Barkers, Ramsey Campbells, even H.P. Lovecrafts. I had not understood all the words, but the fear in them had stood out nevertheless and borne the test of childhood's endless past.
The man whom I had passed appeared to be a designer antique lamp-standard, so popular in shopping-centres. I did not know that his bones, lusting after flesh to cushion them, were putting out feelers, as they simultaneously planted tapering, crackling roots through the boot-leather, even through the upper crust of civilisation's concrete veneer—heading towards their own mindless version of the Earth's core where unadulterated, unwritten horror flourished with the craving jaws of its own jump-leads.
Not understanding, I did not even realise that the figure I passed was a man at all.
My elder brother had said the shops stayed open so late on certain nights of the week, you could never find them shut. So, I had taken the last bus to town, in search of my mother's birthday present which she had uncharacteristically forgotten. Maybe I was growing up, just old enough to be relatively independent ... despite the media-led dangers of the world. The concerns of such fledgling adults tended to obliterate earlier, more innocent preoccupations—like remembering birthdays, playing pass-the-parcel or hunt-the-thimble, reading Enid Blyton, Capt. W.E. Johns, Richmal Crompton ... Wurzel Gummidge the scarecrow...
I looked back. The darkness stained the shop windows with moving lines of soldier words, in strict spit-and-polish. Other shadows moved closer, taunting me with a brother's typical back-chat. "Go away!" I screeched, thinking he had followed to frighten his little sister.
I suspected the shops had always been shut and never properly opened—the glorious sunlight only seeping in from the outside as some celebrity had snipped the ceremonial opening-tape with heavy-duty snicker-snackers, clacking, clacking blades, the tape being made of some alien fibrous stuff that could never be cut.
I shook my head vigorously as if to clear it of something. I had been fed too much pap at teenage "slumber parties"—all night films in Dutch Elm Street, the images of splatter flickering over the huddled shapes upon the settees, petting heavily but falling short of humping, desperately seeking carnal secrets amid the concert crescendo of screams from the screen which had no erotic context but pain.
I tried to shake myself free of all this.
Could my brother have tricked me here to test out some outlandish theory of horror which had been bugging and buzzing in his head ever since the fast-forward, sharp-zagged trails of the Evil Dead. Even when he realised that true horror could only be found in books—not videos—the neat straight lines of print merely wound, coiled, rippled tantalisingly towards meaninglessness.
I panted. I was determined not to scream again. That would only tell the monsters where I was. The shop-window dummies stared in disbelief. Many were undressed. I had often wondered why they had such small heads and stylised black-and-white bodies. The nippleless breasts moved as if hands were feeling them from within glove puppets. Flecks of pulsing blood-light stained the inner thighs. The glass between them and me drained the light from the now slow-flashing Coca Cola sign.
The upbedded patterns of the footprints surrounded me like hour-glass cowpats. There never were invisible monsters in Stephen King, I thought. This was more like an old black-and-white B movie. But I had never seen one and could not draw the comparisons which life left clues about at every turn of its pages.
The waste paper, like discarded manuscripts for stories, crawled back to its bins, scaling the wire meshes with the aid of lolly-sticks and can-tabs. They had yearned for the rubbish frights of low budget colour-gore, not the shadowing subtleties of Cat People, Mannequins and Ghosts, all good value at double the cost.
The roots shrunk back, as I suddenly smiled.
My brother's eyes stared at me from behind the impenetrable shop-front glass where he had found himself trapped inside a dummy, in a dream worse than any of his nightmares.
The invisible monsters took up their print-marks and placed then towards the squally night outside the precinct—where all was boarded up for the night, even the bedrooms.
The lamp-standard man eventually stepped free, his bony roots fully withdrawn from the ground. The man indeed knew that I had forgotten my mother's birthday present—but the best possible present now would be her daughter's return next morning after a night away. He took my hand and chuckled at his own good will.
He did not hear the rattling fingertips on shop-glass somewhere behind, frantic though they were. Nor did he hear the muffled shouts from behind that glass of “Beware the Weirdmonger!” Nor did I.
*
"The nights grow longer, my life shorter..."
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself."
"I expect you're going to tell me that life's too short to be sad."
"All good things do have to end some time."
We stared at each other over the half-drunk glasses. This was only the second time we had met. Surrounded by seasonal drinkers, we often found it difficult to be heard.
"One can say anything with words."
"Words are not everything."
Suddenly the whole place went deathly quiet, like a still from an old film. All the office party-comers stared glassily at each other in stony silence—wondering what life was really all about, discovering that silence was far from golden, since it was black and white, or even grey. Nobody noticed that the two figures in the chimney inglenook had passed away like silky ghosts. They had never been there in the first place, other than the half-full glasses they left behind.
"Words make you think, screens only blink.
"Head's coming up."
The voice was uncertain as it spoke through the sound of perforated waters. The face was indeed half discernible, from the bridge of the nose upwards, so the voice was generated by a broad beard of darkness. Despite needing a better word to describe him than him, I leaned forward clearer to hear the dithering tongue.
"Body's halfway out, now," it said, poking through red mesh.
So, yes, the near recognisable stubble-roasted face was eventually full revealed, together with the shadow-haired chest, heaving with the effort of the commentary on its own birth throes. It became a man more conscious of the tattered duvet than of his own sweat-riddled body which tested the water of hard reality. The only answer was to raise the voice aloud: the sole recourse, as the first light of a false dawn seeped into the black curtains like blood. A second body moved familiarly beside him and scolded in his ear to go back to sleep—where I impatiently waited in a dream, expecting the rest of the body tentatively to follow the head. It was a pity that part of it was stuck judder-fast upon the raw razor nerve-edge of reality for a split second of eternity, as it leaned menacingly between the shower curtains. And, indeed, the blood is peculiar in the film called PSYCHO. Like blackcurrant juice without even a hint of red. The record on the wind-up gramophone turn-table in Norman Bates' bedroom was the Beethoven Eroica Symphony. One of those old seventy-eight rpm versions. I'm told modern technology has got rid of all the clicks, jumps and back-track noise by digitalising on to compact disc. It's a pity that I've got the same old eyes and the same old ears—yet not the same, really, as when they weren't old. Everything is in black and white in the after-life. I wonder, though. I reckon it depends on the nature of your death, if you can indeed call it your death after you've had it—like a drink ceases to be a drink once you've drunk it. With even half left, it takes more than a windbag to palm it off as anything but a dead glass, fit for dunking in the spin-washer. Neither shaken nor stirred. Clunk-click, belt up for the last icy thermal to Heaven. Words will be everything, there, they say. One day I'll learn to live with someone called "him".
"Perhaps you should have been born a man."
"Me? Why?" I asked, genuinely interested.
"Well, you do dress like one, don't you? And you've never really hit it off with a..."
"A man of my own?" I asked.
"Yes."
Donald was on the other side of the riddled sounding-board, disguised as a priest: someone who knew my hot points.
"I was raped ... once, you know."
"Yes, you told me before," he replied, "but do you know what rape means?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, in that case, I'm glad it was only once."
"Better than twice, certainly ... but immeasurably worse than never."
"I understand." But he had even less grasp of such matters than the girl, but her voice sounded certain.
"Shall I tell you about it?"
"If you want to." He yawned—silently. He sensed that a third person was listening. But no matter, in for a penny, in for unlocking the pent pound, as the local saying went.
"I was younger than I am now." I waited for the courtesy of an answering undergrunt, but received none. I was on my own now. "I dressed like a man, because I feared men so much..." Coughing interrupted and the loosened phlegm was relaxing. "I always dressed as a man,” I continued. “I don't know why. Anyway, a creature called Emoss Crack often met me in the lift at work, every morning. With a greasy smile. He was one of those office wolves who had a medallion nesting in a shadowy chest, his heavy breath whistling between the teeth as he leant over me to show how to add up the columns. He'd double-guessed my sex or, perhaps, he knew from the dusty records they kept in Personnel. Whatever the case, he discovered breasts beneath my sports jacket after he had sent the other girl in the office to get drinks—dispenser number 35 regular coffee, 24 strong, 17 whipped—you can see I remember it all well. The other girl came back, with the steaming plastic cups inserted into the holes in the tray. Smiling all the way back to the invoices."
The silence was painful. Listening was the other side of Hell.
"The details are pin-pricks," I resumed, "details that are never to be forgotten. It was as if the other girl in the office simply knew I had been manhandled by Emoss Crack and condoned it. I wondered if she had once had his wet blubbery lips upon her own. How do you do, Mr Tongue? Quite well, thank you, Miss Tongue. She looked the sort. Not exactly tarty, but with come-on eyes. Emoss Crack made me want to cry. I tried to make my eyes speak to her on my behalf. But she wouldn't look at them."
I heard Donald fidgeting from the other side of the confessional. Then my quaint female fart.
"One day," I continued again, "the other girl was gone. Absent on leave of maternity, they told me. But it didn't make sense. She would have continuity of pensionable service, if she came back to work after the confinement. Why should having babies make you more of a woman than you were before? I had a baby of my own, you know. It was his I suppose. Emoss Crack did it from behind, arching under with his device bent up in the middle like a winkle-pin."
Later, after returning from the church, I stared at the wheeling tea. I would never drink it. Merely relish it in anticipation. I spat into the chamberpot beside my bed, as if I'd coughed up semen. Confession always did that to me. My friends had all died out—except, of course, the one with the pretty flowers in her hair and the personal stereo clamped to the ears, who came to visit. It was me disguised as someone else's daughter. Didn't seem to matter whose. I told her of my home life—when, from the large scullery-kitchen, the echoes of chanting prayer had reverberated through the darkly lit halls, landing to landing, until they reached the shuttered attic bedroom. Father's intoning voice punctuated the household's vesperal responses. The roof grunted. My many wide-skirted aunts grunted, too. History re-wound across Old Europe. The personal stereo which I had as a birthday present was a neat black box with insect-like appendages. The kind uncle who had donated this item had also included a pre-recorded cassette to try out on the revolving spindles. So the manufacturers could break the music at a convenient point, it was necessary to spool back to the tape's end accordingly when commencing a new side. The music was monkish plain chant, echoing as if the head itself was a cathedral. I hated hard-core rock. The stereo effect was so sophisticated, I imagined there was somebody behind me, grunting. It was just one of the monks out of tune. A leper in the woodpile—an expression my shadow-haired uncle had once used when stroking my neck. Apparently, an ancient saying. A bad apple in the barrel. There's always one such in every group. All families had at least one. Sometimes, I thought I was the only decent apple in the whole barrel. Rosy-rubbed. That birthday night, I dreamed of owning a personal video set. There would be eye-phones as well as ear-phones. Walking the streets with a white stick, while watching the latest horror splatter movies...
Afternoon tea was a tradition, like evening prayers when the servants gathered with the whole family to hear Father intone from the big black book with gold clasps. I knew about the history of generations. I read most of it on the fly-leaves of ancient volumes that had been collected over the years. The other children were members of the same blood-line. I wasn't. It mattered little, since these modern days nobody bothered to care. Only my uncle—the one who had seen fit to heed progress with the personal stereo—had the wherewithal of knowledge. The gift was, I believed, my consolation prize for being a mongrel. "The wooden spoon in the race for ethnic cleansing", as a politician once clumsily put it on television, whilst referring to something quite different, beyond the context. My pedigree was beauty. The other members of the family were ugly as sin. The aunts scowled. The cousins wore masks on their faces, as ordinary folk wear shoes on their feet—to avoid further weathering. Tough as old boots. Leather tongues instead of ears. Boy and girl tongues meeting in dark chimney-corners. Eyes sunk below the Plimsoll Line. I was my uncle's favourite because the abnormality of my conceiving had produced intrinsic normality, the swings and roundabouts of cross-breeding: a roulette-wheel coming to eternal rest with several ball-bearings (instead of just one) lodging in the lucky numbers. The plates were brought in. Manicured cucumber sandwiches. Steaming samovars of oriental infusions. Tiers of drooling cakes, each in turn an aunt's favourite. Father would have been pleased to see the tradition continued.
"Tea's on the table." The aunt who said this to me had a wizened face with pointy ears. "What's that sprung over your head?"
"It's a present."
"Well, take it off, dear, while we have tea. You will not be able to hear us talk."
"It's switching off," I said. "The side has come to an end. I need to turn it over."
A squat half-brother tweaked the bra strap that must have showed clearly through the back of my blouse. I went to clout him around the ear, but thought better of it. I would be blamed. Last time I had done it to one or other of the family, the ear had come off and spun across the room into the log fire—spitting and splattering for the length of tea-time. A heady aroma, along with the muffins. Something to remember when I next went to Confession. So, I closed my eyes upon them all, hearing the talk unwind—or the bleeps on the empty tape's progress towards the auto-stop.
Remembering was watching a film slowly running backwards—till the point in time one wished to recall and one stopped it and ran it forward again at normal speed. My uncle was on his knees praying. Tears weltering in the sunset's blood, he gazed up at me, propped up as I was in bed upon mounds of blue and white striped bolsters. I was dying from diphtheria. But nobody dies from diphtheria these days. I fast forward through the flickering images, only to pause now and again: to make sure I'm still alive. Then the snowstorm of pin-pricks. Finally, auto-stop. Nothing. Perhaps I never was. Never even half a woman. Simply a shaggy-chested man too mean to be me, undergrunting the opening bars of a famous Beethoven symphony beyond the perforated shower-curtain.
The two figures in the inglenook resumed their drinks, nodding blindly to the images from the juke video-box, lowered lashes sewn into their cheeks like dead insects.
*
The babies crying did not upset Donald but he was slightly perturbed that some had handcuffs on. They had been left in rusty prams which looked as if they hadn't been pushed anywhere for centuries. The wheels were splayed, the springs choked with corrosion and the harnesses spat pellets from the hanging rattles with every gust of the wind. There must have been at least a hundred prams, turned in all cock-eyed directions, the inhabitants wailing fit for a thousand. Donald knew it was a baby's lot in life to cry, but this was taking things too far.
He turned to me. I had fallen asleep next to him in the bed—before the dream of prams had started. "Let's get out of this one and quick," he mouthed so that I could lip-read, since he knew I was deaf in dreams, if not in real life. In many ways, I looked prettier than when I was awake. He wondered if I misunderstood, since my answer was a smile and a tug on his hand towards one of the prams. I was evidently feeling broody. And the baby I eventually chose possessed a head that was as wrinkled as an old man's. Its wrists were far too thin for it to keep the handcuffs on. But Donald knew fresh-born babies were often ugly and deformed, only later to grow into normal human beings like him.
