UNPUBLISHED STORIES BY DF LEWIS FOLLOWED BY MORE "NEMONYMOUS FIVE" REVIEWS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.
THE LOST CHORD
Dear Greta,
High time, I thought, for a letter to my oldest friend. How are you? I’m OK but a lot’s happened since I wrote last spring. And things have gone awry with me, but no use in complaining. Something missing from the music, as the saying goes.
Do you know what? Adam has got himself into a lot of trouble over some girl. And I always thought he was a joy, can’t tell these days. He fell head over heels with someone called Prudence – I met her once – pretty enough – but not much up top, in my estimation. Adam must have been after things that didn’t come from people’s heads. Anyway, she led him a rare old dance. Musical chairs didn’t have anything in it. Off with Adam one day, off with someone else the next. Hunt the lost thimble? Prudence had several silver ones strung through her nose, it seemed. I didn’t look up close. Greet, believe me, I’m sure some of the holes were festering! Talk about something missing from the music, she sings at pubs with pianos, and I can’t imagine anyone liking her screeching.
Enough about Adam. Safe to say Prudence is no longer on the scene. She went off with my dressing-gown, God knows why. Perhaps she wanted to strangle someone with it.
Adam’s no oil painting, as you’ll recall from his First Communion, but he deserves better than her. He’s back to his old ways. Sinking jets, he calls it. I call it something else. There’s no telling them these days. I just have to sit back and watch him waste his life. His teeth are still pearly white, though. His best feature. (Sorry, went back and crossed out jets, and put jars instead – whatever the case young men are hardly ever sober, with binge drinking and things like that).
I don’t get around much now, myself. Too much telly, with it being on so often. I preferred the good old days when you could only get a test card and light music. Susie visits. She’s not like Adam. She’s settled down with her Peter and both got well-paid jobs. No kiddies. Not sure I want grandchildren anyway. How are yours? Great grandchildren, by now, I be bound. I’m sure your hands are full making Cjrismas present all year round, eh? (Hey, just noticed something else wrong – misspelled Chritsmas. Got it right now. This letter will all be crossed out by the time I finish! You’ve got to laugh).
How are your troubles? Hope the rashes have died down. Not that we had pins and needels in our bodies in our day – and pores weren’t the easiest things to clean. I still wash out my nostrils with soap every day after coming back from shopping, and I’ve not had a proper cold now since … well, ages ago, I forget.
Sorry this letter’s not very newsy. I suppose at our age, Greet, news happenss to younger people. Telly’s full of it. All those wars and people having affairs and people being greedy about everything they own, houses in the sun, makeovers, repairs … talking of which I’ve just checked through this letter and corrected some more spellings and crossed some things and inserted others I won’t bother to mention. But there’s something my mind’s lost I meant to put in somewhere above. On the tip of my tongue. Never mind. It all makes sense without it, I suppose. Couldn’t have been important. Probably only just a word. Maybe something to do with Prudence’s singing. At least she’s happy.
All the best for now.
Love, George. xxx
AN OPENING OF A NOVEL IN 1000 WORDS
"Are you sure this is the place?" asked Mrs Turke.
Mr Turke looked askance. They had travelled mile after mile in their jalopy-of-a-999-breakdowns; hoping against hope that today wouldn't bring the Big K or, even worse. the Big End, literally——
They had, in fact, reached the museum, their destination, the place of learning, where their daughter worked as archivist, where she'd been given the honour of the grand opening ... of the rusty-tooled, black-skinned volume recently discovered in some bigwig's cellar, purportedly containing a plot that would allow the world to survive. They had only just reached the street that had the museum, Mr and Mrs Turke, when the jalopy spluttered and sunk to its wheel rims. A busy street and the passers-by were bemused by this dishevelled couple clambering out without any close-down of cockpit drill whatsoever. They even left the engine running or, rather, spluttering, the handbrake off, out of gear, left yellow indicator pointing pointlessly out like a misunderstood salute from the side of the upper chassis; they were supremely confident that it was in no fit state to move and, if it were, they'd be relieved rather than dismayed (barring such havoc it might have caused by any freewheel). But, now, they were more concerned, in their sweet way, with Tricia Turke's welcome gambol down the museum's steps in her jeans and well-filled blouse.
"Mummy! Daddy! You're only just in time"—a fact which was more than evident from the short sight of the local Mayor and Mayoress huffing and puffing at the unseasonable delay already incurred—"the book has already been escorted to its plinth"—she indicated with her nose the uniformed lackeys with pikestaffs that stood two abreast—"and we have only two minutes left before being saddled with the bad luck that is said to await us all if it's not opened at the precise moment laid down in its sequel..."
Tricia had already written to her parents explaining that the book was a novel written by some pre-Millennium scribe, whose follow-up successes had been supposedly bug-free. Hence, the somewhat backward slant thrown on the single predecessor, lately dug up from a descendant's cellar (a rich geezer who had lived off royalties ever since he was found to be related to the authoress of the countless sequels)—and, as determined by these very successful pot-boiler follow-ups, the first novel that had actually set up all the characters who had lived, loved and loathed within a whole world of imagination that the Dome Authorities had allowed in place of screens could only be discovered if a series of clues and Nostradamus-type conundrums were solved, leading, eventually, without too much unnecessary confusion, to the cellar in question. Why Tricia (in her jeans) had been chosen was as result of there not being a choice at all. Prophecies were like that, lieutenants of fate.
It was also set in stone that the Turke family and loosely-related in-laws (who had already arrived at the museum) would be present—otherwise, there would be some glitch worse than any antique bug could possibly supply even by extrapolation.
So, all was ready. Except there weren't enough Turkes. Somehow, one of Tricia's third cousins removed by latent expediency had not turned up. Nobody noticed. There had to be exactly one thousand passwords, each learned by the Turkes in attendance, in advance, in secret, in isolation and in insulated perpetuity. All to be spoken together by Turkes, as one word, representing the novel's opening salvo, its first thousandfold hybrid of letters illuminated by solitary hermit monks...
As the front cover creaked open under top-heavy Tricia's fair hand, the jalopy by the kerb started rolling forward, at first slow, then quicker, as the 999 Turkes realised they were in its path (the book's plinth being established, as pre-ordained by its follow-ups, in the vicinity of the traffic lights further down Museum Street)—
There was a great cheer. At least nobody would now be forced to read any of the sequels.
END
AN ARITHMETIC ANGST
When the saviour was due to conduct a sermon on the Mount, he had been warned in advance by the almighty that this was going to be the most important one of all. The sermon on the Mount, in fact, so he'd better have something pretty good up his sleeve to deliver. Imagine the saviour's consternation, then, when he arrived on the Mount, only to find just a bedraggled couple of non-entities waiting for him. You could not even call them a tête-à-tête, let alone a crowd. Although the saviour had blessings up his sleeve, he produced a rabbit instead.
"Go forth and multiply!" he commanded the audience.
And in the circumstances that was a very wise thing to have said.
I forgot I had a pen. If I hadn't, why would have I tried to commit all this to memory? Nothing short of a dictaphone or cassette player or reel-to-reel recorder was needed. Or even an answer-machine somewhere at the end of a telephone line. Yet, why did posterity need to be told in the exact words conveyed to me by the potential corpse's mouth?
Then, I suddenly recalled the pen—lying in its case's bed of silk—my old school prize, nib still sharp, barrel hopefully brimming with indelible ink: its steel lever at the side prime for the pen's plunging into another black bottle, if the need should arise during my interminable scratching, scratching that was guided by the narrow feint lines of the foolscap.
I could have killed myself for such an act of stupidity. The parrot fashion grappling with the corpse's last message, the tussling with the long words, trying to get my tongue into gear, switching on hidden vocabulary sumps in my mind, rehearsing the rhymes and wherefores of each mysterious syllable—finally, giving myself elocution lessons for fear of the curtain rising and the audience sitting in silent expectation for my recital as a corpse's understudy.
All this time, there lay the pen and there leafed the paper in the untidy draughts of the concert-hall and, what was more, there grew the empty space of time in which to start my scrawl.
Now, as the corpse’s apotheosis draws closer, I'm still struggling to recall the very last words, before it became the swordthrust's victim amid the weltering blood's blackness. It grasped my wrist with a paralytic's last gasp—and asked: "Where is the pen?"
As if it knew my memory played it false.
I smiled and answered: "The murderer has it."
I would not have smiled, had I heard the whirring camera.
The saviour's moustache had taken well, despite only having recently stopped shaving. The mirror certainly did it justice, judging by the reflection. After his day on the Mount, he twiddled the upper lip to and fro as if he were a cat who had suddenly discovered that the spiky itches that had irritated him—since Christianity began—were whiskers. But the face was his own, with pitiful eyes that spoke terrible memories.
A boy raised his desk-lid and took out his Scripture books, trying to watch the teacher watching him trying to be unseen. He'd forgotten his most important item: the neat-writing exercise book which he'd inadvertently left near the oven at home when his mother told him to turn the gas down for fear of the roast charring. He remembered forgetting it there.
Well, of course, there was the rough-working book still in his desk—a book of thick wood-knotted pages upon which he was meant to work out ideas, to practise joined-up writing, to test sums for answers and, most importantly, to exercise his faith in a narrow and faint Creation.
Well, this rough book had been issued to him at the beginning of term, along with the neat-writing exercise book, the latter sporting a red glossy cover, an allotted space on the front for his name and class, together with times-tables and weight-equivalents printed on the back. So, today, he had to pretend his rough book was this glossy red neat book, or else the teacher would come down on him like a ton of bricks. Or was it a hundredweight?
He riffled in mock bravado through the bulk of his roughwork that sprawled between a good number of the thick-sliced pages. Doodlings, in the main. Pretence at practice made perfect. Rehearsed religions. Regurgitated arithmetic. Random numbers masquerading as difference, division, product and aggregate. Graffiti in the shape of someone raising the whole arm at an impossible geometrical angle of salute. It was, after all, during the war years that memorabilia of his schooldays scrawled themselves thus on blotchy narrow-lined paper, rough to the touch as well as to the rough end of a lacklustre pen. A scratchy nib and exploding blots. Cartwheels. End-to-end stick men. Star designs. Instinctive rules-of-thumb. Monstrous concretions of back-of-the-mind abstractions. Scribble become a nightmare with just one last intuitive stroke of the crayon to create another stick man stapled upon a cross of sticks.
But, then, there were the spit-smudged pencil portraits of the girl he loved in the next desk—portraits looking more like her insect sister.
He came unto my dream, a real jaws of a man. Toting six-shooters, he came right up to my face with not even a bye or leave; he leered into my mouth as if he were a dentist.
"Hey! What you want?" I spluttered. "Step outside if you want to sort something out."
I had forgotten we were already outside. Infuriatingly, he failed even to deign a single reply.
"WHAT YOU WANT? WHAT YOU WANT? HAVE SOME RESPECT!" This my splutter had turned into a full-blooded screech.