Suddenly, Donald felt himself within the boiled beetroot skull of the baby—looking up at two strangers who were mooning down at him and cooing silently. The woman (presumably myself) offered him her bare breast to suckle—and he dozed into a dream within a dream, or a dream's dream where a prevailing truth and reality seemed to return...
An old man recalled the boy he used to be, clambering over the corrugated roofs, in search of what was known in the games as "spice trove". Most of the other boys who chased giant butterflies and shy bumblebees with him along the topmost garden walls had all since died. Now an old man, he lived with a tea-drinking, untalkative female creature, in wide skirts. But as much as he prattled on about the residue of his past life, his companion merely nodded and sipped and stared. The stares were as blank as the turned down TV—where images flickered and pursued each other across the screen, from the past to the future, via the never never of the present. Why did he dream in such stilted terms? He used to scale the roofs of the ancient home town, questing for wild honey (a myth generated by boy talk) and also seeking a maiden who had spoken to him in his dreams, saying she lived behind the huge chimneystack—from whichever way you approached it. The other boys would humour him and say that they had actually seen her themselves, with hair growing down her back and untamed legs like shaped cream-butter—the face with a complexion born of flames. She was for Donald to discover, one endless summer's day towards the end of his boyhood. He would have to surprise her, as she played hide and seek around the stack. Creeping along the roof, legs astride the ridge-peak, he held out his Box Brownie like a gift. He developed it at night, but all he could see on the print was a blur like a winged slug with soot smuts for eyes. Now an old man, he smiled as he stared at the TV, his eyes smarting and clouded with expended time. The screen always bore the same blur, inching bigger with the days, but he really loved the endless soap opera in which the mysterious maiden featured. Each sip of his tea had no more volume than a teardrop. His wide-skirted companion would soon have nobody to whom to listen, as the ancient Donald prepared to clamber up on the roof, by first standing precariously in his wheelchair—which was effectively a baby's pram of grown-up proportions...
There were not a hundred prams. Perhaps there were not two hundred. Whatever the count, Donald knew he was one of the babies in them and he began to search each one methodically. I was not so painstaking, sitting, as I did, on a nearby bank of wasteground and knitting booties. Eventually, he found a pram with a baby so small, its whole body was on the pillow. It squeaked like a mouse. He leaned against the pushbar, but the rust was hard and fast along the axle and the pram sounded like an old man choking upon quickly hardening phlegm. Donald looked at his own hands—covered in brown stains, freshly off the encrusted pushbar. He winced, as chemicals stung a small sore.
"Come here!" he waved to me. And I waved back...
His new dream was a tapestry, woven and woven about with other dreams, none of which promised an end of the senseless seamless mock-stilted pattern. He wondered why he was cursed with a giant's body, possessing a mind as powerful as the muscles it controlled. He lived in a hovel, beyond some hills and didn't want to meet anybody. And, despite the accusations, he did not wield sorcery by choice, nor swords by any dint of blood thirst. He was merely a self and nothing could take that away. His first memory was of seeking his mother's body, which had crawled away from its produce rather than die in sight of the one she had just borne. He failed—as he still failed.
There were thick-skinned elves said to live over the hills. He had read, among books found about him, of many creatures, monstrous and delightful alike, including such as himself. But the creatures that angered him most—more even than wide skirts and yet wider hips—were ones with egos far too big for their bodies, nauseating little irks whose skins would sooner burst like over-ripe plums than try to keep their minds within bounds. At last, his own temper cracked. He unscabbarded his broadest sword. He scavenged for sorcerous spells in dusty corners of his home, finding a clutch of them, clucking, rooted in the night soil under his clapped-out truckle bed. He donned the skins of beasts of prey that had come to his clearing in the forest to die of old age and, with a final glance at the place that had been his home for a lifetime, he strode off towards what the books called Sea. The forests changed colours with the days. His heart changed too. And he dropped the sword in an unmarked spot, for fear that he might eventually use it. He kept spells about him in every pocket, since he began to fear for his own safety rather than for that of those he threatened. At long last, he emerged from the forests and knew he would never return to his home, for the journey had taken the rest of his life. The roar of Sea, the tang of fucus, the scream of gull—he knelt, head resting on the sand in pain and, strangely, relief. After many hours, he looked up and, in the purple twilight which lay across the cream-topped waves like a sumptuous quilt, he saw the distant rigging of schooners on spice-trove trails. From his pockets he took the embodied spells he'd toted. Their skins were, by now, thickening, faces growing to a point, hips broadening into an obtuseness beyond the Platonic Form of Latitude, elfin voices becoming squeaky and cruel. Suddenly more fearful, Donald crawled towards the sea where he could tell the fish about the rest of his life...
The wasteland where the countless prams had been abandoned, Donald could see sloped down to a pitiful sea. Scrawny waves plopped in and out—where some of the babies that had escaped were now playing. One near toddler was spanking a sandcastle into shape, whilst another in horrendous diapers was spiking it with flags made from cotton buds. A third, far too old to be called a baby, was rolling about with a life-sized dolly. Donald took my hand and pointed towards these examples of parental creation, as if to say, there but for the grace of God...
In another dream—one that, although he had dreamed it several times before, took on a formal reality that belied its credentials as a dream—he was a collector of trapped metal piece puzzles: not so much to solve them but to admire their gleaming workmanship and intricacy. He enjoyed the delightful rattly chunkiness when shaking a puzzle's box-container and he relished its sensuous twining of cold steel limbs. Some puzzles were easy, merely slipping off each other as soon as look at them. Others were of middling difficulty: a minimum of choice manipulations brought the various bars, flanges, stanchions, roundels, spokes, rings and hinges into optimum interface, whereupon they readily fell apart almost upon a sheen of oil, like spent lovers. However, those few of a devil's perversity remained ever-enlocked in eternal embraces of misalignment, as if they were acrimonious ex-lovers who could not disentangle their various body parts for love or money. There was one puzzle in particular which took pride of place in his collection, one that had defeated all his friends. He could almost watch himself as a different person when, one day, determination lay in the set of his mouth, teeth grinding with the jaw motion of cattle, eyeballs pierced with pinpricks of light as he ruminatively turned over the reluctant trinket with a knitting-needle under the desk lamp. He suddenly saw a way through. Now bringing his fingers themselves into play, he lovingly eased one pinion into an unusually acute relationship with a ragged tab of metal-flashing which he'd suspected was never intended to be there. This manoeuvre served cleanly to sheer off the unwanted growth; a file could never have been contorted into such a crevice. Therefore, it was fortunate that this near-accidental quirk of prestidigitation had slickly taken it off with the run of the grain. But with other possibilities dawning, his mind zoomed through too many labyrinths of rivet tolerance, rogue alloys and median scapement. And with concentration gradually deserting him, he threw the recalcitrant piece across the room—a random act that inadvertently caused four iron curds to be abruptly released from their conundrum of interdependence. They separated with a silver severing sigh of consummation, but at the same time dubbing him a cheat. One curd was a sparkling spider on splayed legs. Another was the key to the unknown convoluted trip-tumblers of a lock. The third was a crucifix with the blurred outline of a girl's body bulging from its spokes. The fourth was a simple circle, a wedding lock, an eternity ring, or whatever. At the time, he could only think in roundabouts. Donald could not plumb the feeling of despair that came over him as he stared at the falsely solved puzzle...
Which of the babies in the prams would grow into Donald? The brat, with the huge dolly, spat a wad of filth at Donald from its back gums. That was surely not Donald. Such a creature couldn't solve puzzles even it were given the answers first. I, by now, had disappeared, wheeling off one of the prams with a groaning squeal. I'd evidently chosen a baby, without his help. Surrogates were not even part of the game, nor was the icy phlegm now trickling down his cheek in tearful humiliation. This was not a dream, but a working life seen in retrospect, sideways rather than from either end of the telescope of birth and death...
There were moments in life as well as dream when all the bother of actually maintaining a vestige of existence in this dubious world seemed almost worthwhile. That day in mid-December seemed like one of those moments. He had been hand-picked by his boss's boss (whom he'd never met) to travel northwards to visit a potential client of the Conglomerate. It was little more than a delivery job, but he did have to say a few vital words when handing over the free sample: "I hope you like the design of this, Mr X, but it is modelled on the version once said to be used by the Grand Old Duke of Y and his men—they're bound to go down like hot cakes." He had not been given the full names for the sake of privacy. He had the perfect journey northwards. He woke refreshed, before the heavy-duty alarm clock had a chance to fulfil its customary ambition of glorified fire drill. The shaving cream was latherier than ever before upon the beaver-hair brush, and his overnight stubble slid off nicely as if it were not joined to his face at all. For December, the weather was ideal for driving, clear but mild, the roads running smoothly under the bright-eyed cars. Breakfast at a motorway service station was piping hot: even the bacon rind and over-stiffened fried bread went down a real treat. He arrived at his destination not long after the sun had perked up. Of course, as was his wont, he was years early for the meeting and decided to have a walk through the pocket town. He had gone straight there without getting lost even once. There was more to him than met the eye. He always said so. The one-eyed sun stared at him out of the corner of the sky, from just behind the block tower of a semi-sightly church. The shafts of the early morning light played upon the jagged chimney pots which seemed to abound here on the terraced houses. As he reached the river, he heard the sound of a weir: punctuated by the church bell suddenly deciding it was high time to mark the hour. It was a wide weir, too, with side branches more rapid in their roar than the middle. He had bought a newspaper at the service station. Not too much of interest to read in it, except the stale account of yesterday's train disaster. Safer to go by motorway, he had mused earlier. Well, this paper came in handy to lay upon the damp bench which was positioned nicely for a view of the spectacular weir. A lady passed, pushing a pram, with some difficulty across the crude ground. She did not say good morning. Nor did her baby, for that matter: he laughed at his private joke. He shrugged: the place was perhaps unfriendlier than he had surmised. Coming from the south, he imagined those in the north to have small talk on a hair trigger. Well, not that lady and her baby, anyway. It became chillier as the sun ducked behind some clouds and he automatically started counting interminably—as if the sun were hiding and he was seeking. A light aeroplane flew overhead. He wondered if the pilot said good morning as it passed. He should never know. He resented the pilot possibly finding the sun before he did. Soon, it would be time to make his visit. The artefact was still in the boot of his car. He'd left the car in a free car park, since it deserved a rest after the two hundred mile journey. The tyres could not rest, of course, being what they were: the chassis was even heavier when it was not moving along, in any event. He wondered if he should have brought the free sample with him to the weir, in the event of the boot being rifled. His life would not be worth living if he botched this delivery. What was that message he was supposed to say to the client? He should have written it down. His mind had slipped out of gear for a moment. He was terribly confused. For a moment, he believed that the weir was flowing back across its hump, the way the water had come. Looking at the ribbed water, it was easy to imagine that. It was only common sense that told him that could not be possible. He stayed where he was as he watched an impostor walk backwards from the bench toward the road, folding the damp-stained newspaper as carefully as if it were the linen tablecloth his grandmother used to fetch from her bottom drawer on special occasions. The car would reverse back down the endless motorways, only to be blue-pulsed by the police on to the hard shoulder. He wished he'd written down the message. Only half an hour before, he had remembered it perfectly. It looked as if Donald’s crucial delivery was to become a terrible abortion...
As the sun dipped into the sea, spreading itself like gory paint along the horizon, the prams became large beetles on their backs, unable to right themselves, their feeble feelers flickering wildly. In the distance, a light aircraft looped the loop, misfired and nearly hit the tops of some nearby trees. Without any reason, he now knew this wasteland by the sea was the crèche used by those single parents who worked for the Devil during the current world recession. All human sorrows were nurtured down there like black jewels, even to the extent of cabling subliminal TV programmes to all our waking homes. The lone-parent workers would soon be returning from Hell to collect their infants—after having had a hard day down the pit, wringing, with huge mangles, the blood-gutted nappies fresh from demons' backsides, stirring the great tureens of shining white pus, stoking the fires into enormous weirs of irreversible torture. And as they lugubriously waded from the spent seas to retrieve their young from the rust-corroded prams, Donald scuttled back into a long chimney of sleep—yet he eventually spotted a tiny prick of light at the other end of dream's telescope, through which it would be possible to climb, but only if he could crack the devilish lock-puzzles of the tiny hand-cuffs he sported on his wrists.
“It is easier to believe the truth of real dreams, than the truth of a dreamed-of waking reality ... but when old age tips the push-chair down the slope of the final dream or, as I would prefer formally to term it, towards the edge of a dreamed-of death, madness itself may become intertwined.” Rachel Mildeyes—from “THE ART OF ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS” *
Many of the vehicles had been abandoned with no regard for the white lines that marked out the allotted spaces in the carpark. The snow that had covered the area had subsequently melted, thus giving an excuse for careless parking.
Dressed in a scanty frock, I approached the barrier, whereupon the ticket-dispenser machine thought I was a thing on wheels and handed me a reminder of the date and time printed on a hard-to-lose card. I forthwith flicked it away into the darkness, as if participating in one those ancient school-playground cigarette-card games—the blind-man's bluff version.
I remembered that I sought a car, one with its headlights on and a registration-plate matching the letters and numbers tattooed on my left breast—a combination I'd meticulously memorised the night before. If I ever turned into a nameless corpse, my compatriots in the Conglomerate would be in no doubt that it was me. The whereabouts of such a corpse would indicate the successful outcome of my mission—or not.
Yet none of the cars were alight. They simply squatted there like extinct baby-pods of prehistoric monster berserkers. I wandered in and out, unworried as to the floweriness of my own thoughts' language. I had been brainwashed only to take the illogical for granted. Amid the haywire aisles of scattered metal, I peered through the windows to ascertain the nature of any occupants and, if there were any, whether they were still alive and communicado. Not that I really wanted anything but an empty car. But the confusion derived from my training to seek that for which I did not seek, in the hope that such obliquity would lead me by accident to the thing I actually sought without knowing I sought it.
The sky had just started to activate sprinkler-systems of disabled snow, which seeped as sleet into my skimpy clothes, making me shiver...
The headlights came on suddenly. Not merely one or, even, two. All the cars broke their vows of silence and erupted into a life which, if the very beginning of the world had been witnessed, this would appear to be its obverse at the very end of time. An abrupt awakening as a prelude to death. I was caught in the cross-glares, eyes blinking, heart thumping, mind full with memories of those shafts of twirling lateral light stirring the war-stricken night of my youth.