He showed his own sharkfin teeth in a silent version of a smiling reply.
"What are you doing in my dream, anyway?" I whispered, having decided that low profiles were all the rage—and no doubt the best policy with this ugly customer.
He spoke with a slickness: "Perhaps, I should ask you that particular question, as it's your dream, after all."
Evidently there was a lot of soul to search since, if I could not take responsibility for my own dream, I must have lived in a poor world disguised as rich reality.
I spoke again between gritted teeth: "Well ...errr ...what I mean to say is, you look like a man who knows his own mind—but, thinking about it, here you are claiming to be a mere pawn on the chessboard of my dream."
I was sure that he would have no answer to that little conundrum of a dilemma. Indeed, he beat a retreat, accompanied by a Red Indian; the latter, in full war-dress, had been previously unnoticed by myself: evidently stalking the cowboy and myself amid the scrubroot desert. Yet I had also failed to notice the desert itself—but that was surely too dreary for a resplendent dreamer such as myself to have dreamed as the dream's backdrop. Perhaps it did not matter, because I hoped to wake up shortly—with at least one white shard of wisdom removed from my gum-holster.
What was that corpse's name? He turned from the mirror, still finger-testing the moustache he was growing beneath his nose. She'd been dead now for ages. Many of her sort were killed during the war. In ovens.
He examined his hands and the arithmetic agony redoubled. Only two hands. Non-entities, both. Lines of life palmed off on ill-considered futures. An aggregate of near-miss digits. Fingers bent like claws. Tens without units. Stars without shape. Decimalisation. Decimation. The rough with the smooth. Pitiful eyes like a cat's as it was about to be put to sleep. Whiskers still flicking after death. Numb numbers in subjection.
He had really taught the girl, hadn't he? The arthritic age. Semitic sums of subtraction. Mere semantics. Whatever the case, the teacher shouldn't have smacked him for proving that religion was never neat.
It was such a stinker of a cold, it felt as if I were sniffing cowshit all day long. I decided to leave the office at lunchtime, to give myself a breather. In fact, surrounding the building, there were some quiet country lanes that were rather pleasant at this time of the year. Despite the proximity to the M25 Ring, it was easy to imagine being in the depths of the Welsh hills—so peaceful, so lonely, so...
Abruptly, I spotted a large crane in the distance, one of those huge monstrosities which swivelled their T-crosses in slow swathes. It seemed to be constructing next to nothing in the middle of next to nowhere, since the base of the vertical stalk of girders was concealed by a meadowy ridge.
There was no sound of an engine (or whatever was used to drive such outlandish contraptions) but the grinding clatter of the turning tower was clearly audible, but only as if I were hearing the echoes rather than its source. My stroll was by its very nature a circular one: well-trodden by those occasions when I'd built up sufficient hours on the flextime clock at work. I usually chose sunny lunchtimes ... but today was a little overcast. I was, however, trying to pump the bilge of my head rather than obtain an all over tan! And what was more, there was the added advantage that the endemic cow stench of the countryside was not noticeable, since I'd been snorting a home-grown twin nostril version of it all morning, whilst goggling at the office VDU screen...
I laughed out loud. I was not an office worker, but a murderer. I couldn't even convince myself as to my innocence. I had pointlessly told myself that the crane was somehow peculiar, mysterious, uncanny, ghostly ... knowing all the time it was actually employed by the corpse I had murdered and her camera crew, all of whom were close-by over the ridge.
And a corpse murdered is more than just a corpse.
But, surely, the crane's revolving crucifix arm had for some time been a customary feature of my mini-rambles, spoiling the otherwise idyllic ambience of lunchtime. I returned to the office with my back-brain snot reasonably uncurdled. After slotting in my flextime key for the duration, I spent the afternoon pretending to be a whole load of numbers on a screen out-staring a dull-eyed female corpse who was pretending to me.
I find it more difficult to say thank you than goodbye. But what I find always impossible to say is never.
It's OK where there're no speech marks to spotlight such words' sayability. But when I'm called upon to stick a chest, throat, tongue, teeth and lips into the fray, I think I'd rather choke on my last dying words: "I love you."
Life's fragility centres on one's head. Even the best of visored crash-helmets cannot expunge fears of toppling cranes, head-on collisions, earthquakes, metal girders slipping off backs of lorries straight into one's windscreen, sharpened pen-nibs slipping into the eyeball...
For some people, it is easy to put such fragility concerning their heads out of their minds, simply by means of the rough and tumble of normal existence—but resulting in the wear and tear of mental processes to the extent that they cannot even worry about such matters, let alone think straight.
Once, I saw a person staring blankly into the distance, with tiny serrated nib-blades being wielded from inside the head, cutting round the eye sockets...
It was a pity that I was too senile to notice it was a reflection on blank a computer-screen. Thankfully, though, I did not need to fret about my murderer since the crane let my face fall to the narrow feint paper and eye-lined a last incriminating message. I loved you. With no speechmarks. Nor blessings.
LOCKER ROOM with Margaret B. Simon
When they put me (the man in white with glass eyes) into the freezing compartment I shredded a hole in his lapels but he got away so they changed their minds about procedures.
Banging behind me always: the voices the boomdurm boom a durmaboom! Wall to wall to wall to wall with these four stress fracture failures delete compose icons (he comes to inspect me) I tolerate the disgusting routine. Him to me in four years. Language that is mean.
To escape, I concentrate on recalling a place by an ocean, surrounded by green glades. I was supposed to meet someone there for the annual holiday celebrations. My family was to attend. I remember a family. My father, and my three sisters and a white-haired female. I’d bought a new shirt for the occasion at one of the local Hiphop shops, and shaved for the first time in months. Cut off the tags, swallowed the receipt.
But when I got there, I found Old Tom Mahler was to be smoked from his erstwhile locker room (now a coal bunker) by the fostered forces of his daughter, wife and mother. Old Tom was my father’s older brother. The women, my three wide-apart sisters, although they would have denied any such connections, for obvious reasons.
Tom'd probably blink wildly upon staggering out into the late afternoon sunshine: amazed to see that I was a member of the crowd that had mustered since early morning ... on hearing that good old dependable Tom had threatened some form of felo de se. If even men like Tom could consider just a smidgin of self-annhilation, what chance others? Depressions being two a penny these days, half the world should have met their maker in this fashion long before the likes of Tom, or so we the crowd thought.
But none could quite believe Tom's choice of venue. Secreting himself in his bunker and waiting ... just the sheer waiting for the Heavenly tip-lorry to disgorge its freight of Earth's black curds upon him.
To my surprise, Tom was not out to greet us upon our arrival. Yet to be sure, the usual amenities were exchanged; a few slaps on the back, a kiss on the cheek from pimply-thin daughter, fat wife, faded mother. I headed for the wet bar, without waiting to be asked. Make it to fake it yourself, I always say, and I announced as much between pouring and drinking several tumblers of Absolute and tonic, with a twist of lime. I’d brought the lime and a bottle of Absolute. Our families never serve alcohol, though several are closet drunks. Quel surprise?
Eventually, I found myself wandering about in search of Tom’s new Locker Room. Not because I was curious, but because I was slightly drunk and very bored. Quite abruptly, I felt a falling sensation as the earth opened up momentarily and took me into its dark, gaping maw. That was the last of the sunlight I was to see for four days, as it turned out. I’d found old Tom’s new Locker Room.
As the coal dust cleared, I could see I’d interrupted Tom playing strip poker with four zombies. Up to his old tricks, obviously on a roll. Three of the four had lost both their hands by now and the other one was bone naked. Only one among them wore white hair.
Meanwhile, Tom's above-ground womenfolk had searched the house long and high for some sign of his living body ... but none thought of his deepest den of dens ... until the puppy-thin daughter tossed her hoop randomly round the yard and it glided like a dream through a narrow gap between the hinged slats of the coal bunker door.
To the pompom daughter, the rooms of the house were dark enough. So, imagine her consternation when she heard stifled breathing from inside the bunker as she approached to rescue her hoop. If she'd known it was the breathing of her father, the terror of the situation may have reduced. Thank Heaven, zombies couldn’t breathe even if they wanted to do so.
"Mummy, mummy, fat mummy," the pimply-dimply daughter screamed, as she escaped into the house. But none answered, for none admitted being the one thus called. The sun had come round to the bunker's side of the house. It fell in streams of golden light, bathing the early evening in an aura of non-reality. The leading lights of the neighbourhood shuffled into knots of further onlookers, as Tom’s womenfolk sidestepped into the assumed roles of Earth Mother, Half Daughter and Sibling Wife. Each hung upon the same set of constricting bones. With muffled voices, the onlookers waited until the twilight snuffed, dispositioning the bonewomen’s frames, sucking them into one unholy, darkest of the Darkness Pit. Then everyone went home to fornicate, dance and/or drink themselves into oblivion, as usual.
My concentration on this escape-dreaming increased as old Tom stood up and came towards me, smiling in welcome. I was, indeed within his safehold, and he assured me further of this fact by hugging me close to his boney chest. Then, taking me by the elbow, he gave me a tour of his locker room, which contained several caverns, some decorated with plaques and trophies relating to the poker games (skulls, and the like). When I questioned Tom about how he’d met those who chose to challenge him, he pointed to a vast hole in the darkness of the main chamber.
“They comes from dar,” he confided. “Down dar, where dey is, and all’s I do is go boomdrum booma durmaboom on me mine, here, and up comes one and another, by an’ by. An’ we sits here, what’s of them and all of me, and we play cards, y’see?”
“What a fine place you have here, Tom,” I replied. “I rather like it. Do you mind if I stay?”
“Yep and none,” said Tom. “This is your four days on holiday. More than this, ye’ll not get right about.”
Four years, four days, four hours, four ... A number without a noun to master is merely nothing, however big.
And so it went. Tom handed me a fresh deck to cut and in doing so, I noted that the queens bore a remarkable resemblance to his rumpty-dumpty Daughter (hearts) and Sibling Wife (spades). The queen of diamonds had three faces (my three sisters) and the last—the queen of clubs—faceless.
The newly kindled fires inside the house found exits for their heavy smoke, as the main chimneys expelled it fitfully ... thus darkening the sky in tune with day's war with night. Having himself by now fed on coal till his belly was a ruptured carrier bag, Tom eventually floated free, in equal ghostly garments of choking grey ... and disappeared into the gaping cellar of night, the proud wielder of death's gilt-lit halo.
Those who were left below wended back to their tasks and re-apportioned roles; they soon reminded themselves that ghosts can only appear in dreams.
The pump-easy girl pointed into the sky at the fading ring of golden light. Thunder roared: boom dooma doom. Bim bom, as Mahler says. (Who’s Mahler?) None could reconcile her lisping tears with any feasible sadness ... if it were possible for feasibility to encompass sadness at all. I bet my total Free Will on four of a kind or a full house rather than an oubliette or locker room.
“Only God has the power truly to become a Goddess.” - Rachel Mildeyes, from Four Halos and Hoops
BRUNCH AT THE CHARNEL CAFE with Margaret B Simon
As I was out maundering early today-I like that word, maundering-for it's what I do when I'm not up to writing obituaries-I chanced upon a
new restaurant, the open air type down on 44th and Lincoln; a few blocks from the corner, you see, there it was! Welcoming gargoyles circled the flower pots blooming with lotus and some other sort of plant that I found quite profoundly beautiful.
So thus, I ventured through the iron gating, as all appeared to be in accord-a party of ladies dressed in suits, seated on tombstones laid flat, with one for the backing of each seat-a party of businessmen taking the day off-or politicians, it didn't matter to me. I see them all, one way or another in due fashion.
Behind me, I heard the gate snap shut. Before my astonished eyes, everyone was stark naked! EVERYONE! And I felt a gentle rush of breeze, and glancing down, I saw my own boney knees and-blushing-covered my crotch with my hands.
Still, this spot lured me closer to sit on one of the stones, which, to my amazement, felt supremely cushioned. Most comfortable. Immediately, a waiter appeared at my elbow to offer an "early brunch" menu which I noted was embossed in gold lettering. The prices were most reasonable, and since I was rather jagged after my walk, I ordered a cup of cafe au lait 'au supreme', according to the menu, that is. It didn't occur to me that my wallet was also incognito at the time. "No charge, Madame," smiled the waiter. "Today is our Grand Opening. Your meal is on the...ah, house, so to speak."
The coffee was brought to me within a few moments, much to my pleasure. While I was waiting for my order (which, as I say, was very quickly served), I cast my eyes about the premises. Staring beyond the leggo false-o-heart femmes, the silhouettes now devoid of their Neiman Markus suits-still conducting business as usual, I supposed ... and studied the images of stone within the garden view. These were new, totally new-must have also been imported from somewhere....so I thought, then.
Gargoyles and skulls, the Grand Reaper, the Widow of Widdersfield-all depicted in broad daylight there, in this sidewalk cafe. This NEW sidewalk cafe.
Wishing I'd remembered to bring my camera, for some insane reason; wishing I'd remembered to leave my taste buds at home for a reason so sane, I wondered if, after all, I wasn't mad. The coffee grounds were just that. Bitty, nuggety, chokelets of dust and ash. Somebody's ashes! With hot scalding water thrown on to make almost half palatable. It wasn't madness, but murders with which I needed to concern myself, then. Murders, ink grains and splinters coating my outer as well as inner throat.
Even my boney knees had spillage sticking out in stubby grits. Stumpy fingernails. Toenails hardened to turtle bone. It was as if my inner skeleton were turning to stone, leaving the flesh to become gristle. Gritty gristle. Grating as I tried to move from the seat. Grinding my teeth in a pain I didn't feel as pain but I knew was pain greater than I've ever been pained with before.
"Everything to your satisfaction, Madam?" The waiter had sidled up obsequiously, except he hadn't really said 'Madam', but "Muddiness", now I remembered...after the event. It's strange how normal things we -when they actually happen-remember. It's like describing an automobile accident-but even stranger than the strangeness of the fact of life I'm recounting about how strange things become after the event, an event which was originally so straightforward, simple and run-of-the-mill.
And now I can't even tell it straight! In the quiet of my own home, later, the events of the day gather strangerness, as well as dust. Perhaps nothing strange happened. And now that I've noted that I'm nude, I merely think I was nude all day. Nudity seems serial.
The cafe soon produced some nicer coffee after I sent the bad lot back to where it came from in the cocina. Olé. One of the older customers had joined me. He, too, I recall, was nude. His coffee was blacker than mine. He had ground a pepper mill over it as seasoning. He used a trivet of green mustard as a finger bowl.
"A new eating-place is always worth trying at least once," he said, trying to make small talk. But I would have none of his trivia.
"I feel like death warmed up," I responded with a forced grimace, because I was holding back the smile for later. I suspected him of being a businessman. I could tell this by his demeanor, despite the lack of clothes.
"Indeed?" My companion wiped his moustache with a checkered napkin. I do believe he was concealing a smirk. I opened my mouth to ask his name and before I could utter a word, he began, "Allow me to introduce myself. Folger Rim, at your service. And you, Madam?" I hestiated for an instant, then told him the first name that popped into my head. "Whatley. Alicia Fortunas-Whatley, Mr. Rim".
"Very good, Ms. Whatley. And may I suggest we try the house specialty, for our culinary delight of this fine spring morning!" He pointed to a dish listed on the menu with three red stars surrounding its title, which I couldn't decipher. It appeared to be in French, only I am quite sure I've never seen or heard of tortore du terre. The price wasn't listed. I asked Mr. Rim what it was, but he shook his head, putting a finger to his mottled lips. "Trust me, Alicia-if I may call you Alicia?-trust me, you'll find it quite unique."
I tried to protest, as I'd already placed my order. The waiter (again beside my elbow) bowed to us both, assuring me that my order would be cancelled immediately, should I agree to Mr. Rim's excellent suggestion.
And thus, in this stranger than strange dreamscape, I recall the waiter bringing us a dish, and I recall tasting it. Devouring it, asking for another serving!
I'm sure that all of this couldn't have possibly happened. It was, after all, only an omelette with apples and cheeses. Not what you'd think. You'd think it would be rotten meat, served up straight from the grave. You'd think that.
It was all so perfectly-normal. The dish, that is. What was so truly strange about being there (and unseasonably nude, serially NUDE) was that there was no accent on sex.
I shrugged my shoulders and tucked in. Folger Rim merely smiled before remarking, "You are a real picture, sitting here eating like that. Only Gauguin could have caught you so-ah,-alive! with shadow-play of color cast by our hyabiscus blooms. Marvelous!" (Or did he, on reflection, say "Gorgon?"-I can't quite recall.)
Suddenly the strangeness was explained. Stones and all. Coating both my throats. Even the word clattered to the cobbles like cryogenic (death not warmed up) curds. Would I never wake from the dreamscape?
"Will I?" Bone all through. Alicia's brunch.
CHLOE’S ELBOW with Dawn Andrews
This scene runs over and over, luminous, although its edges have dissolved in time like a sugar cube in tepid water. There is a beach, sand glassy and brittle under a huge sun, a blazing supernova. How we met. She was drowning. I was there. "Look, don't struggle – I'll help you if you let me!" Her arms flailing, her elbow in my eye, the crack of bone on bone. Then she relaxed – the shiner she gave me. How come such a little squirt could bruise me so easily? After I finally managed to haul her out of the water we both lay on the sand, panting and exhausted, as if we had been having sex for ten hours. Straight.
They lingered, those tale-telling violet marks I had to constantly explain away. I claimed it was a riding accident that I had suffered from off the back of some godforsaken unbroken steed masquerading as a child’s near-pony of a pet. When I forgot the story and replaced it with another figment of my imagination (being lodged against a car by another car) I must have become the world's most accident-prone man overnight, my wife acidly commented. Yet I hated it when they faded. After she died, I'd even pinch myself to recreate them, then cry my eyes out.
How much can be reanimated, from the past? If I save another struggling girl, out of her depth, will it be the same? I keep wondering if I can make it happen again. Change the ending – all still passionate and very alive. I begin to see where Doc Frankenstein was coming from. And the freak with the living doll, Coppelia. Hey, doc. Cop a load of this! Cop? Dr Coppelius. That was his name. Swanilda – well, that was a different story. She played fast and loose with all puppet-masters, at the best of times, give or take the omniscience of Him who could only create her as a human, let alone a puppet. Give a man a break.
But she never did. Demanded perfection, always. The pure line of the jaw, not a bone out of place. Only her enigmatic sexuality saving her from the scrap heap of miscellaneous parts, piling up in the basement, awaiting incineration. Of course, her flirting ways were a constant threat, and maddening to her creator. She finally went too far. Lost the game. Snake eyes! Chloe had fractured her elbow. My wife, Swanilda, did die – I wasn’t sure, looking back at my notes, whether Chloe had died, or Swanilda had died: certainly one of them had done so. By composing fictions (like a latter day Borges), I have thrown up the luck charms and they’ve come down as dice. Chloe is the winner. Cube dice chipped off her old elbow.
She lies in the grass, trying to read a book that flickers on and off in the deepening twilight. Of how Mayans made dice and other gaming tools from the bones and skins of the sacrifice victims they tortured. Chloe knows she is a winner only in name. The stakes of love are high, and losing sometimes fatal. Poor Swanilda! Her pale blue eyes still radiate calm fire, cobwebs forming between her delicate brows. Chloe is an echo of someone else. Her elbow an echo of another elbow. Perhaps her own. Let me come clean. I compose music. The notes on the staves are like puppets. Crotchets and minims bouncing along the trampoline themes, heads butting, tails twining, keys turning, quaver waves surfing. This is the tale of one special composition. Chloe's Elbow, in four movements. A reanimation of soul from sound.
Soul from sound. Women can live their lives out as echoes of another presence. (We puppet masters rule the game, despite minor losses.) Did you know that Chloe and Swanilda were at school together? They were rivals, even then, the games they played – Chloe was the champion gymnastic dancer, Swanilda the vaulting princess – Watch her approach at a graceful run, pleated skirt wild above white thighs as she leaps high to reveal regulation navy-blue knickers, hands firm upon the leather horse, golden charm-bracelet jingling. As are the nerves of the gamesmaster who watches, breathless. Perfect landing, all smiles. Chloe takes to the floor, dances free-style, the music swells, the pattern of the music skips and misses a beat, as the heart yearns the dance progresses, even Chopin, he of the demonic hands, has a hard time keeping up! The girl spins like a dervish. Scriabin’s piano music next, more off-the-wall than Chopin, despite the obvious similarities, does sound from the tannoy. Has a strange metallic texture, as if broadcast direct from the ballroom of a submerged ocean liner. The epic tenderness of lost pleasures. Other girls clamber over a huge webwork of wall bars in tune to some internal rhythm not made obvious by the music, yet with so many sweaty show-offs crawling thus vertically towards their imputed Heaven, there was no dimunition in the attention span of the audience of proud parents towards the antics of Chloe and Swanilda in free-style abandon: a many-handed clapping building in time to the undercurrents that several sensed the music held, if not the dancing itself. The religious frenzy that sheaths the dance Spain and North Africa, the arabic delight in rippling flesh, the beating heart, open upon the dancefloor, that the dancer responds to, evermore in tune with the audience, wielding unveiled desires. Gymnastic dancing was relative to both performer and watcher only inasmuch as it was quite separate from either. A sculpture. A single thing called dance. The puppet-master’s vision was one that sketched their shapes in grounded free-fall without any danger to life or limb – a skein of independent images overmapping the two girls’ real attempts at the choreography in their heads. Elbows clashing, heads butting, in the overenthusiasm of their finale as a duet.