Having used confusion as a subterfuge for clarity, I could hardly recall how I had clambered into one of the cars and driven it from the car park. Even without the all-important card, the barrier had lifted of its own accord, knowing that, if it had not, it would have been smashed to smithereens. Even stones bled in certain phases of the cold blue moon.
I steered quickly through the slanting icicles of rain, my high-heeled feet playing the engine like a bass organ. I knew the bomb in the boot may also have had a life of its own, its short fuse matched to my own feminine one.
The streets through which I drove were completely unfamiliar but, at the same time, I knew exactly when to take certain turnings. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I thought I could discern the dark shape of someone sitting in the backseat. Yet, darkness, when it saw fit, could take whatever fumbling form it wanted.
Ah, there was a bridge: a mock-gothic affair which the street lighting moulded from almost nothing, so as to allow the river (or was it a railway track?) to be traversed as the crow would drive. Was I mad? I felt an embodiment of someone else's dream. I felt calm, as I was certain that I had been warned about the encroachment of such madness. Madness was what made the job so dangerous. I would need to compare notes.
Driving to a halt at the brink of the bridge, I turned to see who may have been backseat-driving. But nobody there, only a pile of what appeared to be unwanted rubble from a building site.
I left the car and walked round to the rear where I could see tyre-tracks in the snow leading up to the back-wheels. The sleet had in fact resumed its snow disguise after settling. The marks were more akin to skids, as if I'd screeched to a halt and, on returning to the front, I saw why: the inky cut was just out of sight beyond the gaze of the headlights. The bridge was a cartilaginously cantilevered mass of pulsing flesh, ribbed further with engorged veins, parts fluted with perfectly linear tumours, other areas haphazardly sown with knobbly cancers beyond even the manufacture of crazy modern sculptors in clay or any other medium, and the pinions and stanchions upholstered with scarlet haunches of clumsily sawn meat—all being wrapped by snow and, conversely, dyeing it.
Tentatively, I first-footed upon the near edge of slimy gristle. It moved under me, as if hurt by my stilettos. I shuffled forward, testing all the time, for the snow made nonsense of the structure's hidden strengths—like walking on a hammock, but with underlays of breathing, if not burping, animal-fat.
Halfway across, I looked back at the car, which immediately doused its lights as it trundled engineless in my wake. I was thus left invisible to anybody keeping watch. They could only guess whether I had reached the other side, before the boot blew...
Morning brought communal waking, with news of yet another car-bomb outrage. "Carnage leads nowhere," said the Prime Minister on the wireless. Nobody, however, appreciated the kindness of the terrorists in arranging for the mayhem to pre-date the bomb-blast. It lent a certain inevitability, if not an excuse.
Beneath the snow, there was a conical piece of rip-edged flesh with a coded message (D679 BBY) branded upon it. It was never discovered, so nobody would have to face such mystery; nobody would need to explain how a dream could leave bits of itself in the real world. Whatever the case, no party admitted responsibility.
*
The parlour was darker than necessary, because the curtains were shut even at the height of noon. It was warm, too. The gas fire hissed and roared, while Donald waited in the armchair. He expected the arrival of someone. He had no illusions about the nature of this someone. It would present a surprise whoever it turned out to be. The fact that he was not alone in this building of all buildings often surprised him—surprisingly. Bending forward to turn down the gas a touch, his armchair skidded back towards the already scuffed skirting-board—an incident which caused him to be taken unawares by the oiled silence of the wheelchair as it came through the parlour door. Seated in it, with a head moving only very slightly from side to side upon a long neck, was what could only be described as a bedraggled ostrich in an old woman's clothes. Its webbed feet appeared particularly outlandish poking out from a wide skirt, the mooning eyes oblivious of the sight it created. There was now no surprise when a second wheelchair containing a similar creature in wide skirts followed close on the heels of the first one. Although both of them were steered by others from behind, most of the motive force came from the claws of the passengers' bony arms upon the wheel-treads. Those steering the wheelchairs were shadowy figures, such shadowiness enhanced by the darkness from the hallway outside the parlour mingling with the gloom of the parlour itself—but as the entourage approached the vicinity of the gas fire, the steerers could be seen for what they were: nurses who were even darker than the shadows they threw. Donald had quickly gathered himself together following the incident with the armchair and motioned the nurses to make themselves comfy upon the grey sofa, leaving the wheelchairs and their passengers stationary, facing the fire. This the nurses did, since they seemed more scared of him than he was of them. The wheelchairs had their backs to us amid the increasing stench of burning poultry. Gradually loudening haw-haws from that direction brought tears to the nurses' eyes (mine in particular). We nurses rarely spoke, but, whilst pointing at the wheelchairs, I did say: "We told them this was a beauty parlour." Donald nodded. Being an attendant inside a communal gas-oven has no doubt made him a touch over-caring and bake-brained. He fingered the scorched swastika on his sleeve and cried, too.
*
He was excited with himself, I could tell. As we touched wings, I told him to calm down, but he shook free before I had the chance of capturing his attention with my bright eyes.
The rain was slanting across the allotment on a wind that had suddenly blown up from nothing. The drops splashed on us like eggs. Only just a few moments before, the stars had been scattered across the night sky, together with a cheese wedge that, if I had not known better, was mocking its own identity by dashing in and out of the dark unplayful clouds.
I drove on, my wind-glasses beginning to be more of an hindrance than a help. I then touched his undertail which furred up even as I felt the shudder of his chassis.
He squealed like crude iron in labour. He wrenched his front round so that my stare was frozen in his, but the dread I saw down there was greater even than that I felt myself: two monsters scaring the shitpump out of each other.
The rain eased in the growing hours; the stars began to shepherd the mocking moon into its rightful place at the top of the sky, but they were hindered by the stationary clouds that were reluctant to leave the stage; they thought they were the real stars, if more diffuse, or apparently so.
I had fallen into a purring doze with my jagged jawbone embedded in his tangled sump of a belly, automatically sucking out the oily blood as if I were a new-born baby at its mother's dug. He the werewolf, me the vampire, no doubt: I had dreaded him awaking before he was too weak to attack back with his own splayed silver fangs, but the cross-over point between defeat and victory was still uncertain, and would the bloating of my own bodywork slow me down?
Our hearts beat together, like twins in one cot, as the sun arrived and shook itself in a spray of orange mist, an animal fresh from a night swim. It would seem a lifetime before what I called the moon would dare return, like a shy child on its first day at school.
I stretched and yawned as the healing process went into mock reverse at the same time as extricating myself from him whom I'd partnered through the night. The other parked cars glinted like dewbacks, as I towed yet another to its final resting place.
My human owner, Emoss Crack by name, Weirdmonger by nature, would soon arrive for me, and I relished the thought of human feet moving up and down within me. I wondered if Emoss Crack realised how the pain was almost too exquisite when he drove hard with sharp boot-heels upon my tender parts. Still, he'd never know that cars shunt, as well as trains, particularly at the dead of night.
*
When I took her Summer break, I decided to visit the East coast rather than the more familiar, warmer ones South and West of London. I couldn't face the continent, this year, in any event.
I was pleased to have escaped the built-up Smoke. Even if my part of London was Hampstead Heath, where I could pretend I was walking deep in the countryside, an abrupt cresting of a hill often brought into view the silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral floating like a square rigger amid opaque chimneystacks. As with people, places were deceptive, too.
I sat in the train, heading for a region I'd never visited. The Essex and Suffolk countryside sped past the window in odd patches of yellow, enabling me to see further than I'd ever seen before in one go. The landscape was disarmingly interminable, with a few poisoned trees to break up the flat minimalism and I wondered if God had ever been able to throw horizons that far again.
I shook my head. One of my characteristics was the way my mind played fast and loose with its thoughts. Day-dreaming for me was almost an out-of-the-body experience rather than one of those rather bitty affairs in which most other people dabbled their mental toes. Which reminded me: even though the weather had not yet caught up with its rightful season, I was rather glad I'd packed my favourite swimming gear. If I hadn't, Sod's Law would have made it too hot to breathe in Brackensea, with nothing of my size in the local shops, no doubt. Not that I was anything more than an average build. My bosom was large, however, compared to the frame on which it hung.
I laughed—this time with full acceptance of where the thoughts were taking me ... towards a plainness that mirrors in Hampstead, at least, couldn't lie about. Perhaps I'd have a holiday romance, like those stories I read last thing at night on my own in the dark flat. If I stopped laughing, nobody noticed, since nobody had noticed I'd started.
But there were two others who shared the carriage with me. A husband and wife, if their behaviour was anything by which to judge: a non-descript couple who made desultory conversation with each other. They had boarded soon after the train had abandoned known territory as far as I was concerned—beyond Colchester, even Ipswich. Their words were barely understandable beneath the weight of some unruly dialect which must have been uncommon, I guessed, even in these parts, since I'd not heard it before upon any form of electronic media in Hampstead. That fact, if none other, was strange. I'd evidently considered the world to be more cosmopolitan than it actually was. All to the good, really. It gave visiting places that added edge of excitement, even if one were still in the same country. Rome and Florence were over-rated, in any event.
Could it be that the man in the carriage had said something to me? A detail about a tunnel approaching and, once through it, I'd be able to see the sea for the first time. I had seen sea before, I intended to say—but, almost as a matter of course, the tunnel intervened and, with the driver forgetting to switch over to the on-board lights, all I could make out was the red tip of the woman's cigarette. I felt an unaccountable sadness and, yes, fear, because the train's whistle possessed a wild scream as opposed to the more comical hootings of friendlier transport. And the tunnel made it sound worse than it actually was.
The blinding light that eventually halted the pain in my ears revealed a sloping farmer's field where statuesque figures, rather too wide to be scarecrows, haphazardly dotted the crops. They were mummified in red bandages—to keep the straw stuffing inside, no doubt, I thought.
"Scarecrows," said the man, confirming my best fears.
I'd even contemplated train crash survivors. But, indeed, I'd not had sufficient time to see what I thought I'd seen and, soon, the glinting coastline caused a resumption of my natural optimism. I was going to have a damn good time and, if I were lucky, be a heroine in a romance story.
It was only a short stroll from the station to the hotel in Brackensea, the one I'd already booked. A church-tower appeared a little crooked but I put that down to the lie of the land. It was hillier here than the surrounding countryside, even if it wasn't a patch on the contours of Hampstead Heath. Coastal erosion had created peculiar configurations, aligning cliffs with pebbly beaches and, in rarer cases, vice versa. I'd never understood the full implications of conservation and, what was more, Geography had never been my strong point at school.
I knew that the man and woman were walking in my wake—not following me, as such, but certainly proceeding in the same general direction with the grain of the ground. There must have been a short shower recently, since the sloping slates glistened. The buildings that enclosed the Market Square, where the hotel itself was situated, possessed leaning roofs that were half wet, half dry, in a piecemeal patchwork. My first typical thought was that monsters had been basking up there in the rain and had now gone—perhaps on sensing my own impending arrival. I was not normally romantic, yet here I was peopling roofs with monsters! I shook my head in self-disgust.
Brackensea was hardly quaint, holding the atmosphere of an industrial conurbation further north in England, whilst maintaining a definite charm of the typically less commercial seaside resort. No silly hats here nor saucy postcards. Just gentle oldsters whiling away a second honeymoon. Yet, the buildings were offputting in a Fifties Utility fashion. I imagined I'd soon catch the sound of a needle hitting the groove of an old juke-box record, about to play Elvis Presley's 'His Latest Flame'.
Discarding my own waywardness, I shivered. I felt drizzle returning to fill the salty air. However, drawing nearer to a steep side-road leading down, between ramshackle guest houses, to the beach, I was amazed to witness many lobster-roasted sun-bathers in briefly cut costumes lying amid some black fishing-shacks. These tall coffin-like industrial beach-huts, as it were, had nets strewn over them, making them seem like huge land-locked kites. Day-dreaming, again! I shrugged. I needed to sign into my accommodation. A quick wash and brush-up and, then, I could really explore the joint.
For no reason whatsoever, I was relieved to discover that the married couple from the train were nowhere to be seen. The woman in wide skirts had reminded me of myself a little further on in time. The church tower was now closer and it no longer leaned. The diamond-shaped clockface a third of the way down showed that the time was later than that on my own wristwatch. Almost high time for tea. The street lamps were most peculiar, tall thin poles of plaited green metal topped by squashed globes and, except for a few parked cars, no other sign of life in the Square itself.
I glanced back along the route upon which I had entered the town. The path led up into a clump of trees where the hill slope now hid the station. The architecture of the church showed that the place was not on its first legs. Its flush of youth was well behind it, as also evidenced by the seedy parade of shops, each with its independent roof. Some of the lamp standards, I could now see, had mere stumps without lights: following me, perhaps, to the door of the two star hotel on the other side of the Market Square! I was still on a dirt surface, which several other boots had scuffed up not long before, because, no doubt, the increasing drizzle had drenched some divots but not others.
In the foyer of the hotel, the reception desk was tenantless. I rang the bell vigorously. Two women approached from the lounge area, with the undergrunts of a TV soap behind them. To my drizzle-blurred eyes, they were in identical wide-skirted uniforms, a cross between a chambermaid's and that of a Prisoner-Of-War Camp commandant. One was decidedly winsome with a frivolous humour in the way she had to keep brushing her blonde fringe from in front of her large eyes. The other was older, or less able to convince anyone of her youth. Both were markedly more bodies than minds. Their hem-lines were a trifle too short for comfort, bearing in mind the width.
"Yes?" said the spokesman, the older.
"I've not been here before but I have booked a room for the night."
"Never been good enough before, eh?"
"Not at all ... I've just not visited the area, before."
"Few do ... if they do."
"Shall I sign the Register?"
The younger one took a large ledger from under the reception counter and opened it at the first page. I appeared to be the very first visitor which, surely, should not have been the case.
"Don't you usually get guests to sign it?" I queried.
The younger spoke for the first time, her voice as smooth as wild honey: "You are the first to ask..."
If there was a mystery, I was usually the first to desire league with it, to be an ingredient as it were of its frustrating inscrutability. I even supposed that I might be the mystery whilst Brackensea (with its strange hotel and leaning church) was ordinary and straightforward. I entered the ledger with a signature that I had never used before, ending it with a flourish of lines and curls. I beamed with pride, as I rescrewed the top on my fountain pen.
The stairs were brightly lit by hurricane lamps, but the landing was left dark, so I could not see how far the corridor stretched nor the approximate number of rooms. My own room, to which I was shown by the older woman with a cinema torch, was adequate. The bed seemed lumpy but sleepable; the bathroom brown at the edges but doused with a cocktail of disinfectants; the ceiling stained with maps of archipelago worlds that I almost believed had a feasible place in real geography; and a trap door no doubt leading to that vast slated roof I had previously surveyed from below in the Market Square: a basking-frame for monsters!
From my window, I could see the sun was at last just managing to peel back the dirty clouds, but too late for the weather's sake, since the huge red rim was dipping behind a clifftop—almost too early for night. The square was still deserted of people, but the almost prehensile parked cars had gone.
I tried the twanging bed and examined my feet inch by inch: a routine that travelling always caused me to do. I plumped them eventually into the wash basin which I'd filled with tepid water. I could see from where I was now positioned that the odd standard lamps in the square were gradually seeping a yellowy glow, as the sun finally gave up its ghost to the red moon.
It was quiet. Too quiet. The two wide-skirted women were evidently listening to me. Trying to fathom my mystery. So I daringly spoke to myself to make it worth their while listening:-
"I expect those two women run this joint together, in between the TV programmes ... they can't have much to do ... they seem nice creatures enough ... so affectionate, I imagine, with one another when the customers have been put to bed..."
I knew nothing about them. I simply surmised. I smiled, as I heard shuffling from above me in the bedroom ceiling.
"When I get home to London, I will tell people of the two women ... that it's nice to be looked after by such a couple, instead of by one of those plug ugly man-woman creatures which usually snoop around such hotels in the guise of managers. Two women's bodies are so nice as they lodge upon one another, with nothing poking in between them in the manner of a broken bed-spring..."
It was tantamount to reciting a speech that someone else had learned by heart on my behalf. The drizzle had irritated me, but now I was safe and basking in the autonomous day-dreams which I conjured for myself and for my two auditors. Then the trap door in the ceiling below the hotel's giant roof began to gape open inwards ... but which direction was inward, which outward?
*
I had hiked from Brackensea, which meant all of the morning since breakfast had been spent clambering along woodland tracks which tirelessly followed the contours of the countryside away from the sea. I crossed the last brow and looked down at the village of Driffidge, glistening in the aftermath of one of those sudden summer showers that had dogged my holiday so far. Repositioning the shoulderstrap of my lunchbox, kindly prepared by the two women at the Brackensea hotel, I pumped my legs against the downward slope.
Nobody about. I made a private joke about siestas in this little patch of Old England, even though the watery sun was more an ingredient of an oil painting than a heat source. I looked down at my skirt—ripped wide at the seams. My face was smudged, but I was unaware of this. I sat upon the dedicated bench in the graveyard and, just as the church clock reached 12.44 pm, I caught the sound of a train: this must be part of its route towards its destination in Brackensea.
My jaws met through bread and fish paste. I was quite oblivious of the flavour, since I gazed at the church-tower which, as indicated by the local history books, did lean more than just a little—unlike the one in Brackensea which only sometimes looked as if it did. Brushing down my blouse, I noticed the sweat had soaked the armpits; its waft of unwelcome memories of human beings deriving from animals followed me up the church path. Sometimes, I thought men were worse than animals. An animal's need for sex was at least predictable—urged upon it by its own season of heat. A man's season was something else.
The heavy door croaked on its hinges, breaking a silence that had ensued without me noticing the lack of sounds. Only the stained glass windows were visible like luminous oil paintings; yet they shed no glint nor shimmer upon pew and icon. The church's interior had its own impermeable darkness.
I allowed the large door to close behind me, its short sharp sound of falling latch being in mock of Judgement Day. There was no thunderous echo. Simply an uncanny click. I was confident, however, that I could merely turn on my heels and open it again. But what was stranger—I felt as if God had been locked outside in the open. There was no sign of Him otherwise. Just the sense of His absence. I wondered if I should return to pottering around the gravestones in the churchyard, seeking a sign of a forgotten memorial.
The windows were so bright, why couldn't I make out the altar without the assistance of a light-switch? I caught the sound of something flapping in the area of the rafters. I was aware of the church's architectural features without having seen them in the flesh, since I always took holidays very seriously and carried out painstaking research before determining a week's itinerary. The flapping must be a trapped bird of some kind. Or perhaps a bat. Even now, I was not concerned at the situation, despite the confusion. The noise was growing louder as the motive force swooped through the darkness—casting no shadow as it began to hover downwards.
Suddenly, with a lightning shaft of sun, the church door opened. A vision of an ex of mine, a man I remembered as Donald, stood framed, as if pinioned in gold by a pre-Raphaelite painter—each part of him woven in primary colours, stitched with darkest purple. Arms outstretched like wings, he was simultaneously a poacher's gutting and a handsome shepherd honoured with sainthood...
Kneeling on one of the hassocks and praying that he'd go away, I failed to realise that true horror was an absence—not a presence.
*
Forgetting I'd left the hotel's lunch-container in one of the box-pews, I sought a name engraved upon the stonework of a hidden grave. The sun lit the stone tongues. I seemed oblivious of some fish-headed gargoyles that ungrappled from the much taller architectural stonework above—healing out into animality within winding-sheet kites of textured blood. Or if I did see them, I didn't believe my eyes. Scare-crows flocked around the tower like black seagulls.
It seemed like several hours later but, on looking casually at my watch, I saw it had been barely five minutes. The afternoon light was already fading behind its veil of drizzle. I rediscovered the path back, but I was convinced it moved under my tired feet, rather than vice versa. Driffidge was still empty, but an almost imperceptible flick of curtains showed that I was being watched out of the place, as I must have been watched in.
Once over the brow of the hill, I began my trek back to Brackensea, yet reluctantly returning a gaze upon the village: now doll's houses and toy models. The church-tower was slowly, very very slowly, lowering itself to the ground, although I knew that could not be true. The hands on the clock, I vaguely discerned, were also moving so very slowly, but far too fast if I could actually see them move. I trudged on into the wood, rather worried about the attitude of the two women in the hotel when they got to learn that I had abandoned the lunchbox that they had provided.
But I need not have worried.
*
A packet of pain. That seemed to be the most understated description possible for what was delivered to Donald that otherwise sunny day last June.
"Hello, Mr Emoss Crack."
He stared at my spriggy face, guessed I must be a holiday stand-in for postman Dan and he accepted the sticky-taped wad that I proffered with a sweet surreptitious smile. He unaccountably resented it, because Dan was the regular feeder of his letter-box with all manner of orange envelopes containing rejections or contracts, jiffy-bagged packages with returned manuscripts or contributor's copies of magazines, adverts, fan mail , bills and, more infrequently, billets-doux from potential sweethearts.
"Thank you," Donald said, wondering how I knew his surname—until he looked at the label on the missive's bubbly wrapping. Emoss Crack wasn't his pseudonym. Yet nobody in the publishing world could possibly have known he was called Mr Emoss Crack, especially as he hadn't called himself that for many years: a closely guarded secret, between self and a certain certificate he kept in a casket along with other private papers—simply waiting for the bio-riflers at some indeterminate point in the future. Although death was the most certain thing about life, it also remained the most uncertain.
Donald tried to live down, not his surname so much, but more the murky reputation that lay behind it. Some had even claimed he was more real than Count Dracula—and that was really saying something, considering the recent hullabaloo of the vampire bandwagon when a particularly rich seam had been discovered in the human psyche, a rich seam relating to the so-called undead branch of Earth-Stowaways (as such creatures as werewolves, zombies, flesh-corrupted ghosts and spirit-diluted ghouls were often generally categorised) and also considering—perhaps with even more significance—the sheer force of a malevolent destiny that now seemed to prevail worldwide whatever the best efforts of so-called human beings.
If the truth were known, Donald was on the side of the angels. He simply started wearing false fangs as a disguise, so that the harbingers of intrinsic badness would not recognise him as an enemy and would even count him as one of their ilk. It was a bluff worthy of the Devil himself, a clandestine means to a subterfugal end, even if Donald began to believe his own disguise—which was, of course, an occupational hazard, seeing that humanity was currently stricken with an endemic case of premature senility, Donald included. In fact, his mind wandered so much, he failed to remember whether Good or Evil was his paymaster—not that either Good or Evil controlled any financial—or even moral—wherewithal, during the global recession of mind and money which permeated all civilised societies at that time.
Blank off.
Half blast ten.
Donald thought his wife to be sexier than his mistress.
It was a bit degrading, I can tell you, as the stand-in mailperson, which was me, became this very mistress..
He listened to the booming in the chimney breast. He dabbed at the canvas, hoping against hope that a picture might eventually emerge. The deep-coloured floral curtains barely twitched in a draught from the shut sash-window, its lacy net underwear stuck to the glass like gauze bandage.
I entered the parlour on cloud eight and a half. I twirled my night clothes, revealing parts of my body which, in public, I wouldn't be seen dead in. Light music playfully bumbled upon the fine tuning, visibly rippling the sensitive mesh of the speaker. Donald resented such background mush. The wind, in contrast, had no excuse, other than its natural leanings.
He hated artefacts. He suspected me of being part animal, part machine, freshly manicured hard-ends and softer bits simply yearning to be pampered by the likes of him. Recalling the abrasive love-making earlier in the day, he ached for the company of his wide-skirted wife. At least she was woman all through, even if it meant suffering the sharp edge of her tongue.
I made as if to turn up the volume on the high-thigh.
"Leave it low," he said.
"I like this group," I simpered oilily.
"Can two constitute a group? Or even one and a quarter?" he found himself wordlessly thinking. Too easy to misunderstand women. Manifestly, they were created by a tongue-in-cheek God for double-entendres. He wondered whether God Himself had any metal parts about Him.
Capital letters.
The wind abruptly spoke capital letters, roaring down the chimney-shaft like an old-fashioned train. The curtains flew into the room like an angel's wings, dislodging the plastered net dressings and revealing a reddish moonrib. The latter caused the condensation on the inner pane to seem bloody. Donald felt his head—something was coming apart in there, too.
I nuzzled next to Donald on the sofa, iron grey eyes rolling in innocence. My breasts grew larger with the increased rate and depth of breathing. The self-adjusting channel on the speaker grew fainter. The matchless beauty of silence: a stop-gap in a static storm. I heard God rhythmic breathing in tune to Donald’s biological clock.
The key in the lock.
This moment's dread had lived with him since the beginning of the affair. His wife. Her unexpected return. How could he find words to explain? I was more than just a woman. But that was too trite a thing to think.
He'd never really anticipated friendship between her and me. A wife and mistress conspiracy—against him.
The first light of dawn signalled the storm's abating. Donald's desultory attempts to return to the comfort of his oils. The canvas looked more like the window than the window: with certain drapes as a hamfisted mediæval framing. The sun's new gold shafting through the cluttered lace blurred the pantile rooftops beyond. The focus-point was merely memory. He hated derivation—so he painted into the picture several impish creatures clambering between the chimneypots. Fantasy was halfway to Heaven...
From the bedroom, he heard us two women mumbling. He thought he heard me claiming I had a device which most women lacked—all I had to do was blow hard with my nether maw.
"Ooh!" whispered his wife wordlessly.
Donald had been appointed chaperone (a bit of a non-job, in the circumstances), but he failed even in this role. Then, the noises in the chimney woke him to reality.
Time to switch on. He reached into his trouser pocket and turned a speaker knob, his tongue initially gagging on the muslin hymen.
"Breakfast, girls!"
White screen.
Pub past then.
"The way wicked works..." the strange woman whispered wordlessly.
Donald scrutinised her across the pub lounge and he caught the silent meaning as if she had spoken aloud to the whole company. Smiling seemed to be the only thing to do. Realising this, she smiled back. Not only was she strange, but a stranger, too—yet with two identifiable identities in common.
Donald had not many memories on which to base his past (other than his name), but he knew for certain that he was someone whom he could easily befriend if he'd met himself for the first time in such surroundings. With this confidence, he took his drink over to her table.
"Come here often?" The triteness of his opening gambit caused shame to redden upwards.
"You should know. You should know."
Why should Donald know ... twice?
He felt the roof of his mouth with the tongue and it tasted peculiarly metallic. He put this down to the quality of the beer. Her voice was less whispery close-up.
"May I get you another drink?" Donald pointed with his head at the half-drunk contents of her cocktail glass.
"No, thank you. Too much of it makes my head whizz."
Now on automatic pilot, he sat down beside her, ignoring the stares of the regulars. One regular had just appeared from the Gents and sat on a high barstool, raising a drink to Donald and the woman.
She seemed as if she were ready to depart, but Donald's interruption had evidently postponed such a decision—at least for a while.
There was nothing sexual in his advances. He was merely interested in her as a person. Why on such a lunchtime was she drinking alone? Why had she whispered wordlessly about wickedness? He also yearned for company, which would serve as recognition of his existence in the otherwise unfriendliness of the world. He needed to claim a space, however undeserved. The woman's attractiveness was a side-issue. The way her deep-coloured floral blouse was filled with large unbandaged breasts was, if anything, a distraction.
She stared at Donald's long fingers, as their pressure around the pint-pot turned them to white gold. He, too, was intrigued by the aspect of his own finger-joints, since they wore chunky rings which he had never seen before. The knuckles, too, were nuggets of something other than bone.
Some regulars were now braying familiarities at the inscrutable bar-tender. Donald heard the slam of car doors outside—either new pint punters or others leaving. He feared the woman might have been awaiting an assignation. Would his blushes become a plug-ugly crimson mask, when her beau arrived? She eased the tension by saying: "I was watching you, watching me."
"Sorry."
"Please don't say sorry."
It was too late to obey, so Donald made as if to move away.
"Don't go—they say people have much love under their armour."
He stared, forgetting to smile. She had found the chink. His kneecaps tightened hard. A bone for the plates.
"It's like a crane, isn't it?" she said.
"A crane?"
"Yes, when you people are aroused, it lifts up like your old childhood Meccano model, hook hanging."
He settled his eyes on his lap. He felt sick to the stomach, the bar food which he'd sent there churning between iron rollers.
The blue pulses outside became obvious. Uniformed men surged into the lounge and grabbed the regular on the high stool.
"Come quietly—you're wanted back at the Works," Donald heard grunted.
It was presumably the end of the regular's lunchbreak.
Two of the bluebottles made wicked glances in Donald's direction...
As he was led away, Donald's head could swivel back to take a last look at the woman he'd known as both someone and someone else. Me in yet another disguise.