They cling to each other as the music ends. Dazed azure stares into greyest smoke, a painful understanding. Chloe has cuts on her hands. Swanilda'sface is scratched. Wounded by the freedom gifted to them by the music. The leather horse does not even blink. It is sleek with sweat. It imagines the future: a sea scene within its equine skull that betokens both a near drowning and the shuttling lifeforce reconfigured as music – in an attempt to stave off that watery extinction. Chloe's horse desiring to swim out, one of those horses that love to swim, at the expense of the rider who clings for dear life to a seaweed-entwined saddle, the wetness and heat of the animal neck against her face. The night before she remembers as if in a dream, the music, La Mer, waves pulse forever within the notes as if held prisoner by the mind that can sit before this immensity, and turn it into wriggling creatures of pure sound. Her mouth filled with the acrid bitterness of death, her eyes stinging pearls, full fathom five.
Chloe and Swanilda finally faded or still fade from any overlapping. Chloe became an artist of fine distinction. The dice came down in her favour, all manner of many-sided geometricisms that were once popular in role-playing games of the late twentieth century. She often incorporates their bone configurations in her art. Dragons and dungeons in freeform abstractions. Marienbad nuggets in random ricochets off their own surfaces as well as the ground they brushed.
Swanilda married Dr Coppelius. Schools are only for a meagre portion of contemporaneity. She and Chloe couldn’t possibly have gone through the whole of their lives clipping their joints in accidents of dervish or dance. Heads were not made of rubber. Clips and slaps of the skull rind would inevitably bring brain damage. Their girlish love for each other could never have borne such comings together.
Dr Coppelius was a dollmaker. He made Looby Loo for Andy Pandy, then created for her a soft boy called Teddy as a companion, because Andy Pandy was too preoccupied with picnic hampers. Swanilda was model for most. Her dancing was a diversion, though, since puppets or dolls rarely moved of their own volition … except perhaps, at their optimum, in dreams. Gymnastic wastrels and waifs he often ragged out into human shapes from excess bedding. He made horses into shoes, and shoes into horses. Or, boots, perhaps, bearing in mind the mane and neck and laced up jaw-bits. Vaulting was a pleasure deeper than leapfrog.
Meanwhile, Chloe became a long-distance swimmer, as well as an artist. She felt her elbow ends and kneecaps were safer in the water. A slomo dance of the forward crawl. She saw the coral beds as an artform she yearned to paint for real. Crags and fucus standing up on the canvas with the soft geometry of exotic airfish weaving between their furrier, seaweedier bits.
Chloe and Swanilda finally faded or still fade from any overlapping. Salting their melancholies. Chloe became an artist of fine distinction. The dice came down in her favour, all manner of many-sided geometricisms that were once popular in role-playing games of the late twentieth century. She often incorporates their bone configurations in her art. Dragons and dungeons in freeform abstractions. Marienbad nuggets in random ricochets off their own surfaces as well as the ground they brushed. In this way she creates scenes that turn black white and white black, the wanton feathers around her throat clinging to the possibilities of change, yet a theme that in reality had one outcome. Last year. Whatever happened? Happened. She was inconsolable, wished to forget. But in creating, only remembered with agonising clarity. More games. Swanilda married Dr Coppelius. Schools are only for a meagre portion of contemporaneity, teaching girls how to please and simper and lie. She and Chloe couldn't possibly have gone through the whole of their lives clipping their joints in accidents of dervish delight. Heads were not made of rubber. (Not yet.) Clips and slaps of the skull rind would inevitably bring brain damage, and this they could ill-afford. Their girlish love for each other could never have borne such comings together. Dr Coppelius was a dollmaker. He made Looby Loo for Andy Pandy, then created for her a soft boy called Teddy as a companion, because Andy Pandy was too preoccupied with picnic hampers. The desire for picnics usually an excuse for rural coupling, yet Andy wore an abstracted air, always. Fiddling with the salt cellar he would lie under a giant horse-chestnut, lost in the blue while Teddy and Looby Loo messed around in the licentious rhodedendrons.
Swanilda was a model wife. Her dancing a playful diversion, using the four-poster as a vaulting horse…. though, since puppets or dolls rarely moved of their own volition…. except perhaps, at their optimum, in dreams. Gymnastic wastrels and waifs she often ragged out into human shapes for excess bedding, although never going to De Sadean extremes. He made horses into shoes, and shoes into horses. Or, boots, perhaps, bearing in mind the mane and neck and laced up jaw-bone. Vaulting was a pleasure deeper than leapfrog. (And good for the complexion.)
Meanwhile, Chloe became a long-distance swimmer, as well as an artist. She dreamed of making it to the island; she knew it existed, that place where magic taints the air and the dream-capped towers, where sweet sounds drive the beasts to distraction. She felt her elbow ends, kneecaps and other sea-changed bits were better off in the water, away from civilisation, the temptations of excess. She scoured old junks shops, looking for a map. A slomo dance of the forward crawl. Even on land, now, she had the elegance of a mermaid. Like Esther Williams she kept her make-up immaculate, nobody knew how. She saw the coral beds as an artform she yearned to paint for real. Rich and Strange, as the voyages existing in the barnacled mind of Peter Grimes. Crags and fucus standing up on the canvas with the soft geometry of exotic airfish weaving between their furrier, seaweedier bits. She started to use collage, satins, laces and even the skins of rabbit and mink, to create the depth of thought she needed, then objects that only she and those closest to her could ever understand. She became 'obscure'. Moribund art dealers with care-worn moustaches would frown at her lack of monetary ambition. And she would watch her name, etched upon the sand, erased by each new tide. Then she would dance, and laugh. The freedom of being nameless!
Yet our names are violet marks. Not tattoos, not even everlasting bruises … from the fight or the fight against rescue from drowning. Only puppets can be tugged clear by the strings – or by the hands up their nethers.
The horses vaulted through the waves. Those exercising waves, stretching their meniscus curves. Allegro, Adagio, Scherzo, Allegro. Two halves of one woman tugging back at the strings that a Doctor had once pulled free. Edge to edge they re-healed their well-heeled pizzicato souls. The only cop out was not knowing where the strings ended. Brass and percussion, too. Yet the egg-timer allowed the sand free rein through the middle joint. Time to go home, Andy is waving goodbye, goodbye. Chloe’s Echo. The shiner she gave me.
BROWN STOKER
You must build a wall. The voice was so quiet, I wasn't sure I had heard it properly. Build a wall? Why a wall? And why me? And you must build it now. I had evidently mistaken voices for thoughts. That's what happens when a mind goes awol. Either that or I was hearing voices, I supposed.
Susie soon pulled me together. I had begun to depend on her more and more ever since the onset of the troubles. Russian money wasn't legal tender any more. And Chinese Walls no longer effective. If Money was my car, Susie was my brakes. Everything was cutting fast and loose. Everybody knew everybody else. And even cellars were not dark enough for cleaving meat. Vegetarian hells.
"Thinking can be dangerous," I thought she said.
I nodded as she looked quizzically through my desk diary. I had several appointments today, most of which must have appeared dubious, bearing in mind the various financial scandals currently involving most of those due to be met.
"You can't see him," she scorned, without even the hint of a scowl.
"Why not?"
"He's been shipping T-bones from Samarkand."
"Such lily-livered laws were meant to be broken, Susie. Come off it, if everybody went around paying such lip service...."
She went back to touring my schedules—as if she were making personal appearances by virtual proxy. I could see her eyes rolling back into her head.
I put my hand under the desk and lifted a brick from the floor. Once a gold ingot now simply a worthless foundation stone that landed on my desk with a vicious clunk, having slipped through my weakening fingers. It even had a wedge-free zone in its top for the cement. I stooped to fetch another. The security authorities would once have had kittens, given the defaults of their erstwhile jobsworthness. Now they merely connived with any form of laundering, even to be found regularly credit-card sharpening in the cellar. Amid smoke and heady booze smells and shovelled shit. One or two even honed bones.
By the time Susie had polished off my laptop, I was hidden behind a veritable high-rise of low finance. A virtual house of cards.
Now you've built it, time for love.
Susie was sprawled over showing her shameless stocking-tops. The scowl had by now resumed its own natural territory, wrinkling up her cosmetics like crumbly aspirin.
"Another day, another dollar."
Her hen-bones stuck out through various orifices, crumbling too. A particularly vicious T-junction was where the money mites swarmed from her bowels. A dissheveled security guard eventually found her light enough to drag down to the cellar.
I winked at him. Give him his dues, he saluted back. He'd once been my official chauffeur. Now a brown stoker.
THE CRIME with G. Lewis
As I walked away from the cinema I was still overwhelmed by the film I had just seen. Little did I know that it was going to have a profound effect on my life.
As usual, on my way home, I called into my favourite public house. Charlie the barman was his customary cheery self as he bid me welcome.
“Been to the cinema, Tom? What was it like?”
“It was very good as movies go,” I replied. “A bit thought-provoking, but it was entertaining.”
“I thought so, too,” said the young man who joined me at the bar. He was a complete stranger but I didn’t think he was being intrusive. He was easy to talk to as we exchanged our thoughts about the film.
“Do you think it possible to commit such a crime?” I asked.
“It would take a lot of nerve to carry out,” he replied. “Need a lot of careful planning as well as all the right props.”
We had moved away from the bar to sit at one of the tables and our conversation turned to other aspects of the film, peppered with associated items of beer talk.
“You’re not suggesting that we two could commit a similar crime, are you?” I asked.
“Why not? Just a one off job.”
I couldn’t believe I was actually having this conversation – talking to a stranger about matters that would not normally cross my mind.
He could see I was slowly becoming uncomfortable.
“Come on, come on, let’s think about this. Let’s pretend we are in a film ourselves – as directed by someone we have no control over, so we should not feel guilty if we commit the crime. We simply follow the path he – or she – has set for us and maybe we won’t even go through with the crime. Hold back at the last moment. Not reach the thrilling climax. Like a bubble bursting.”
He smiled as I nodded. Suddenly, having just watched a cinema film about a perfect crime, here I was actually appearing in one, talking to a perfect stranger about committing this very crime!
The pub became very busy. Milling about were countless folk of all shapes and sizes, gripping jugs of amber liquid, shouting instead of talking, billowing with clouds of smoke, then laughing as they jocularly split from their various groupings to relieve themselves in the realms of near privacy elsewhere. I seemed to recognise one or two faces from the film…
I shook my head. I could not believe I was thinking what I was thinking. I turned back to my new found ‘friend’.
“Don’t worry, Tom,” he said.
“How do you know my name?”
“How do we know anything in this life of unexpected turnings and wild coincidences.”
He stood up and I followed suit. The pub was becoming very oppressive.
“I want you to meet someone,” he said. “A lady who knows a thing or two.”
We hit the cold night air of the pub’s car park. Standing by one of the vehicles – a black hunched shape that reminded me more of the Sixties bubble car than anything of more modern vintage – was a tall lady in evening dress and sporting a hat that would have been worthy of Royal Ascot.