A Road to Nowhere. Talking Heads. Iron cross-eyed.
Real tears weltered in both my red rimmed eyes.
He cried wirelessly, teardroplessly.
Quarter cast two. Blank on.
Black screen.
One day, towards the latter end of his exploits, when his mind was fixed on the single-minded goal of actually thinking (whatever the consequent thoughts), there dawned on him a rare moment of uncharacteristic clarity. Or he thought it did. He was Count Dracula in person, no more no less. Not Dracula's double, or mimic, or even understudy. Nor was he the creature that Dracula himself often mimicked. There could be no doubt when Donald Emoss Crack found himself with his spine hinged backwards and rearing above a beautiful girl who was about half his age (half his own age as opposed to half Count Dracula's relative immortality, needless to say), his fangs already drooling a dress rehearsal of his own gum-blood, eyes so piercingly red he had charred his own retina, his consequent blindness lending a realistic tone to the flailing panic of his movements, head wagging from side to side, hams jerking, hands prising the soft thighs apart, his one-eyed spitting serpent larger than life...
The fair maiden bit Donald off, with one fell gouge of her youth-embedded teeth, and said, between gristle-picking, something she later would have regretted if she hadn't forgotten it: "Rapists go to Hell!"
Yet why was the mailwoman loitering on his doorstep following the delivery of that snap-pod packet, too big for the door-slit? She seemed to await a reply for taking back to whomsoever had instigated the parcel's path through the mail maze. Her peaked cap suited her complexion, however—as did the bristly uniform, navy blue pleated skirt above even bluer stockings and shiny high-heels. Must have been a sore job tramping the post round in those patent leather teeters. The hair was as colourless as human hair possibly could be, and in endearing clumps. The mouth kissable but, in the context that day, decidedly unwelcoming, despite the half-smile.
He started to shut my door. A thank-you was the most she was getting from him. He hardly passed the time of day with postman Dan, at the best of times. So, she'd had her ration of pleasantries already, especially for a new face in the neighbourhood. He was eager to open the packet, in any event: to see who had the nous and, yes, effrontery, to address it to a Mr Emoss Crack: felt like a book inside, a paperback. His work had never appeared in a pukka book: mostly magazines to date, albeit, in some case, posh ones. So, he was quite excited to see his work printed in something that somebody might pick up at an airport and read on a journey ... which was not usually the case with the magazines he had previously frequented: frequented like an unshakeable demon.
He was intensely angered when the mailwoman had the bare-faced cheek to lodge one of her high-heels in such a position that the door jammed open, upon his trying to slam it shut. He felt the woodframe judder up his bad arm—the one with twinges of tennis-elbow—a snagging that made his teeth on edge, as if the heavy-duty doormat had sufficiently swollen to jar the hinges loose. He was crazy enough to look down to check it out—to see if his beaver-hair welcome mat was engorged with something other than boot-muck or, even, to gauge its capacity to incubate a bristly soul. No, the effect was purely due to the positioning of the post-lady's left ankle-joint, heel-drumming, impatiently sole-scraping.
"Would you mind..." he began.
This time the smile was broad—in the open. She doffed her cap, in a moment of mock politeness. The mouth's kissability was tangible, tasteable in sheer anticipation. The eyes spoke volumes or, rather, simple stories of fate and fatality. Here was stirring stuff to startle the most seasoned fiction writer. The words almost spoke for themselves. A bestseller before he'd bought off the worst. He had never been in a story in real life before. Everything, to date, had been from the inner workings of imagination, if thinly sown with nuggets of experience. And, like history, there was no arguing with it.
Mesmerised by her actual ability to exist outside the story which he was about to write, he invited her into his sanctuary with the merest tilt of the head. Since he had no better judgement left, he could not even act against it. She knew how to behave; after all, he was the one making her do what she did. He only had himself to blame.
Donald wished postman Dan wasn't on holiday. He would've chinwagged with Dan for ages, simply to keep Dan on duty. All was forgiven, Dan. Come in for a cup of coffee, Dan. Have a freshly baked scone, Dan. How's Dan's wide-skirted wife? We should have a chat like this more often, Dan.
Nobody had been in his parlour since ... when? He could hardly remember. He saw his own word-processor on the desk, just waiting for the imprint of his fingers: keyed up for the words to be delivered in description of the events now being physically reflected upon its black screen. Him and the thickly tweeded mail-woman. Dan's stand-in. Coming closer. Tongue speaking to tongue with spittly gutturals. His mouth wedged wide with a thicker, tougher wad than a simple human tongue. The front-door could go hang. He imagined the missive's bubbly prophylactic wrapping popping as the pods ruptured against the teeth. Tantalising the soft palate with snapped air-pockets.
He felt his mind's words slime down the gullet full of so much meaning they would burst that mind soon as they got back there. Slither words. Burst blood-blister words. Sex words. Reaching to the very backscreen of the brain, by-passing the eyes and, even, all the other senses. Yet he knew he was the perpetrator of the evil done to that poor lady who was postman Dan's substitute for someone else. Now her front door was to be lodged open by the porkiest pink parcel she'd ever likely to receive. I should know.
But, instead, the engorged gland bent back into his own rear-end, impregnating his tiny unsphinctered precinct to the point of lateral blow-out: bearing a sticky-label addressed to a man too mean to be him.
When postman Dan arrived with the same day's delivery, he discovered corpse fingertips straining through the letter-box, as if trying to escape the house. The fingers led to a man dressed in a wide navy-blue skirt and peaked cap, as if he had been playing at something to do with trains or airports, perhaps role-playing for real. A toy post-office set was discovered on the kitchen table, its rubber date-stamp dated with a date past the death-by date. Also sheaves of scrawl, evidently in some act of self-perpetuation or was it map-making? All gobbledy-gook. The man often received a lot of post—in really tiny pink perfumey envelopes from a strange woman (or so Dan naturally inferred, judging by the recipient). But, as Dan gradually became to suspect, they were all self-addressed and sealed with a loving kiss. Dan shrugged and went home to his wide-skirted wife who was interested to hear what had happened. Dan kept the grisly details secret from her and, in time, even from himself. Certainly a suicide, or as certain as one could be without the corroboration of a primary source. Suicides were, in any event, more unmemorable than murders: less participants. Dan’s mind went blank. Mr Emoss Crack had always been out of his arse, even at the best of times, hadn't he? Time to shrug and go.
*
I felt the chill of the rilling moonbeams as I pushed the sash-window with a painful grind. I closed the floral curtains. I should never have left the bed, should I? Yet I could not get my teeth low enough for the food otherwise. Matron was sure to scold me. I felt tainted by the moon, as if I were a vixen who had just eaten its young. I managed to retrieve my note-book from under the remains of my meal and sucked the business end of a red biro...
A typical seaside town, one slightly posher than the run-of-the-mill versions further along the coast. My only visit was on the occasion of a carnival, an evening of lighted candles in the park and a fancy-dress parade on the pier. The sea attracted me most, however, where the orange and turquoise dusks were a sight to behold, with merely a hint of breeze—and, once upon the cliff, looking down at the strollers on the prom, I thought that the whole world's history had led to this one point in time. The past and, indeed, the future only existed to frame this single moment: and, closing my eyes with a sigh of lashes, I sucked deep of the sea air. My troubles gradually dissipated with each breath.
But all good things have their ending built in.
I have always considered myself to be part animal, part angel—the combination that made the me. I wore clothes that did no justice to the shape within, sported heavy cosmetics which my face did not need and concealed my lights under such spectacles which would not have been fashionable even ten years before.
Imagine my surprise when I sensed a stranger within my body's territory, just as I was finishing my clumsy nirvana. I looked up at met the eyes of a woman scarcely out of girlhood. She smiled and then lowered her head slightly as if expecting me to strike up a conversation after her first move. She was dressed in a grey corduroy skirt, ending just below her knees, a half-length cagoule—which surprised me as there had been no sign of rain for days—and high heels that must have meant a difficult climb to this point on the cliff.
She spoke, evidently having surrendered any hope of me taking the initiative: "There are not too many evenings like this..."
I nodded but still could not bring myself to speak, since this intriguing encounter had been too sudden by half, too soon in the scheme of things. I was not ready for such attentions from one of my own sex.
The other woman continued: "When winter winds loudly howl in chimneys, I dream of evenings like this. The sky could not be more perfect, don't you think, makes you want to be in contact with anybody who is near..."
I found myself studying her face, believing that the dipping sun was hiding my stare by shining off my glasses. She was no doubt all angel: skin luminescent and features finely modelled beneath a coiling sprig of dark hair at which the sea breeze gently tugged. And such mild eyes, belying her outspoken manner to a complete stranger such as me.
She wore her soul upon her pretty face.
I broke from my prison of silence at last: "I do not know his name, but that author who wrote 'only connect...' was right."
She shook her head violently: "The author was a fool, then!"
And she raised the cagoule, to reveal—not the pert girlish bosom I expected nor the lace-trimmed brassiere she ought to have worn. Where nipples should have been were the wriggling ends of blind but evidently malign cancers still germinating from within the body's incubator and striving to close the circle of their disease like a snake in search of its own venomous tail.
I closed my eyes—in one moment of horror and grief and compassion and, even, guilt.
I opened them. She was gone of course. A damp grey mist encroached upon the sea and, eventually, upon myself. A solitary war plane droned and juddered in the distance. I set off to return to my hotel, in the desperate hope I would pass a chapel where I could light a candle in her memory. Not a carnival candle, but a holy one. The fact that she never existed did not seem to matter. But, by the time I reached the prom and walked amongst those late strollers with dogs and spouses, I had forgotten her.
I stared at the red biro, shaking my head at the careless way it had been manufactured. It blotched ink everywhere.
The parlour was frankly too full of my knick-knacks. Too chintzy by half. But I enjoyed my parlour more than I enjoyed anything. Merely the plain sitting in the wing armchair with knitting-needles clacking among my fingers. Or embroidering fresh antimacassars for my still dark hair to rest upon. Or simply listening to the Home Service on the wireless, at such an ungenerous volume I could hardly make out the words of the bespoke announcers; only the chimes of Big Ben marking the top of important hours were sufficient to break the autonomy of the relentless clock's ticking from its carriage on the marble mantelpiece. Although past my prime, I was finally at peace.
Noises in the road outside were far and few between. The heavy velvetine curtains, which I preferred drawn tantalisingly close, particularly on purling moonlit nights, muffled any extraneous outburst from the soap-cart kids who often used my pavement as their race track. A motor scooter or bubble car back-firing was bearable ... just. But when the dust-carts arrived, I sat in ear-muffs, staring blankly at the wireless. I rather resented these rough and ready men clattering uncouthly along the otherwise rather select road ... because I prided myself on never putting out any rubbish for them to collect. I, you see, was not a rubbish sort of person.
There was one particular person I recalled, who permeated my day-dreams. Donald whom I had almost loved. A person of the breed Mysterious Man: who wore made-to-measure suits, with trousers specially for a gent who "dressed to the right", as the tape-worm of a tailor had once sneered out loud whilst measuring Donald ... in my presence!
You see, I was a lady who always wore high-fashion gloves whatever the occasion and, for me, Mysterious Man's attraction was the heady smell of after-shave, the jar of Brylcreem, even the cakey cylinder of Erasmic left suggestively at the edge of the wash basin. I did not want to delve deeper into other more dubious activities nor know more than was good for me about his private areas.
So, I pushed Donald out of my life. All because of a chance remark made by a bespoke tailor about some intimacy of a crutch-panel lining. Life's too short not to have standards.
The parlour was an audible game of Pick-a-Stix, as my needles competed with the clock. A ready-laid fire in the grate asked for lighting, its ruffled tongues of yesterday's Daily Telegraph showing from below the meticulously arranged firewood. I was willing to shiver rather than start a flame just for their benefit. I feared it may remind me of what I had stuffed up the chimney...
Despite the whining of winter winds, the soap-carts trundled outside, kept in queue by the gutters. Those kids should soon be off for their high tea. Meantime, their otherwise shrill voices were deadened by the curtains—as I hoped would be the incessant peep-peep of the dust-cart's reversing.
I stared at the blots on the paper and wondered if there would be enough ink to complete the story. It would be a shame to waste omniscience. After all, there were few leaks in certainty. And even fewer floods in moonstreams.
The Old People's Home was set back a little from the road, up a winding path between some bushes that had evidently been scorched by an out-of-control bonfire in the recent past. I took him around the grounds and even laughed when he said it looked as if they must have had a pretty wild fireworks party that November. Now being December, the undertent of the sky hung browny grey: soon, all would be blunted by snow.
I was not exactly ancient. However, senility was now particularly prevalent in those of my sex. Scientists said it was a disease; others, less tactful, said it must be as a result of women leaving the shelter of the family home and trying to go out to work like their menfolk.
My visitor was in fact older than myself. He was rather gratified to see how well I looked, compared to what he had imagined. It was not as if I had lost all my faculties but he must have felt the saddest part was when I called him by my late father's name.
We strolled, arm in arm, towards the large double-doors of the Home's entrance. He felt the spattering upon the back of his neck and, unaccountably, he began to dwell upon a memory of one of those rare white Christmases as a younger man. I was then a mere slip of a girl, with pigtails which I often tied together across my flat chest. I became excited about the Christmas Tree and its topmost angel. He used to give me rides upon his knee.
This memory made him cry, but he concealed it from me as best he could. He guessed I could see it in his eyes. In fact, he wondered whether I recalled those old days, when he used to be invited along to all major family occasions as a vestigial uncle figure. I smiled, as we walked into the relative warmth of the Home.
He tried to keep his eyes on me, so as to avoid seeing the other inmates nodding silently to each other from their armchair rafts. The large television in the corner had a flickering image but no sound, and many of the residents stared back at it, glassily. They thought it was the Light Programme.
I still maintained my figure and a certain dress sense: although this may be the credit of the Home's service. Whatever the cause, I was still a woman at whom people could not help looking twice if they saw me walking the streets—which, of course, I never did. The skirt-length hung in tantalising pleats and folds, with a tuck-ribbon fastened at bottom-back, just above the closely-carved ankles. My bosom and hips were graciously shapeful, if I may say so, the neck revealing the positions of the slender bones, the cheekbones high. Despite my dimming eyes, the onsetting weather had not blunted my figure.
I looked round at him once and then joined the ranks of the armchair brigade, to nod away the rest of the evening before going to bed. In that one short glance, he must have read a sort of farewell which, despite its vagueness, plumbed to his tormented depths of self-delusion ... hinting in my own half-wit fashion that I still recognised the obsession in his soul ... for me. I suppose I blamed him for my present troubles. Something in the past hung in the air between us, something mostly forgotten. It was as if I felt his hands on my budding breasts, even now. He knew it would be pointless to try to convince me of his innocence.
Having come to the conclusion that my mild eyes had not said anything at all in that last moment in the Home, he left without even giving his regards to the Matron in charge.
Outside, the tears no doubt turned to snow upon his cheeks, as, increasingly desperate, he looked for his car. You see, I narrated parts of the story I didn't even know. Women have more instinct, which even senility cannot change—or which senility actually engendered. In fact, there was a wondrous wisdom about women like me.
When I had finished writing, there was ink upon my mouth like smudged lipstick. There were rodent ulcers travelling from the roof of my mouth to the bottom of the throat. I glided to the bedroom window and selflessly drew back the floral curtains. It was a turquoise summer evening, between dusk and darkness. I felt drained by the gurgling moon but happy that death was to rid me of all the pains at last. I looked down at my lap. I must have eaten my own breasts. Only puddingy tatters remained and one scabby nipple...
Strangely, despite the change to calm weather, the wind in the chimney howled in agony.
*
That was the last time Donald made (what he called) "the scar trip", touring unexpected places—as far as his credit card would take him—in order to inspect (and hopefully cull) the well-healed and barely-healed wounds to which men and women (and often animals) found themselves subject after accidents and inflictions.
The purpose of this once irregular quest was to collect specimens for his unworld-famous museum—indeed he'd've loved it to be infamous but, maybe, even that was too much to hope, short of ignominy.
Well, on that very last occasion, he found himself in a Spa town, one, for whatever reason, sporting the most scars per square inch of human flesh he'd ever encountered—whilst it was more by instinct than by studious research that had brought him there in the first place.
Upon the first night at the Hotel, he espied me—young by his own standards—across the other side of the Residents' Lounge Bar bearing a pair of facial scars which looked like tug-of-war teams competing for the bridge of my nose.
Other than that feature, I was an ordinary, decidedly unpretty, individual—but single ladies in a hotel bar were something he could never take for granted, let alone at face value, keeping in mind their general rarity, pretty or not.
He smiled at me, mouthing a garbled how-do-you-do as the barman poured his drink, planting a cocktail umbrella with a cack-handed force more fitting a stevedore.
He could see, from the twitch of my eyebrows, that I was trying hard not to respond to his overtures, but I eventually returned his smile with an accompanying squeeze of the eyelids.
Grasping his cocktail glass as if it were a pint of lager, he moved along the circumference of the bar and hovered beside the barstool neighbouring mine. The barman—who bore his own jagged scar just below a tattooed DEATH spelt across the knuckles of one hand—followed Donald round the bar, as if having some terrible territorial right to uphold.
Ignoring the barman pointblank, the scar-hunter turned to me:
"My name's Donald. I believe this is the only hotel worth staying at round here."
I nodded, locking my eyes upon the bubbles of my gin and tonic (he assumed there was some gin in there).
"I sometimes try another one," I said, within a whisper of silence.
"Near here?"
"What did you say your name was?"
"Donald."
"Yes, I thought so. It's an unremarkable coincidence but my name's Donald, too. Miss Donald."
I kept a straight face.
"I can't call you Donald!"
He laughed. I echoed his laughter, rhythm for rhythm, tone for tone.
"Rachel Donald," I said, implying permission for him to call me Rachel.
"Well, it's nice to meet you, Rachel," he said, guessing, in his mind's eye, that my real surname was (outlandish or not) Mildeyes.
He held out his hand, whilst planting himself on the neighbouring barstool. My scars looked less severe when face to face with them, but they did seep suspicions of a colourless fluid that Donald blamed on perspiration; the bar was too hot, being in the bowels of the hotel, near the main boiler.
I had not even began to reciprocate his handshake, before an individual of the male persuasion approached from a part of the bar where, evidently, his own face's five o'clock shadow had contributed to his overall camouflage as well as to the disguising of a long angry scar which, close-up, Donald discerned beneath the bristles—across the prow of the chin.
"This is Donald," I said to the man. "Donald was wondering if I could advise him on other hotels in this area or places to sleep."
Donald couldn't help but assume that I was trying to make excuses for his forwardness in approaching a woman apparently on her own in a bar.
"This is my fiancé, Trevor," I added.
"Nice to meet you."
Donald offered his hand for the second time that evening. Trevor made a meal of grasping it with a clumsy fist—yet certainly more positive than I had been.
"What's your business, Donald?" Trevor asked, with a smile.
Obviously, Donald couldn't tell Trevor the whole truth, so he was economical with certain confusing aspects of it:
"I'm into cosmetics, of sorts. Travelling salesman, and all that, for make-up and home-brewed plastic..."
If Donald had said that he was curator of a museum, one which specialised in exhibiting all types of scar, Trevor would have thought Donald was mocking their afflictions or, at best, telling a tissue of lies.
The rest of the evening was spent with Donald making a polite, long drawn-out withdrawal to his bedroom, leaving Trevor and I alone together. He waved to us at the door and we waved back. We had all agreed to meet there the following evening.
Trevor, myself, the barman and the other drinkers had given Donald great hopes for his scar cull on this trip—and he wondered if our visible skin betokened an even greater crop beneath our clothes. He knew he would have a busy day on the morrow, so he needed an early night, in any event. And to get his beauty sleep, so to speak.
That night, however, he had a terrible nightmare. Instead of his museum being in its usual well-scrubbed, pristine, yes, clinical state with specimens under clean glass, mounted by pins upon immaculate cork—instead of that, the place hung in cobwebs; the various skin grafts lay under shattered glass and grew a rotteny green in the unseemly tackiness; even in the dream he could guess that the museum's air-conditioning was on the blink and intruders had contaminated his once proud panoply of scars—the prize ones, within their own original setting of flesh, all becoming corrupt and fetid.
He woke in a pool of sweat, quickly feeling the weak points of his own body to check its fastness.
There was soon no doubt that Donald had to work extremely hard the next day. Despite his tiredness—a tiredness resulting from a sleep that had, all night, bordered on a nonsensical waking mind—he dashed from street to street in the Spa town's lower quarters. Here the scar harvest boded well; every corner he turned there were wondrous specimens zigzagging across young and old alike. Goodness knows what even better ones were concealed below their clothes. Some individuals, indeed, were in rags, allowing him to glimpse livid versions that were totally breath-taking ... until, yes, he saw Emoss Crack. Donald knew this dosser's name by the piece of scrawled card leaning against his collection plate—asking for "alms and kindness" signed Emoss Crack, with the name underneath in block capitals in case the signature couldn't be read properly. Literally all the dosser's visible skin (face, neck, hands and the shin within the undesigner-rip of his jeans) was one uniform scar, a shimmery covering that looked as if it couldn't keep the bones inside nor the air out ... in fact, the nose was a bone that had managed to penetrate the wafery gauze, whilst other patches were marred by an archipelago of near-surface blood.
Of course, Donald did not take advantage of such an easy harvest and his "contribution" to Emoss Crack’s plate was a generous one— and that was leaving the dosser alone.
That evening, having left his now bulky satchel in the hotel room, Donald wandered off to the bar, where I was sitting—as on the night before, alone with my cocktail.
He smiled, saying the first thing that came into his head, whilst pointedly ignoring the barman's scowl.
"Where's Trevor?"
"He's had to go back to London, suddenly. His boss wanted him for something urgent."
It seemed strange that Donald hadn't asked last night what Trevor’s business was, as he had done about Donald’s.
"Oh! So you're left to keep the fort?"
- if drinking in a hotel bar was something anyone could describe as a duty, in that way.
I laughed, seeing a joke somewhere—my eyes appealing to the barman to stay within sight, since I obviously still considered Donald a stranger.
From the corner of his own eye, Donald spotted another lady, one who was beneath a large hat, sporting the widest skirt imaginable and leading a medium-sized dog—well, it was a dog of sorts, but, in his view, it seemed more like a pig.
I waved: "Hazel! Have you a mo?"
Donald shuffled off to another part of the bar—if only temporarily—now feeling unwelcome, an emotion increased by contrast to his original upsurge of hope on hearing that Trevor had left me alone in the Spa town.
Indeed, Donald didn't just want me for my scars.
He supposed it was the drink talking, in the end—but he did manage to tail along with Hazel and me for a meal in a local Indian, where he invited us both to visit his museum one day.
"Trevor can come, too," he added, as an afterthought.
"Where is it, your museum? And what does it show?" asked Hazel, a florid woman with a scar it had taken Donald a long time to discover behind her knee, the seamless stocking tricking him with the light and its low denier mesh.
"It's not a freak show, is it?" I laughed.
"No, not a freak show. But the exhibits once belonged to freaks," he answered meaningfully.
How it happened, he is now unsure, but his ambitious attentions were fast turning away from me towards the more mature Hazel. At one stage of the meal—as an Indian waiter spooned some grey sludge on to some pilau rice—he took hold of Hazel's hand ostensibly to demonstrate some irrelevant point under discussion and one of his fingernails accidentally scored a trench from thumb's root to wrist's top (stopped, he presumed, by her watch strap, from divotting further downward). He quickly helped her by means of a paper serviette.
As the three of us left the restaurant, his mouth still tingling from the hot spices and ears silently searing with the contrastive after-effects of the ice cream dessert, he was sure he caught a glimpse of Emoss Crack turning a street corner. Donald told us the dosser's name. We both giggled at his pointless chatter.
The medium-sized pig-like dog was there to welcome us as we arrived at Hazel's house. I had decided to join Hazel and Donald for a night-cap, before I returned to the hotel. He gave me the key to his own room so that I could take advantage of a bigger suite, complete with jacuzzi. The room I had been sharing with Trevor entailed a trip down the corridor at night just for a leak.
How we had all come this conclusion was probably to do with the drink we had consumed. It was almost as if it were Donald's duty to spend the night with Hazel but, of course, he had forgotten that he had left his satchel of specimens on his bed at the hotel—a bed which he had capriciously offered to me during his absence at Hazel's place.
Hazel was, indeed, a lady who expected her every whim to be satisfied and, tonight, Donald was to be the most whimsical of them all.
He can only remember one tranche of their conversation, after I had left, a conversation which, he believes, was set in motion with this question:
"How ... did you get that?"
Donald pointed tentatively at Hazel's one known scar.
"Oh, that," she said, fingering the back of her now stocking-less knee, as if to see whether it were still there. "Tussle is to blame for that."
She indicated the medium-sized pig-like dog now sleeping peacefully in front of the gas fire, its heavy-breathing filling the room with something more than just air. In fact, a stench was becoming more and more evident, which Donald naturally blamed on Tussle.
"Why am I like I am?"
Which of them said this is unclear to him now. However, it caused such an outpouring to each other; two people who were very recently only strangers, if it had not been for another stranger in the shape of myself.
"Why is anybody like he or she is?"
"Life is full of things that hurt, that leave the scars."
They both laughed, in view of their earlier discussion of Hazel's erstwhile brush with Tussle's teeth.
Suddenly, Donald realised she had tears in her eyes, a fact which caused them to prick out in his own.
"Why are you crying?"
"Because ... just because..."
He placed his arm round her shoulders and offered his mouth for a gentle kiss. She accepted his offer, rhythm for rhythm, tone for tone.
Later in the night, Emoss Crack was punched by a vicious footpad, a footpad that cursed as it nursed its ruptured fist, having unexpectedly sunk through to the jagged stumps of Emoss Crack's ribs. Nature, evidently, could get nasty in spa towns as well as in jungles and cities.
And DEATH could just be deciphered on the footpad's shattered knuckles.
*
When Donald greeted Trevor and myself to see round his scar museum, he asked what had happened to Hazel.
"She still hasn't recovered from Tussle. She was very fond of him."
"Yes, I was sorry to hear that. Give her my condolences..."
He could see how boggle-eyed we were upon entering his emporium, his realm, his darksome corridors of excised pain.
He knew, too, that I was no longer single. Trevor and I made a lovely married couple, my unprettiness now masked by a bloom of renewed youth.
"What on earth are these things?" asked Trevor, pointing at a shelf upon shelf of veiny slabs, not unlike flattened prawns.
"And these?" I shrilled, as I stared at another section of blacker wedges of flesh.
"They are things river-snakes slough off in the mating season."
Whilst Donald didn't mean any such thing, he was trying to hide his own shame, pretending this was a museum of merely the darker side of natural history rather than an obsession with scars.
"I did wonder what those stinky things were in your satchel in your hotel room..."
"Yes, Rachel" he replied, "wild life doesn't just stop in the countryside. Nature can get nasty in cities, too."
The next exhibit was a much larger specimen, complete with bones stumping out at haphazard angles.
"That is the victim of a beast of prey," Donald said, thinking it was no doubt reminiscent of how Tussle's body must have been found, half-baked by the gas fire Hazel had forgotten to turn off—forgotten because she had lost her mind, you see—and, my dear Rachel and Trevor, this other object (and he now silently pointed to a blubbery sponge with surface threads of blood) was her mind—something for which Donald had had her skull culled for its richly generous crop of life's scars ... indeed he had been so delighted by such pure and unadulterated healing-tissue, Donald had himself forgotten to harvest her only other scar at the back of her knee.
Eventually, Donald waved us goodbye, having offered us to take a few samples from his museum. We declined, of course, but failed to realise that our erstwhile host was not waving with his own hand.
Emoss Crack turned over in his sleep, waking fitfully—as the heat haze blossomed with darkness. The teardrops did not stay put but sank into the bags under his eyes. He prodded his cheek and felt the finger sink beyond the waxy loam towards the jawbone. He saw, through the broiling murk, a zombie-like she-creature in a large hat, sporting a skirt far wider than a bodily territory its wearer could possibly command, and dragging something along behind. Emoss Crack futilely offered his mouth for a gentle kiss: his only way to love.
*
"In the first world war trenches, there was very little trouble with dog muck." (Rachel Mildeyes THE LESSER KNOWN FACTS OF MODERN HISTORY) I sat on buses and read minds. Not in the ordinary way of the prestidigitators and fortune tellers, but actually being party to them, experiencing them as a surrogate and, unlike the people whose thoughts I read, knowing their outcome (without the need of predictive powers); understanding, too, their rôle in the context of alternate destinies and enduring their repercussions rather more than the originator would endure them, even into the otherwise untenable future.