This was bordering on the ridiculous – or was I dreaming? The last person anyone would think of meeting; such a lady whose outstretched hand I took in mine as introductions were made.
“This is Tom, Nadia,” said the man who was a stranger (stranger by the minute) until I heard the lady call him Edmund. At least I now had a name with which to take a handle on absurdity.
We walked back to the pub, but this time we entered the Lounge bar where there was comparative peace.
Our conversation ran the gamut of topics, other than the one I had earlier had
with Edmund, until the subject of the film came up again. It seemed that Nadia had seen the film and became interested when Edmund mentioned the crime and the possibility of getting away with it in real life. The biggest crime of all.
I was becoming bored with the subject knowing that I wouldn’t dream of entering a liaison to carry out such a crime anyway, so I swiftly changed the subject, before it managed to change me.
Commenting on the way Nadia was dressed, I asked if she had been to a wedding. Weddings always being happy hatty occasions.
“No,” she replied, “I have been to a ‘bit of a do’ up at Wakeland Hall until I remembered I had promised to meet Edmund here.”
She had taken off her hat by this time and I couldn’t help but remark how beautiful her hair was … a shame to hide it with any kind of hat.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she simpered.
I was getting along with her very well until I sensed that Edmund wasn’t pleased with the way things were going.
“Ah well,” he said, “it’s time we should be moving, Nadia,” then turning to me, he said: “Perhaps we can meet again, Tom, I am in this area often.”
Not expecting to meet him again, I merely said it would be my pleasure – without being specific in making arrangements.
Once they had left, it felt almost as if I had never met them at all. What was more, I could no longer see any faces in the pub’s crowd that remotely retained any lingering connection with the film … the film which I had viewed earlier in the Electric Cinema. Ah, yes, the Electric Cinema. Some place! A very old-fashioned picture house with a ticket kiosk straight from the ancient memories of an archetypal childhood. Words that were more grown-up, though, blurring exactly what I intended to mean.
No wonder – any film seen in there stayed put … fastened itself in the mind as well as the mind’s flickering eye.
I took slow sips at my pint, gloomily glancing at the neighbouring drinkers who suddenly – it seemed – had grown quieter, more surly, more sullen, more potentially comprehending of my deepest sophisticated thoughts. The rough and tumble of pub talk put away somewhere behind the gravity. No more hubbub. No longer the alcoholic connections. Nobody came. Nobody left. Their bladders must be fit to burst.
I shrugged. I was no longer in control of my wayward thoughts, until I was brought to full attention…
“Want to buy a bubble car, eh?”
The voice sounded grimly familiar. It was indeed – one of various drinking pals, the one who always mumbles into his beard as well as his beer. Talk about being the soul of the party – Ted Roberts was ever its death!
“Hiya, Ted, how are you?” I mustered a smile.
I saw you outside, Tom, staring at that dame with the bubble car.”
“Did you?”
“Yes, it looked as if she were trying to sell you that little buggy!”
“Really?”
“Yes – what were you doing outside alone with the likes of her?”
“Alone?”
What about that Edmund, I thought.
“Yes – she was very strange-looking with a hat as big as … that!”
Ted stretched his hands around the wide brim of his own imaginary headgear, in order to demonstrate.
“Where are you from?” I asked. “Where were you hiding? Where were you looking from?”
Ted, by now, had turned towards another frowning toper and was exchanging a few more dismal phrases with this ugly customer. I decided not to divert Ted’s attention back to me and I left the bar, ostensibly to spend a penny.
I walked past the door to the men’s toilets and out into the evening air. The freshness after the smoky lounge bar felt good as I set off for home some ten minutes walk away from the pub. My wife Ann would probably be watching TV and have something to say about my being later than usual.
I was about halfway home when I wished I had visited the men’s convenience before setting out, so I quickened my pace.
“I suppose you called in The Dog and Pheasant,” were the first words that greeted me as I entered our sitting room. “Did you meet someone there?” she asked in conclusion.
I was about to mention the two strangers I had met but held back to say: “Old Ted Roberts was there and the usual crowd, no one special.”
With that I hurried off to the bathroom as my need had become very urgent.
Returning to the sitting room, Ann had switched off the TV and looked like she was preparing to retire for the night, leaving me to make my usual cup of tea before I too would be calling it a day.
I switched on the TV to watch the late night news as I sipped my warming cup of tea.
I was surprised by the sound of the front door bell and on opening the door I was taken aback when I saw Edmund there.
“What on earth are you doing here at this time of night and how did you find out where I lived?”
“Charlie at the pub introduced me to someone called Ted who knew your address.”
There are some thoughts that often come to you at the drop of a hat, thoughts that you cannot actually land on the bank from the torrenting river of your mind. Not a stream of consciousness as such – more a white water rafting…
“The Postman Always Rings Twice,” was one such thought, taken from a million others, it seemed. The only thought I remembered thinking.
Again, I had the sensation of appearing in a film, having learned my lines and actions in many forgotten rehearsals. I even held a stage prop in my hand – the TV’s remote control.
Edmund suddenly stood aside, revealing Nadia – now hatless – who stood behind him, beaming – a gun in her hand … glinting viciously in the cruel shafts of stage lighting that forested down from the night sky.
I then realised that it was not a real gun at all – but my own novelty lighter that I must have left at the pub in the rush for the loo. A stage prop in the vague shape of an automatic weapon and when its trigger was pulled a flame would generously plume from the end of the barrel. Indeed, she had just lighted her own smoke with an adept flick of her thumb. Momentarily, I thought her cigarette holder was, if anything, a trifle ostentatious. And I was irritated that she had the effrontery to use my belonging in such a laissez-faire fashion.
The pair had not spoken at all, as she offered the return of the lighter. She held it out to me … smiling. Not a kind smile. More a sardonic grimace. Edmund had by now clicked his fingers … and, as if at his whim, the brazen lighting effects were swiftly doused. I gazed up into the blackness, expecting to see gantries carrying theatrical spots on runners. But, no, the gulf of emptiness was simply that … with the distant drone of a plane and the clatter of vanes.
Ann, by now, had approached from the well of our hallway and stood at my shoulder.
“Why don’t you invite your usual crowd in for some refreshments?” she asked in a somewhat stilted voice.
This was quite out of character for my dear Ann. She was usually wary of strangers. She was rather shy and retiring. I was her everything. But there were those unaccountable thoughts of mine. Those inappropriate imponderables again. Ann now seemed gregarious! Ann loved visitors! Ann loved entertaining! She pushed me aside to allow the forbidding couple to breach our defences by crossing the sacrosanct threshold of our marital home. I pocketed the remote and followed behind.
And all this without even a word from anybody … because I somehow doubted that Ann herself had said anything. I even doubted that the novelty lighter belonged to me.
Tom’s mind, too, was in a whirl, almost feeling as if he’d become a different person … but he managed to introduce the couple to his wife Ann. He had nothing in common with Edmund except their mutual thoughts about the film they had seen. Surely he wasn’t going to bring that subject up again!
“I hope you don’t mind the interruption, Tom,” Edmund said, “ but I could think of no one else to turn to. My car broke down just a few hundred yards from the Dog and Pheasant and in spite of everything I tried, the damn thing wouldn’t start again. We returned to the pub but there was no room there, so we had nowhere to stay the night. As I told you, your friend Ted gave us your address and here we are wondering if you can put us up for the night.”
Tom was flabbergasted by the cheek of the man and was rendered speechless as Ann said the couple could stay if they didn’t mind being split up. The single bedroom for Nadia and the settee in the lounge for Edmund, as their son and daughter were already asleep in the other bedrooms.
“Thank you,” said Nadia, “that will suit us fine. We are not in that kind of relationship. Just friends, that is all.”
They were actually giving accommodation to two virtual strangers and Tom was trying to keep his feelings of intrusion bottled up. What else could he do in the circumstances? He had to go along with Ann’s unexpected offer.
Time was when Tom knew himself as an individual with a definite handle on his own personal self. But now he felt he had become that face across the other side of a room or bar … a rippling reflection … a stranger … a stranger with a weak bladder … in whose body glove he had taken to live and breathe and simply be.
He took the gun from his pocket. Put it to the side of his head … tentatively. Took it away again. Put it back. Time and time again. He could hear the visitors mumbling in deep undercurrents within the hastily improvised guestroom above. Tom also heard his wife’s voice. She was up there with them, uncharacteristically trilling with laughter. Shush, or you’ll wake the kids. Some joke. Some charade, perhaps. Or acting out. The usual suspects talking of a trip to a point-to-point in the grounds of Wakeland Hall … then a revivalist meeting at the newly renovated Electric Cinema.
It seemed as if all the participants had known each other for years and years. Tom almost sensed he could hear Ted’s uncouth voice among them … and Charlie the barman … but at least those voices could be blamed on imagination. Whoever they were, though, they seemed to be hatching a plot or the pre-fabrication of a crime … a gratuitous ignition…
Tom pulled the trigger…
I was surprised that it did not emit a plume of flame to singe my sideboards. I watched, instead, a black filmy bubble slowly swell from the end of the barrel before it swiftly burst.
THE CHARADE...... with G Lewis
There was something about the blonde woman accompanying my wife and I as we rode upwards in the lift from the ground floor of a large exclusive department store. From a distance there probably would not have been any cause for suspicion, but, because of the close proximity, the hair was all wrong for the face, and the make-up, too, wasn’t just as it should be. When the response to my pleasantry about the weather came in a masculine tone, my wife glanced my way with a quizzical look. I believe at that moment we both came to the same conclusion; we had a man dressed up as a woman. It was my first experience of being close to a transvestite, and I felt distinctly ill at ease.
Previously we had lunched well in the ground floor restaurant. The spaghetti bolognese had been washed down with drinks and the final cup of coffee and we were in a hurry to reach the comfort rooms that we knew were on the tenth floor of the building. My wife had heard they were quite sumptuous and being pernickety about such things she wanted to avail herself of the facilities there rather than use the more public toilets on the ground floor. The tenth floor was reached and as we left the lift we were dismayed to see the other passenger followed us. We lingered a while to make sure he wasn’t heading for the toilets, and it was with relief my wife and I went our separate ways quickly as our need had now become most urgent.
Having done my duty, I left the loo...and it was with some surprise that I noticed the tall figure standing with his back to me in the hallway. He was looking from one of the store’s windows. His head of blonde hair began to bob as if he were acknowledging someone outside. But we were on the tenth floor! A window-cleaner in a cradle, then? I could not see anything over his shoulder beyond the plate-glass, merely the reflected cosmetics of the strange face to which my wife and I had stood so close in the lift. I even imagined hearing the slight hiss of what I guessed to be a whisper from his lips. Surely, he was not trying to talk to someone outside the sheer-faced building.