The man downstairs on the double-decker bus knew all that, because he could read my mind. The bus trundled down Moorgate, evidently trying to hit as many potholes as it could. I was on the top deck, at the front, pretending to drive it, as I once did as a kid. I grabbed the silver window bar and pulled on it whichever direction I thought the bus was going to head.
I looked around, to see if anybody was watching me. Who had heard of a 39 year old woman (a mother of three and ex-wife of two) steering a bus from the front of its top deck? There was only the one other passenger (who happened to be downstairs), one who seemed, when I saw him, to be writing (a difficult task on a bus in full flow). He had ignored my clumsy boarding of the bus and subsequent clamber up the steep stairs to the top.
All the empty pairs of handle-bar seats glinted in the late afternoon sunshine. The conductor was ascending the stairs, already turning the inner tumblers of his ticket puncher in eager anticipation of the long white ribbon he would produce specially for me. Whistling in unconscious embarrassment, he approached and cocked his head for the destination I required.
"St Pauls, please," I enunciated in as sophisticated a voice as she could muster.
Then they came to me. The conductor's thoughts crowded in like ticket strips in overspill, and it took me quite a time to differentiate one from another through the lack of perforations. They caused memories of my own past to seep down the drain of used time, whilst replacing them with another's memories, however ill-thought out.
He was a chimney enthusiast.
He had made a study of those terraced cottages in Battersea, now sadly demolished, which were dwarfed by their own chimney stacks on the roof: the prime size of flues for up-draughts to work efficiently: the cleverness of the Victorian skyline in elongating the smoke travel by the use of pots, thus enhancing, if only slightly, the environment: the silver spikes of costume jewellery that future people were to erect upon their stacks, all pointing in the same direction, towards the enemy: the coming generations who would never know that chimneys once had something to do with coal: the seven foot "tallboys" in distant Leicester: the houses that suffocated when the chimneys finally disappeared, their windows swelling out into oversize breasts: the roosting-posts of large dark birds: spiky haired creatures emerging... The thoughts were too numerous and somewhat garbled to categorize or even take seriously.
I tried to regather myself. It had only taken a split second to absorb a lifetime's obsessive knowledge. The conductor was flicking through the dials of his machine, finally producing enough paper tape for a hat band and ribbons for a bumper girls' tea party.
I was now receiving thoughts he had never had. They were memories of his forebears instilled into his very fibre at birth: his father as humble ironmonger: his father's father as sewer-hunter and seller of dog droppings to the tanneries: the glue factory outside the maternity hospital where he was born: the friends he never met because they were killed in the war: and so on.
I could not bear it. I decided to leave the bus to its own devices and staggered against the rhythm of the bus towards the head of the stairs, knowing that I'd missed my stop anyway. The stairs seemed an endless spiral downwards, as if Hell was a machine. An old woman in a wide skirt was attempting to come up, toting piles of shopping under both arms. And I saw visions of two world wars, one just gone, one about to start, where memories and premonitions were as one. There was evidently someone on the lower deck the old lady didn't want to meet, hence her long clamber up the swaying staircase. It was her son Donald who had been too young for the first war, but she feared not too old for the next. I felt the blind tears at my own eyes and the sorrow in my own heart that caused them. The old woman, I knew, had been fooling herself and the son had really absconded in wild youthful enthusiasm to the first trenches, only to return to haunt the lower decks the City over, along with his dead counterparts. No wonder people rode these days on top.
"Oi, Miss, you've only paid the fare to St Pauls, not to the dogs' home!" the conductor snapped from behind, startling me with ideas of chimney fires and Victorian urchins who were made to climb them, their skin hardening into leather: not sent to sweep them, perhaps, but to shoo off the chimney ghosts.
I imagined I was in a vertical charcoal tunnel, as I saw faces in the flames below me. There was a pile of what looked like droppings on a sooty ledge, glistening as the inflamed eye of the sun inched into the open hole of the sky.
I left the moving bus, pumping my legs against the impetus, only just avoiding a particularly slimy ghost of a dogpat.
As the bus vanished over the cross-brow of a hill, an inscrutable lamplighter lit the wicks in the street gas mantles, much like the soldiers cupped hands round their ciggies in the trenches. Having waved the bus bye bye, Rachel Mildeyes walked on, feeling handsome in her khaki uniform, and puffed on her pipe. It was as if she had decided upon a male course at birth, only now, at this distance, panning out.
I rubbed my bloodshot eyes as the bus took me on. The past seemed to have gone on with it, too, into the future.
*
The black rag and bone man was not black for any racial reason—more as if he were permanently stained by shadow.
His name was a close secret in the circles of the city which were his regular beat. But many knew him as the Weirdmonger. The tall chimney-hat was rounded off at its peak—his buttons shiny—his boots even shinier—and the hat's strap indistinguishable, concealed as it was by fitful sportings of a chinbone beard.
As well as the bric-à-brac, his wagon carried a hinge-crippled easel, a blotched palette, a knobbled truncheon for wayward footpads and a yellow stick-insectish deck-chair. Indeed, his pastime was being an oil artist—not daubing from life, but from famous paintings, where he tweaked the angle of attack and/or crossed season with season so that the viewer was presented with a vastly different aspect of a familiar scene. Indeed, one of his works was shot, as it were, from under Constable's Hay-Wain.
A woman in wide skirts, one who was landlady of a pub, owned that particular painting. Despite the obvious danger to this artefact offered by such an unruly environment, she exhibited it upon the Snug wall. How she came to take possession of this flawed masterpiece—flawed because the darkness of the materials which the artist had employed placed shadows where shadows could not possibly have been cast by any visible object—and, even more incredibly, whom she must have bribed at the Brewery to have the pub's name changed to The Under Wain—such matters were mysteries.
No mystery was it that Edvard Munch's Screamer had just been informed that something was clinging to him or to her like a seamless humpback. But told by whom? By the painter in a tall round hat and with an ear for the pitch of terror? Whatever the case, Munch must have painted not from life but from something far more real—something which when compared to life seemed like life when compared to a painting.
A dosser called Padgett Weggs, with stage helmet and plenty doses of turpentine, once sheltered under parked cars. Yet today he was a pavement artist—squashed red oils amid creamy-pink flesh-tints: smearing, freshly squeezed yet flowing, because of the city street's camber, over the drayman's ramp towards the pub.
I saw the scream in the disposable's eyes as my car ran the pavement artist down. I'd not subsequently noticed the lack of bones. A derelict without the shattered shipwreck of a skeleton.
I staggered into the pub for a calming snifter, having explained to a very young police constable that the man must have been up-to-the-eyeballs in drink and had stepped straight into the path of her car.
"No need to worry, Ma'am. We have loads of his sort taken off in carts round the clock," the policeman had informed me before speaking desultorily into his mobile for the clearance department and any available tumbrel.
I gazed at the optics over the bar—saw myself in the mirror behind them—and wondered what it would be like to be a landlady in a such a place. A bone man stared back like a black reflection: a fact I put down to angles of perspective.
Or perhaps I'd need to go on the wagon, myself.
*
I could tell he was new to harlots. And to such rooms as this one.
The fire in the grate was now going strong, since I had seen that he thought it cold. And having gained confidence in my company, he suddenly took his carrier bag from his lap and abandoned it on the floor. I guessed he wanted to smile, for the fire, playing over the contours of his face, lit his eyes like individual founts of sunshine. Yet the lips remained emotionless, a mere workmanlike medium for the words. Whatever the case, I sensed he had begun to trust me.
"I like live fires," he said. "When I was a child, I thought each flame had a story to tell. Only later did I realise that a single flame is never the same entity from one moment to the next."
I nodded. I wondered if he wanted me to remove my clothes.
"Did I ever tell you..."
How could he have done?
"...about my Grandmother? She enjoyed live fires too, open hearth affairs with flames roaring right up the chimney after having stretched a double sheet of newspaper in front of it. She once told me she’d caught one of her wide skirts alight, so doing! She also told me it kept things at bay that wanted to descend the chimney, hungry Great Old Ones that fed on little boys, if such boys were not protected by those like Grandmother who always knew better."
I smiled. I knelt before him on the rug and leaned up to place my lips dryly to the corner of his mouth. He ignored my mild eyes, continuing as if he had a whole speech prepared:
"My Grandmother had a favourite hat. She called it her Fascinater. She said men found it fetching. She's the only woman I've really ever known properly. She told me of the Weirdmonger."
The fire was now quickly withdrawing and, as it did so, the room lost a lot of its colour. His eyes became dark wells, the hands resting on his lap like an unfinished sculpture as his words addressed me more directly:
"Why do you have men here like me? I could have turned out to be just about anybody. These days, there are more strangers about than ever. Let me feel how cold your tiny hands are."
I pressed a hand to his cheek.
"You are cold. We must bank up the fire again..."
I pointed to the bed in the corner as an alternative. But this could now hardly be seen in the gloom. I began to unbutton my top, as if to prove that the cold was nothing to me. My skin glistened in the dying emberlight or it gave off a grainy sheen all of its own making. I tried to unmould his hands, to lift one to my tingling breast. There was a slight resistance to my guidance but, coming free in the end, the fingers dallied lightly with the hardening nipple.
I took a poker from the companion set and stirred the ashes to tease out a few feeble flames. And, in the renewed flickering, I saw his face again. This time he smiled with his lips, revealing ice-white teeth, behind which, lolling easy, could just be seen the tongue. He leant towards me and pressed the mouth against mine: not so much a kiss, more the forging of a contact point to enable a power to pass from him to me—or vice versa. Yet it soon became a full-blooded kiss, his tongue meeting mine halfway.
I passed my hand down his spine, then gradually round to the front, finding his hip bone and, lastly, between his legs. I stroked the inner thigh, daring not to reach higher until he had given some sign as to whether my advances were welcome. Never before had I such scruples with a man. I usually knew what they wanted and how they wanted it. Tonight, I was on unsure ground, shifting sands. The aura of his being was different to anything I had ever experienced.
"Why do you not speak?" he asked.
His puzzled expression was mixed with fear. He had pulled away from the cloying kiss. I wanted so much to answer his question. But I would not, could not be forced out into the open.
The fire having finally died before our very eyes, I detached myself slowly from my embrace of his body and proceeded towards the chimney. With my last glance at him, I saw him take a ludicrous woman's hat with ornamental fruit from the carrier bag and, with a single tear at the corner of each brightening eye, he placed it at a rakish angle on his head. And from his waist there widened shadows...
With mixed feelings, I hurried even more quickly up through the still warm flue, back to where I belonged. I did not see him wave farewell to his chimneypiece.
The only thing he had left unsaid was how his Grandmother had managed to protect him from any Great Old Ones that did manage to negotiate the flues all the way down: how, indeed, she deterred such hungerers from feeding on human boys. By poisoning the little boy bodies as well as their minds.
*
As he threaded the bright-lit quarters of the humming monstrosity, Donald viewed his fellow crewmen sleeping. Being a barrack-room philosopher, he speculated upon the nature of the journey. He, for one, would not be able to doze off so easily, especially with all the ceiling-globes still burning—fearing that sleep would thus bring spot-lit monsters of nightmare.
Unaccountably, he recalled his childhood: sitting outside the pub waiting for his Mum and Dad, stocked only with a packet of crisps and an orange squash. Then, he remembered his wife who once had an affair with an aeroplane pilot. And his wide-skirted in-laws. Every Sunday, Donald had heard their engine buzzing over the suburban house where he and his wife had lived ever since the honeymoon in Clun, Shropshire.
Of the sleeping crew, Captain Trevor Urqu snored loudest. Earlier in the "day", Urqu had teased the others with tales of salt-mines and pepper-mills, to which they were en route for more than a lifetime of labour amid the thirsty, sneezy realms of a yet undiscovered planet on the sinister side of time. Donald forgot where the quote marks began and ended: some of the words were Urqu's, but most were Donald's own retrospective attempts at creating a private joke world.
Despite the apparent modernity of the craft's interior (the glistening clinical walls, the bulbless lights, the interminable smooth under-drive of its hidden power factors, the interconnecting cabins), it was furnished with squashy three-piece suites and four-poster beds dredged from old-fashioned history. Here, the off-duty crew lolled about, blowing invisible speech bubbles in their sleep. Donald creased his brows and stared into each pair of stark-staring eyes to see if he could read their dreams.
His first subject slouched in a wide-winged armchair with grease marks where the head had missed the antimacassar. This was Urqu's lieutenant, Weaver, sporting his epaulettes less grandiosely in his sleep than he did when awake and alert. The dreams capered across the eyeballs like Saturday Morning Pictures. Donald became annoyed as each dream came to a false ending and blended into the next one. He abandoned Flash Gordon in a predicament worse than death only to find himself following the eye-line of the Rocket Man into the chimney tunnels of pre-cataclysm Earth, where critters lurked...
But these were the critters Donald had feared so much in his own dreams. So, he side-stepped to the next upholstered recliner where Urqu himself snoozed. Donald stared into staring eyes. Once upon a time, Donald and Urqu had played the Eyeball game for real (when boys in a mutually synchronised schoolyard)—but a sleeper has an unfair advantage over blinks. Herein, Donald lost himself in a black and white movie from the now legendary Hollywood days. But this was a Film Noir, with only meagre light to place the protagonists into relief. Robert Mitchum's eyes were not only drooping characteristically, but closed, as he zombied around the incomprehensible plot. The film's undergrunts came faintly through Urqu's mouth, but the lips did not move. More sound than soundness.
The next sleeper was a woman. Her mild eye-lined dreams were rosier, more pastel, more romantic. As half a sun set into the whites, her lips made tentative kissing motions. Donald knew this woman as his wife, Rachel. Somehow the old days had been forgiven and forgotten when they used to leave messages written on yellow 'post-its' stuck all over the refrigerator door for each other. He even loved her, loved her as much as he used to hate her when she emerged from the kitchen every Sunday, roast aloft on the spiked silver platter, as if she hoped it was his head, mouth propped open by a tongue swollen into a large fruit gland...
He rather enjoyed making his own Sunday dinner, when she went off with the pilot.
From the far end of the cabin, Donald blew kisses back at his wife, whose eyes flickered gradually shut with the imminence of her (my) stirring. He dodged from the cabin, before she was fully aware of his presence. He could not expect friendly small talk, with waking up in the morning being such a pain these days. However, even her evening endearments seemed laced with sarcasm—perhaps for old time's sake.
In the next cabin, Urqu's nephew, Sisley, was already awake, which was not surprising. He had been suffering a bout of long cough which had recently turned into a bark.