By this time, my wife having taken longer upon her ablutions, as is customary with those of the fair sex — had joined me in the hallway. She, too, gazed quizzically at the sight of someone conversing, apparently, with a tenth floor window! Abruptly, as if sensing we had both arrived, he swivelled upon precarious feet — and I noticed he was shod in the highest of heels I’d ever seen — and spoke quite kindly to us:-
“Do you want to be a millionaire?”
A Millionaire? What an odd question to ask of a perfect stranger, particularly from a man dressed in woman’s clothing. Still more than a little embarrassed I didn’t know what to say in answer to his question. I wasn’t about to tell him that I regarded myself as a millionaire already. But intrigued now with the whole situation I managed an answer to humour him, someone I now regarded as a bit of a nutcase.
“It would be rather nice to be a millionaire, what would I have to do to qualify for such a large amount of money?”
A question I knew I was going to regret as soon as I uttered the words. In little more than a conspiratorial whisper he said:- “There is an article on sale in the art department that is worth such a fortune. It seems obvious to me the store has no inkling of its true value. All I need from you is that you go in with me to purchase the painting which we could then put up for auction at Christies or one of the other auctioneers for valuable artifacts.
Now I knew I was dealing with a bit of a crank, and wanting to end the whole silly situation, I turned to Sarah, my wife, to say:- “Are you ready to go down to the ground floor dear?”
Then, turning back to face the ridiculous figure of a man in a woman’s garb, I said I wasn’t interested in his offer.
Moving quickly, in spite of his high heels he left the window and was confronting us, actually barring our way to the lift.
His eyes were pleading as he spoke.
“I’m not mad, this is a genuine offer, a once in a lifetime chance to make some real money.”
But why the charade of dressing up as a woman? If he were not mad then he was surely an eccentric of the highest order. It was as if my mind was being read.
“It is not a charade, you know.”
“Wait!” I said in a tone of voice that was quite out of character for me. I sensed that there was more to this ‘gentleman’ than met the eye.
I then questioned what I previously somehow ‘knew’ (as I had then put it) to be a ‘crank’. But my wife , by now, had seen I was faltering in my retreat from the outre — and she tugged persistently on my sleeve to remind me where I was and where I might be going if I didn’t beware.
“A charade is a party game and has no real drama.”
I forget, now, which of us said these inscrutable words, I then realised, though, that we were enacting some kind of ritual, needing to make certain predetermined movements before the puzzle could work itself out.
My wife, now half-forgotten, sank further into the back of my consciousness. If she were fidgetting with fear or irritation (or both), I no longer knew. Whatever the case, I ceased to feel the gently tugging at my sleeve.
I left with the ‘gentleman’ (a word that seemed supremely apposite) and my mesmerised wife, no doubt, followed in our wake.
“Who were you talking to through the window?” I asked. The very wording of my question implied that I knew he must have been talking to some person or something, rather that the otherwise emptiness of the darkening sky. Perhaps it was only his own reflection!
“Does it matter?”
I shrugged. We were trapped, I guess, in some variety of stage play, where our lines had been learned. My co-protagonist was not exactly a pantomine dame — the costume and its effects were far too stunning for that. No, I was faced with more than somebody in drag. It was almost as if a spy had assumed a disguise and women’s garments had been the only accoutrements available. They now neither suited nor looked ungainly. They simply were.
We reached the art department where there were a few late-night shoppers.
It was definitely curiosity that was driving me along with the oddly dressed fellow moving ahead.
“Why are we following this absurd creature Harold?” This from my wife Sarah as she tried to keep up with events. “I think we ought to turn round and leave him to his crazy scheme. This is something we ought not to get involved in.”
“I’m just interested in seeing this masterpiece he says is worth so much money. I have no intention to play along with his proposal. It’s obvious there has to be a catch in it somewhere.”
With that we came to a halt as our crazy companion stopped to look at a bizarre painting on the wall. For the life of me I couldn’t see that it was worth the asking price let alone such a vast amount of money according to the fellow we were accompanying.
“It looks a poor copy of a Salvador Dali,” I observed.
“Don’t talk so loud,” he hissed. “It is not a copy. I am sure we are looking at the real thing. All we have to do is lay a deposit promising to pay the balance tomorrow. All I want from you is a promise to share the cost and we will make a bundle out of our purchase.”
Now I was sure we were mixed up with someone touched in the head, so, turning to Sarah I said:-
“I think we will take the lift to the ground floor now dear.” Politely
saying cheerio to our transvestite we hurried off towards the lift doors.
As we arrived, luckily there was a lift waiting for us. I hurriedly pressed the button for down, but, as the doors were closing our erstwhile ‘gentleman’ slipped in before the doors closed and, turning to face us, we could see he was not pleased. In fact he was positively menacing and as if by magic a knife appeared in his hand.
It was then I realised he wasn’t truly menacing — he was simply acting out the role of one of the tapering human-like figures in the painting, that Salvador Dali pastiche he had just dangled tantalising in front of our noses. Time almost melted, as my limbs turned jellier and my eyes mistier. By his actions, now, he was stressing the intrinsic artistry of the artifact, its drama, its provenance — its haunting quality, its transposability to reality...
The creature — how else can I name him? — was indeed one of the shifting shapes that had lived in the painting and, now, having stepped out of it, was taunting us with its beauty. At heart, I knew he was a force for good. But how, then, to explain the knife, the evil glint in both eye and blade, the increasingly tawdry garb strung on a stick-insect frame, the sleazy pose...?
To my surprise, it was my wife who broke the near silence (sliced the silence with her sharp tongue) as the lift hummed lower on its seemingly interminable journey.
“You looked through the glass — the tenth-floor window frame… as if the world were a frieze...”
Yes, I nodded, I knew exactly what she meant. The lift ground to a halt and we froze, too. Any seemly relief was beyond reach. A tableau of fear. Or a tableau of foregone riches. A missing millionaire.
The charade may continue any moment.
THE LAST HOME GAME with G Lewis
The lad was green. But only a head short of me. I took him to his first soccer match as soon as I judged him fit enough to withstand the cut and thrust of the touch-line. I had christened him Tom after Finney, not that I’m particularly religious.
He was my nephew. I’ve got no kids of my own and Tom equally had no
parents. The story about them (my brother and his wife) is a long one and
I have no intention to tell it here. This story is about Tom and myself.
I am more hands on than Gordon Banks as far as fatherhood is concerned. The local match I took him to watch was a needle one. I supported Rovers
and got Tom to support Rangers in the hope of sparking a manly rivalry. The early kick around reminded me of when I sported studs myself, roaming the goalmouth like a good ‘un. You see, one of the players in that match (Tom’s first to watch) was a spitting image of my younger self, the acclaimed new signing from across the valley.
The match ended in a draw, the teams having scored two goals each. Leaving the ground was more subdued than usual. No cries of ‘We are the champions’ and such like chants. But there was an argument between Torn and me. He seemed to think that the equalizer the Rovers scored in extra time should not have been allowed.
There was the usual trouble getting away from the ground and by the time we set off across the fields the argument was forgotten.
Arriving home there was the usual ‘Who won?’ from my wife Sarah. When she knew the result she seemed to be pleased that there would not be the usual discussion of the rights and wrongs of the match.
* * *
The days passed by without any significant happenings until the day I received a letter from a firm of solicitors in the distant town of Elmsford. It seemed they wanted to talk to me about a Great Aunt of mine who had passed on leaving a will in which I was named as a beneficiary. The time that passed to the day I was to travel to the firm’s offices were days of much speculation as to what the reading of my aunt’s will would reveal.
The solicItor’s offices were surprisingly modern, not at all the dusty musty place one expects. I was kept waiting for a while and I began to get fidgetty especially as there was no one else in the waiting room.
A door opened and a man who introduced himself as Mr Grantham ushered me into his office. Once I was seated he faced me across his desk to quietly tell me I was the sole beneficiary of Miss Agnes Fisher’s last will and testimony, and the bequests included her property, goods, chattels together with all her monies, stocks and shares etc.
There was a proviso however... I had to occupy her rambling old house for at least two years. I was to receive £50,000 immediately to defray the cost of moving from my present address and settling in the old mansion.
I remembered that I once visited the old place when I was just a youngster. All I could remember about the house was that it was reputed to be haunted. I remember too, that it was a place that looked the part of a place that deserved to be haunted.
Still in a state of shock when I arrived home I acquainted Sarah with what happened in Elmsford. She was stunned by the news. Tom was excited with the news and said he was looking forward to living in a haunted house. Sarah was less enthusiastic but soon accepted it when she knew what was involved.
***
When we eventually arrived at Argylle House, I was surprised how unfamiliar it was. The old turret that had stuck in my memory was now replaced with a shorn-off cornerstone. Mrs Boscombe — who welcomed the three of us into a cheery firelit study — explained that the turret had become unstable over the years... forcing my Great Aunt to have it scaffolded and finally removed brick by brick by local gypsies.
Tom was so excited he was allowed to wander off on his own. Hopping, he went out into the corridor. Yipping with delight, too. Nothing often fazed kids like that. Mrs Boscombe assured us that all the disused rooms in the house were firmly locked. Yet that didn’t stop him from getting lost...
She winked and smiled as she spoke of domestic matters. Of course, she had not been at Argylle House when I visited it as a youngster. That would have now made her well over a hundred. Yet, why did she seem so familiar to me? Later that night, I compared notes with Sarah and felt unacccountably relieved to discover that she also found Mrs Boscombe familiar — an impossibility since Sarah had only arrived in my life fairly recently.
Tom, we believed had been esconced in one of the servants’ bedrooms. Mrs Boscombe — a cheery, ginger-dyed mop of a lady — had seen to all the ministrations concerning the boy’s settling down for his first night here. Mrs Boscombe was the only item remaining that could possibly be described — at a push — as a servant.
Sarah and I had not seen Tom again that night since his initial foray into the maze of corridors. Football had seemed such a down-to-earth activity. A hobby that had been so healthy and character forming. I couldn’t quite put out of my mind the appearance of that youngster I’d seen playing on the occasion of Tom’s ‘first match’. That player had been so like me when I first visited Argylle House all those years before. I think I forgot to tell you how he scored both goals for the Rovers... with his head. Diving at the keeper’s feet. A brave soul.
As I fell asleep, eventually, next to Sarah, I speculated on the distance we had travelled both physically and spiritually… from the simple pleasures of soccer, followed by laughter, and a cold walk home across fields and stiles for piping hot stew and dumplings. Tom had been such a handful, full of questions about his parents — a live wire with odd moments of sadness. Now a once forgotten Great Aunt had changed all that — brought us face to face with a completely different environment of thoughts and ambitions. I couldn’t help but think that things had taken a turn for the worse. The missing turret appeared that night in my subsequent dream, drifting in and out of mist. I could even hear Tom’s high-pitched snores from whever he’d been billeted. Or so I imagined. Thus the house slept until morning.
I slept fitfully in spite of the long first day at Argylle House. If indeed, the house was haunted, the ghosts were not the noisy variety such as the poltergeist element. Apart from the occasional snore from Sarah the house seemed as quiet as the grave.