"How are you this morning, Sisley?"
"A trifle dicky," Sisley replied.
"Have you tried sucking out the phlegm yourself?"
"It's getting my lips to the mouthpiece that's difficult."
Donald felt asleep himself on hearing that conversation. He pinched Sisley's arm, evoking an effeminate squeal. He asked Sisley to pinch his own arm ... but no squeal at all. Donald cursed. Sisley was probably the only one awake.
Donald, despite the doubts, wandered into the third cabin. This was as dark as a black pepper-mine. He could hear the pretentious snores of the inhabitants. These were the very critters which the crew were transporting to the outskirts of the known universe, bordering on the untenable universe, to labour in the spice lands. Trying to dodge the extraneous limbs—whiplashing from between the gaps in their crates to snarl and snag his path through the cabin—he eventually reached the fourth cabin where those on heavy duty were propped up at the engine-computer control consoles. The dual read-out screens stared into the eyeballs of their respective human parasites, hypnotising fingers in some semblance of basic logic across the keyboards.
Donald rested his hand on a girl’s shoulder. He fancied her, but he did not stop for her to respond. Despite the armholes of her tunic revealing enticing swells of breast, he forged on towards the cockpit where he was supposed to be on co-piloting duty. But he had one more cabin to negotiate—the one he dreaded most. It was a long, narrow room fitted like the utility-style parlours of the nineteen fifties. His dead parents sat opposite a dim, flickering screen that, unlike those in the previous cabin, bore only blurred images and shadowy figures moving like inhabitants of an ancient B movie, ill-preserved on corroded acetate. The narrow-waisted man and wide-skirted woman looked up together, in clockwork motion. They smiled at the one they considered to be their son.
"Sit down for a while, it's not Christmas every year," said his mother.
"No, Mum, you're not here for me to sit next to." He could not stop himself from feeling sorry for her. How could you blame her for being a hologram?
"I'm not a hologram, my dear," she said, as if she had read his thoughts.
"Have some consideration for your mother," chipped in his father. "She got up at an unearthly hour today to get the Christmas roast on."
Donald left the cabin, tears streaking his face as the good-to-honest, rain-sodden earth once did in his urchin days of catapults, cap-guns, marbles and conkers. His mother had given the game away, for nobody surely would have heard of holograms in the nineteen fifties. She had always been only one belt-notch away from premature senility even when she was really alive. He cast a glance back at his father who returned a knowing look—pitiful in the extreme. Donald's searching for himself in the mine of youthful memories was like delving into a bag of Smiths Crisps to find the crinkly blue tourniquet of salt.
In the cockpit, he was astonished to find the whole contraption on automatic free-wheel. The craft was cruising the urban universes, before traversing the more dangerous outspaces that, he knew, bloomed with many overlapping black-hole bubbles. His so-called co-pilot of a male persuasion (quaintly called Emoss Crack) roosted in the lead seat, a bright red coxcomb staircasing its longback neck, its lips already hardening into a puckered kiss that was more like a beak than anything else. Its eyeballs had slewed to the midpoint cheekbones and Donald assumed that all they were seeing were the compartmented blurs of inner space—or yet another episode of Mash or Twin Peaks. Donald took hold of the joystick and plunged it into a manual gear. The craft lurched and spun on its centre of gravity for endless seconds of pure terror. Donald could hear the screams of the other crew-members in the lower bellies where he had just completed a one man's rite of passage. He stuffed earphones into the grooved-out ears that sprouted on the side of his head—but, deep within the tinnitus of the craft's communication system, he could still hear the stifled screams of the crew rather than the Aretha Franklin record he’d chosen.
Before he thought about dying himself, he spotted a yellow 'post-it' on the cockpit window. He plucked it off like an idle feather off an even idler portion of dead poultry.
"Don't forget you may be an alien, too, Donald," it said in recognisable manuscript. He smiled—how could he have possibly been fooled by all those implanted memories into thinking himself to be a human being? He was not really fooled by the sticker, either. As he heard the backward-buzzing of an ancient aeroplane inside his head, his mouth's last speech-bubble stated he was not even an alien, but a machine.
But Donald was none of these things, not even a hologram. Just a buzzing. More sound than soundness.
*
He kept meeting dead-ends. Yet, the city was easy to negotiate during the day which he had in fact accomplished more or less regularly before tonight. However, with the hours of daytime drawing shorter these days, he was almost certain to be caught out sooner or later.
He had been delayed on the telephone, by an ugly customer—though he couldn't be sure just how ugly. The others in the office had turned off almost all the overhead strips before heading for home. They had then filled all the lifts and staircases with clambering bodies—like crabs in a fisherman's basket.
His desk-lamp, gleaming waxily across his yet untidied papers, spot-lit his Hallowe’en mask of a mask of a face, while he tried to put paid to the hard-buy customer at the other end of the telephone. What cheek! What brass neck, giving Donald an earful, trying to be a paying customer at this time of day, when even the clock had clocked off! After all, the salesman's always right...
But Donald was not really a proper salesman. He possessed the soul of a backroom-johnny, a jerk-of-an-erk, one who felt out of his depth when trying to persuade (or, even, dissuade) someone to buy something. At the moment, he didn't mind which it was, as long as he, Donald, could go home and put up his feet with a nice cup of his wife's freshly brewed tea.
It then dawned on him that he couldn't separate his ear from the phone—as if the customer's voice was really an audible glue. He realised that he must slam the phone down rudely—the only way to close the sale. But, there he was, struggling horrifically with the handset: yanking at his fleshy lug as he would a cheesy pizza from its pan.
He glanced in desperation at the sepia photograph in an ancient gold frame of his dear wife on the desk, winking in the flickering desk-lamp, with his two kiddywinks either side—usually a comfort to him during normal office hours, since his work was for them, after all, wasn't it? Whenever a particularly ingratiating client came on the line to chat him up—well, his family's images were a godsend, a heart-warming consolation. Damn! Every sale meant extra paperwork for poor Donald and, indeed, commission thus earned would simply encourage his wife to want another extension of the family or desire better accommodation or, even, both! Still, she did make a comforting cup of tea.
Slamming the phone down was normally the only answer...
He wandered the darkness of narrowing city streets, dazed and lost. The buses seemed to have stopped running—or merely turned over their engines somewhere out of sight, always around the next corner. The underground stations padlocked. Black cabs blacker than night itself. Every thoroughfare identical or so similar it was hardly worth walking from one to the other—leading round and round the oblong city squares. For a while, he sat on a park bench, feeling the side of his head. Thankfully the ear was still more or less intact...
But the voice inside it droned on.
The parlour was quiet, except for my relentless clacking needles. I didn't know what I was making or, indeed, from what it was made, but the flowing grey matter, which the candlelight made to seem as if it were extruding from my revolving ear, had knitted together, spreading over my lap to the carpet—and back again.
"Mummy, what are you making?" asked a attractive little girl with a disfiguring lisp.
"Mummy, why don't you ever say anything?" asked an even littler boy smelling of the Vick spread across his chest to ease the breathing.
They saw me glance at the oval gold-framed photograph of my husband on the writing-bureau, where a candle guttered. Donald was late. They hoped I'd put the kettle on for a pot of tea—that always did the trick. They'd hear the garden gate go—and then...
The phone rang. The little girl scampered to answer it, delighted to be sufficiently grown up for this duty.
"Hello, theven, four, thix, thix, three..."
Donald had discovered one of those old-fashioned red telephone boxes tucked away in a back-double. It should have been a welcoming sight, a throwback to the days before portable car-phones—but, in the circumstances, it was strangely off-putting. He felt the side of his head again and found something slimy drooling from an ear-hole. Mind slipping sideways, he tried to poke it back.
He managed to tug the heavy door open and squeezed himself in before it shut again. Damn! The phone was a left-ear one, and that happened to be the ear in trouble. Nevertheless, he picked up the handset from its cradle. But even before he had the chance to poke his digit in the various numbered holes in the dial, he heard a series of ratchets slipping home at the Telephone Exchange. Then, a babble of strangers' voices: the whole city talking to itself. At one point, he heard his own disguised voice. He wept bitterly when, in the distance, he made out the faint lisping of a little girl he knew he once loved—fading in and quickly fading out amid the aural mush.
Soon, all he could hear were the quick buck deals that everyone ripped each other off with...
"...five, thix, thix ... Mummy, Mummy, this phone's getting wet and thticky." The little girl held out the handset for inspection. I looked up from my knitting and smiled knowingly, my ticking needles weaving a cat's cradle of crossed-lines around my little boy's sleepy snorting head. After all, Donald had worked for an insurance company and knew all the best life assurance policies to sell—and buy. As far as customers went, I had been Donald's best, and decidedly not ugly in any shape or form.
The one for the pot could be mine. But it was bound to end up with dead ants at the bottom of the cup, as I had lost the tea-strainer years ago. The garden gate didn't go. I saw there was a single silver tealeaf of a tear under of the little girl's eyes, but nobody said anything, particularly me.
*
The silence seemed suddenly interminable. There had been pauses earlier, but that particular pause had been a pause too far
"Did you enjoy your holiday?" Donald asked, because all pauses, by definition, needed ending.
Donald and I were once lovers but, now, forced together again as a result of some barely bearable mutual friends.
The room in which we sat was empty of people. The various friends had departed on communal activities that had quite excluded Donald and myself. Not so much a conspiracy of abandonment, but more a quirk of fate that had been spun off from the interactions of various clandestine groups of friends. The constituents of each group failed to plan for the likely repercussions and, perhaps, were insufficiently sensitive to appreciate that such consequences actually existed—the residual result of which was the first head-to-head Donald and I had had since we broke up in sodden tears, ten years before. It was High Noon without the noise of bullets.
The room was full of furniture, chairs galore, where the various friends had been sitting earlier, plotting petty plots and even pettier arguments about such plots, some of the various friends as pretty as myself, some as unpretty as him, yet others in between, neither pretty nor unpretty, but equally boring and pretentious as the rest. The furniture was not to my taste, either—too chintzy, too cluttered, too reminiscent of things I wanted to forget. Furthermore, the same room was where Donald and I had once experienced our happiest, most prepossessing moments
"Holiday? It was OK. Nothing special. I was thumbing through America, with Trevor and Mary."
In this way, I had, at last, answered his item of ice-breaking smalltalk. I kept my head averted, whilst speaking.
"Trevor and Mary?"
Their identities had momentarily escaped his mind. They were probably the least bearable of the various mutual friends—or at least one of them was. Trevor. Yes, it was Trevor who had been mostly tangential to my relationship with Donald and pretty central to its break-up.
"Just the three of you?" he continued, persisting with the pleasantries despite the unpleasantness of the ambience, for which we were both responsible.
"Yes. It wasn't really a good idea."
"No ... I don't suppose it was."
He hesitated more than once, but the pauses were no longer noticeable.
"I spent most days on my own," I said.
"Where did you go?"
He assumed I had acted as a convenient chaperone but wouldn't be seen dead as a gooseberry.
"I wandered through a forest area. It was quite good. I had plenty of time to think."
"Did you come to any conclusions?"
I bit my tongue on the words.
"The thinking wasn't that deep. More a relaxation of the spirit, you know what I mean. Letting it all hang out, random nonsense mostly."
"It must've done you some good, Rachel."
He desperately wanted and, paradoxically, at the same time, did not want me to mention how much I regretted breaking up with him and that I'd come to that conclusion whilst on this jaunt in the forest.
"Well, there was one strange incident—it made me think a lot about you, as a matter of fact."
"About me?"
He was genuinely surprised, if not shocked. He failed to credit that I had given him a single thought during the latter half of the decade since our tearful break-up.
"Yes. You see, I woke up late in the morning after covering myself in underbrush to stop the dew soaking my clothes. I didn't have a tent because I didn't expect to get lost as badly as I actually did. Well, when I peered out, I saw some children running by. The peculiar thing was they were so silent. They were acting as if they were cock-a-hoop ... in such a way you'd've expected whoops of joy, heroic shouting, laughter, giggling, words of excitement. But nothing. Then, shortly afterwards, a courting couple came by. Again silently. Dead silent, in fact. They looked as if they should be chatting twenty to the dozen—agog with ideas and thoughts and loud messages of love—like we once were. They were later followed by older women with long trains..."
He could see tears in my eyes and, indeed, sensed a pricking in his own. He ignored most of what I had told him except the “like we once were.” This reference to our past affair was quite out of his memory of my character: a most unexpected incident in itself, even stranger than the incident I was recounting. He could not bear to interrupt. There was no possible way he could express his surprise. So, with the barest pause, I continued, eyeing each of the room's chair in turn as if speaking personally to each of its ghostly occupants. Quaintly, he guessed the couple I described in the forest had only been silent because they could only whisper sweet nothings to each other.
"Then, when the old women had gone," I continued, "I saw an even older man bent under a bundle of sticks. I then appreciated the silence of these passers-by. It was not simply because they didn't speak or even whistle, but their actual foot-falls on the dry crackling path were silent, too. So very silent. I couldn't force myself to believe these could have been people at all—as if I had been watching dreams of people."
"Ghosts?"
He neither intended to humour me nor interrupt my flow, merely punctuate the conversation with polite evidence of attention. He was also perturbed by my continuous gazing at the many chairs; so much so, the idea of ghosts resting their heads upon the chairs' antimacassars rubbed off on him and gained ground in his consciousness.
"No, not ghosts exactly. I know it sounds daft, but dreams of people come out into real life—the only way to describe it I can think of. The courting couple, you see, looked a bit like us—in our hey-day."
He refused to appear as surprised as he was.
"And the others?"
"Like us in the future, I suppose, weighed down with sodden sticks—the collapsed shelter where we'd slept."
He held one luxurious pause before asking:
"And the children?"
"They were to have been ours, had they lived."
There was a long drawn-out silence—a posy of pauses, a mutuality of missed opportunities. Then, we heard the exuberant giggling and raucous in-jokes of Trevor and Mary together with various pretty and unpretty friends and so forth, returning like a horde of schoolkids who were blissfully unaware of the sprung silence of dark serendipities they had thoughtlessly left unattended. It was as if time had silently cracked open—wide skirts gradually gathering from the grave’s greenstone...
He took out a gun to pretty up my forehead with a crimson spot for the sake of the children. Or was the red moon purely double vision or a bitter-eyed brow’s complaint? Which of us would answer? No alternative nor pick-and-mix endings, now. The pause, you see, was literally interminable.