Mrs Boscombe hadn’t mentioned anything about the house being haunted, so I decided to bring up the subject at the first opportunity. As she was housekeeper only until Sarah took over the reins, I was determined to find out all I could from the lady before her stay in the house was over.
Sarah, Tom and I breakfasted in the kitchen, it being the only place that was heated. While we ate we decided the day should be spent in settling
in. We were to inspect all the rooms to see whether they were locked or not. Armed with a big bunch of the house keys we started from the cellar and gradually climbed up through the house to the topmost rooms in the attic. It became evident to us that the rooms above should remain locked, because the rambling place was much to big for us.
Mrs Boscombe was a bit hard of hearing which made having a conversation with her difficult. However I managed to draw her out on the subject of the house being haunted.
“They do say there be something in it” she said, “but I have not seen or heard anything, but Miss Agnes used to say she bad seen the ghost of a man on the top landing of the house peering down to the hail below.
Yet, there was something about Tom, that first full day at Argylle House, that didn’t please me, an intangible undercurrent; in fact, whatever it was made me unaccountably sad, though I didn’t realise quite how sad at the time
— until I experienced it again through the forces of hindsight many years later. Tom, somehow, that day, seemed less perky, slightly older in the face (even during the course of a single night), with a look of knowing in his eyes: a look I had never witnessed him make before. If I’d had my wits about me, I would have joked and ruffled his hair (as was my avuncular wont) — then questioned him about football and other trivial matters.
But we were all so concerned about the new abode and its domestic arrangements. All I could manage to utter was a cursory “Did you sleep well Tom?”
“Yes, thank you , Uncle,” he answered purposefully, then biting his tongue.
It is simply my retrospective view that had added nuances to the conversation. I forget now, however, where it ended up. Oh yes, Sarah asked Tom about the T-shirt he was wearing for breakfast. She claimed to have never seen it before. It bore a strange fairy-like creature with sugar-glass wings and
a sun like a sliced blood orange. Tom mumbled something about a bottom of
a trunk and Sarah wondered if weren’t damp.
Mrs Boscombe didn’t give it a glance — as if she already knew more about it than met the eye. She simply bustled around… from the kitchen into the future.
* * *
Years somehow passed. Not even in stories, could one imagine the time thus telescoping. Servants came and went. I recall a Miss Albion (a shamefully dishevelled lady with pinched features and long, sweeping skirts), someone who tended to help Tom with his lessons for a while, we being too far from a school for him to travel. Presumably, the Authorities had not got wind of our arrival in the area and we became too dilatory in our own way, to care much. Anyway, I also recall a tall gentleman by the name of Accrington — a moustachioed military figure who often hung around the corners of the downstairs hall and on the upstairs landing. He was, I suppose, Argylle House’s factotum, hired by Mrs Boscombe before she left us. Yes, you’re right Mrs Boscombe did leave us in the end — without too much fuss and bother, but not without me noticing a tear in her eyes as she gave our Tom a last glance.
Tom, indeed, when we come to face it, grew quickly — too quickly by half, if you ask me. During puberty, though, he still made me have a kick-around with him in the stable area, a healthy activity but strangely spiritless, trying hard to pretend we were still Finney and Lofthouse. But my own aging bones soon put paid to all such shenanigans.
Those obligatory two years (and more) at Argylle House had passed quickly by, and as the conditions on my Aunt’s will were honoured and I inherited all her estate lock, stock and barrel. As a family, Sarah, Tom and I had grown quite fond of the estate — so much so — we decided to settle down there. The top floors were opened up but there had been no sign of a ghostly apparation. Perhaps the ghost was there to haunt Aunt Agnes and when she died it simply faded away into oblivion, its last ties with being earthbound were no more.
Over the years since that first day, Tom’s private education had been very thorough and as he approached the end of his teenaged years he was ready to move on to an university. Gone were the days of bantering about football; he was now an adult, ready to go out into the world to make his own way in life. I had officially adopted him years before and was proud to call him my son, for the boy had grown to be a young man of stature. So familiar had we become he had stopped calling me uncle and I believe he was proud to call me Dad, but strangely he called my wife Sarah, I suppose because she was so much younger than me.
Though those days of his final education passed by all too quickly, his times spent at home during those university years were always looked forward to and they passed quite amiably; a diversion in the work entailed in running my estate. A job perhaps ready made for Tom to take over in my later life.
I often now gaze into the future. Tom’s university life petered out and he returned here. The world was not the place he expected, I guess. I see Tom as old as myself, sharing, perhaps, with his own son the magic of soccer. I will never see it for myself and I am rather dismayed that Tom is an only child. And being back at Argylle House is not conducive to romance...
One day, I see my own Sarah, growing strangely younger, as she does, by the day, mooning along the first floor landing, as if seeking company. Perhaps she longs for an erstwhile Mrs Boscombe who used to trip along thereabouts in the busy-body fashion that was typical of her, still young enough to dance a quiet jig to herself when she thought of the people she had once known and loved.
Accrington still works at the bottom of our long garden. I’m told he has a potting shed down there which he has managed to make weather-proof for all seasons. Miss Albion often pops in here for a convivial cup of tea. She looks remarkably ancient for her years, these days. I think she is headmistress at the nearest school, the school which Tom should have attended, could have attended, given the new trunk road that the Authorities have pushed past Argylle House, between the two new towns that have swamped Elmsford. Even now, I can hear the insidious hum of its traffic from the garden, when I venture out there.
Sarah and I have separate rooms, now. I can’t recall how this first transpired.
I often wander around the various corridors — then at my favourite spot, near the part of the roof where the missing turret was once rooted, I stand and peer from the smeary window. I kick my heels… watching a sunset, as three figures, one the spitting image of my younger self, then growing more like Tom than me, another being a younger version of Sarah, the third a fairy-like shape that carries a ball under its wing. Sometimes, when the scene repeats itself, the third figure is more like a tall gangling shadow. I often see gypsies amid the green blur of the distance beckoning. I cannot explain everything, I cannot, indeed, explain anything.
Inevitably I weep, scuffing the skirting-board, as I do. I feel that Aunt Agnes is not far away, after all… still teaching me how to head my head into an open goal. All rovers and rangers need their last home game...
TWILIGHT with Anthea Holland
I'm afraid of the dark, scared by what might lurk unseen in the unknown. I'm uncomfortable with shadows, evil shapes that flicker and fade across the wall. I hate the melancholy feeling that comes at twilight and bathes everything in an unearthly light. Something bad is going to happen one day at twilight …..
There is an abundance of possible illumination in the house and I pace from room to room turning on the lights as I go. There are no un-lit corners here, no shadows waiting to jump on me and scare me to death, no hidden rooms or locked cupboards.
Even though I am surrounded by light I jump when the 'phone rings. After all, although I have shut it out, I am aware that dusk is falling beyond the curtained windows - and something bad is going to happen one day at twilight ….
Is that day today, I wonder, when I hear shuffling in the chimneybreast? Probably something dislodged by a bird. Or the bird itself trapped between the soot walls. The phone I ignore. What else can you do with phones when literally anybody could be at the other end of the line? I’m not paranoiac, but that don’t mean to say they’re not after me! I’ve heard that saying before somewhere but it makes a lot of good sense – particularly at twilight…
Talking about sayings, the postman only rings twice. And my door bell has joined the clarion call of night. But it is sooner doused even than the phone. Silence regains its sway. I wonder who is trying to reach me. It may be some kind soul wanting to remind me that there is no goddam reason why anyone should be worried about twilight: that cross between day and night. But for me, night is far more wholesome than dusk. The glimmerings of dawn, too, do not carry the same uncomfortable ambience as sunset seems to carry. That kind soul may be Rachel: she is (or maybe was) the kindest soul in Christendom. When she left me, well, that was a bad day.
Rachel, now there was a lady - or had been. She was too good for me, indeed she was far too damn athletic for a sofa slug like me. I reminded myself that it would never be Rachel jingling the bell on my 'phone again - just as she would never twang my heartstrings again or jog on my stairs.
That noise in the chimneybreast is there once more. I stand, totally still and listen. I hope it isn't a bird, I dislike the thought of anything trapped; it reminds myself too closely of my own position - trapped within these four walls for the hours of twilight. No point in tempting fate my venturing forth from the safety of my own home - although don't they say that the most dangerous place in the world isn't New York City or Harlem, but one's own kitchen? I shrug; it doesn't apply to me in the here and now - anything bad that is going to happen to me is going to happen when I’m bathed in the non-existent light that invades the earth at dusk.
Rachel left me at twilight. She insisted that I left the curtains open and the lamps unlit - pouring scorn all the while on my fears and insisting that I acted like a man for once in my life. The whole thing degenerated into a row which resulted in her storming out of the house. I would have run after her, only it was twilight out there and I knew that something bad was going to happen one day at twilight.
Twilight is akin to two. Twolit. Twilit. It brings me into the present and back into the past at its whim. Present and past the two halves of it. At the interface is me: watching for a third force: the future. Then threelit. Trilight. Trilit. Words have more strength, it seems, than reality itself. And tonight’s leading edge of twilight, I feel, is to be where the three-cornered communion of light, dark and something-between-dark-and-light-without-being-either are due to touch base.
It was Rachel who scrabbled down the chimney like a wrong-headed santa.
I shake my head in bewilderment at my own fancies. That’s what this wan light usually does to me as it filters through the curtains I’ve drawn to keep it out. Filters, though, are two-way. Light filtering in from the weakening source of dusk. And my soul filtering out to stain it darker still.
I saw Rachel’s soot-black fingers scrabble in the grate upon an arm that snaked from the flue.
I blink and the image is gone. Crossing to the sideboard I took out a bottle of whiskey. Pouring out a generous slug I gulp it in one go. I deliberately turn my back on the hearth and think about the past/present/future. The not-so-holy trinity; trinight. It occurs to me that the room is no longer quite as bright as it was a few moments before and I spot that one of the table lamps no longer sheds its tulip glow across the burnished wood table top. A moment's panic sets in but a quick check reassures me that all the other illumination is as it should be.
Rachel had been a creature of darkness, it was as though she sucked the life out of the day - as it died so she became alive, vibrant and vivacious.
I put my empty glass on the sideboard and crossed the room, intending to head for the kitchen where I stored a cupboard full of light-bulbs.
Rachel's voice hissed my name as I passed the hearth.
I blow her a kiss from my heart. Despite everything.
This is the first twilight where she’s got so far down the flue without actually coming out into the open grate. The worst possible monster is one made from someone you used to love. As a small child I recall that my mother - when she slept - snored and snorted and rasped her throat and made ugly faces and spoke words I couldn’t fully understand -- and thus sleep had made her the worst monster simply because, when awake, she was my loving mother.
I once told Rachel about my fears and terrors – and now she’s returning to haunt me knowing exactly which fright buttons to push.
Rachel’s head squeezed down within the chimney breast, then her own sweet sweet bosom followed…
In the kitchen, I count the bulbs out, I count the bulbs in -- then idle over to the rattling spigot desperate for a drink, yet fearful of the water-hammer that besets this house everytime the plumbing’s used.
I surrender to the desire for liquid - a need for something pure, perhaps, in contrast to the many-times distilled golden liquid that waits for me somewhere else. Not that what comes out of a kitchen tap is pure, of course; urine, having been filtered by the kidneys is, I understand, much purer than tap water - but it certainly isn't the kind of golden liquid that I fancy sampling.
The sound the plumbing makes is like the hammering of a heart.
Taking the appropriate bulb from my collection, I walk through to the living room only to find Rachel sprawled on the sofa. Ignoring her, I replace the dead bulb and walked across to the sideboard for my whiskey. I don't need to look at her to know that her eyes are following my progress; I feel them burning me like hands of fire, and I am certain that when I later undress there will be blisters where she has touched me and yet not touched me.
I have wished for so long to have Rachel on my sofa yet now she is there I want no part of her. Still, I thought, a bird in the hand …
Rachel was always different. She enjoyed bobsleighing and handball and all manner of obscure sports to which she dragged me during Olympic week. She couldn’t bear watching people on TV outdoing her physically, I guess. She often smeared her face in soot and went pot-holing or was it that the soot besmirched her wondrous complexion after she’d been pot-holing? Whatever the case, she couldn’t get me threading those underground chimneys for love or money. I’d share the toboggan with her or, even, the white-water kayak … but not those subterranean labyrinths of her heart…
The creature on the sofa is covered in soot so thick, really it’s the wildest of guesses that it’s Rachel at all. The stuff looks sticky, a tarring and feathering. A bird after all, then, having fluttered down the chimney, perhaps, towards a fell death. Or a cross between crow and woman.
A bird in the hand.
I return to the spigot where the water has been spluttering into the bucket; primed for sluicing the creature clean. Rachel’s already used to wet dousings what with all that water polo and synchronised swimming she used to do between dressage and softball. If it is Rachel.
Twilight, at its height, made me feel schizophrenic. And I often sensed that all these daydreams of minority sports were mere fabrications of a twilit mind. The pipes hummed. And my own waterworks thrummed. A sign that twilight was on the wane as night eased away dusk’s duplicity amid an ebon balm.
A trinity, I think; myself, Rachel and twilight. The three together are some kind of catalyst - always have been, I remember. It is at twilight that we first make love - a desperate, cruel kind of love-making as I recall. My alter-ego is present and turns me into some kind of Marquis de Sade and she responds in similar fashion. There’s much scratching, biting and afterwards as we lie sated, the sheets are blood spattered. Later tonight, when I am myself again, we shall really make love - well, I will; for her I think it will just be another sport.
I gazed at the kitchen curtains, beyond which I was aware the twilight was easing into the comparative safety of night. I was afraid of the near dark, scared of what might have lurked unseen in the unknown, but sometimes what we know is the scarier of the two options. The curtains were decorated with fruit - plums, apples, oranges and raspberries which reminded me of the fruit that birds pecked at with their sharp beaks. I could barely see the parasites now or the worms and maggots that had decayed the fruit with their cooking.
A bird in the hand …
I realise that the bucket is over-flowing and turn off the water. Heaving it out of the sink I return to where I had left the bird-woman.
The sofa is empty except for a slug of darkness... distilled from light and shade.
Something bad did happen that day. My death. Possible to experience and describe only by its points of perspective. Two or three, I wasn’t sure.
The door and phone resume their shrill awakening. Like Rachel’s morning drill.
A LOVE TROVE
I loved him with all my heart's heart, but he promised only liking in return or, at the most, fondness.
I tried to turn off my love and divert its unused energy into exploring the city streets where nobody had ever been before. The prying terraced curtains tweaked of their own volition; loneliness gave me the courage to be myself. A comfort, too, were the shaggy shadows of distant high-rises where people had congregated for fear of these low-downs I roamed.
Indeed, I found myself seeking someone who was already with me, this causing my heart to play leap-frog: a found fondness deeper than love.
CABINET (2)
If anyone entered this cabinet, I could only remember the type of person involved and the thoughts judged in isolation from being that person. Impossible to pigeon-hole. Yet an insulated dream which knew itself – at least somewhere – to be real and boundless.
Once I (as this person or in this role) had stepped within the cabinet – a walk-in wardrobe that I could never have afforded the space to own – I could perceive the dulcet care of lighting that a gentleman about town may have confessed was intended for liaisons rather than garment storage. The two long mirrors failed to hype up or eke out any illumination.
There were no garments; they had been stripped out along with their clothes-horse frames, tie-racks and many sock-drawers of ill-defined usage. No see-through drip-dry shirt-tails to conspire with the lighting’s urges to dim or brighten. The ill-woven tapestry that once concealed cross-hangers like a fold-away draught-excluder or light wind-break had slipped not only from in front of the open cabinet wall but also from the memory I now used. Indeed, many things were not there, nor even thought about or considered worthy of noting their absence, I’m sure. But there was a dead tree lying on the parquet floor. Seeping open its own flayed and palsied bark. Not the corpse of a soldier as I first unaccountably assumed, but a genuinely slumped trunk reaching into the darkest regions of the wardrobe, leafless branches out-splayed like a thousand knotted limbs grasping at nothing: crumbling where the damp had reached its due existence of further nothing. Rotting by root and tip. Indeed its minor rootlets were further limbs, more sveltely ‘living’ than the branches. Yet rotting, nonetheless.
The major roots were tantamount to things I once feared growing in my own body. No possible description of such huge coiled menaces, hidden by their own minors or membranes, as they were … yet vaguely sensed in the wardrobe’s body mirrors on each side wall.
I stooped to touch the dead tree’s bark or, rather, its upper sutures – or I didn’t stoop at all, but squinted in the sedated unstructured light to see the shape more clearly, without daring to approach it. Merely to touch with my eyes, as it were, while failing to see that this was the most dangerous entry to the soul with which I saw.
The dampness had reached such depths, I spotted a tiny lake amid the runnelled surface of the bark – even a pocket sea. I yearned to saw through various branches to allow irrigation to drier areas where tiny wooden mouths seemed to pock out with airlets or minuscule dry bubblings. I fondled the nail-file in my pocket, wondering if its serrations would prove sufficient purchase. I clicked my heels on the parquet, in a tantrum of powerlessness.
Crosses had been carved into words upon the bark and equally dressed with some verjuice that my tongue knew (more intimately than my nose) was rhino-gomenol, despite various trajectories of these two senses being conflated with surrogate touching. I could not read or reach the sad words thus chiselled, words which no doubt were noting some tryst beneath the tree’s wide bower in happier times.
The tree’s pulpy ridges pulsed but, then again, they were dead, completely dead … as if the floaters in my eyes – fed by deeper heartbeats – lent their own life to what they witnessed. Back and forth our sight does travel, nobody owning its visions. My last and best liaison perhaps, I raised my hand tentatively to the dimmer-switch.
A voice spoke that the cabinet was made that way. From dead wood.
nemonymous five
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Third Review on this site:
I've decided to buck the trend in this review and write it with knowledge of who wrote the tales. I've singled out the stuff I feel deserves commentary, either (largely) positive or the ignoble alternative...
I wasn't quite sure what to make of DRIVING IN CIRCLES: some fine dark prose, though the whole of it felt a little unfinished, as if the author had submitted an excerpt. It reminded me of the opening of King's CHILDRENOF THE CORN, and I mean complimentarily; I just wanted more. I like a story to be a story - we have a beginning, a middle...but, for me at least, no end.
However, I truly enjoyed THE HILLS ARE ALIVE: it fitted with my traditional sensibilities. Mysterious house, strained relationship, weird happenings - the works. A pungent piece.
HUNTIN' SEASON was certainly unapologetic in its approach, though I've never been a fan of such extreme work. Richly descriptive and effective,and it sure worked well in proximity with the gentler tales around it, but not for me, alas.
Now then, the very good stuff: THE SCARIEST STORY I KNOW - probaly the best title hook I've come across, reminiscent of the subtitle to Ford Madox Ford's THE GOOD SOLDIER. And the tale lived up to its ambition. A tour de force of multiple narratives and blurred perspectives; a gem.
As was NEW SCIENCE. I won't make it a secret that I personally know the writer, and I had the pleasure of reading this story in manuscript form. It's amazing. Terse, brutal, bleak. Beautiful, tender, uplifting. How can so much be said in so few words by such a short guy? A great, great piece.
There we have it, then. Some fine work, some interesting stuff, and other pieces that neither moved me to eulogise nor aroused my criticism. In all, a solid collection, and with two outstanding contributions, a must-have book.
So let's lament the passing of an unflinchingly eccentric and ambitious project. Nemo - Latin for 'no-one', I understand. Whoever follows will have a tough act to follow. Nemo did it better.
© Gary Fry (2005)
www.grayfriarpress.com
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Second Review on this site:
The latest (last?) issue of Nemonymous reaches us looking like one of those little Memo books mothers of the 1970s used to write their shopping lists in. Of course the identities of the authors of this particular collection of stories have been disclosed but I thought it more appropriate to write this review doing my best to ignore this fact, thus adhering to the principle of this now justifiably world-famous, revolutionary journal.
We begin with The Robot and the Octopus, a jolly little tale that had me smiling all the way through. After all, how can one resist a tale with sentences like ‘We have millions of dollars worth of nanotechs walking around in a robot dragging an octopus behind them’? One of the constant delights of Nemonymous is that you never know what the next story is going to be like, and the opener in no way prepares one for Driving in Circles – another short offering that is as neat as it is nihilistic. Running Away to Join The Town has such a splendid opening paragraph that I had to read it three times in order to fully savour it. A shame, then, that the story itself is somewhat clichéd, and while the narrative offers a few touches of surrealism the outcome is predictable and therefore ultimately disappointing, all the more so because of the delicious way in which the story has been put together.
The style of The Hills are Alive falls uneasily between Lovecraft and Ligotti, with the finished tale coming across to me as too verbose to be successful. The thankfully brief heyday of splatterpunk is revisited in the thankfully even more brief Huntin’ Season. I enjoyed Well Tempered – a clever little short that had me grinning with the possibilities left unexplored by the writer.
We then move on to a couple of stories presumably juxtaposed by the editor to act as a show-stopper to the already high-quality proceedings. All I can say about The Scariest Story I Know and New Science is that they are both so well-written, so emotionally devastating and so unbelievably powerful that this reviewer was reduced to tears over his French toast at a fashionable Bristol café one sunny Saturday morning, prompting the waitress to ask if everything was all right. Terrific stuff from both writers that more than makes the experience that is Nemonymous Five worthwhile.
So that’s it – an eclectic group of stories from a magazine (or megazanthus) that always provided value for money. I have all five issues and they are sitting on my desk in front of me as I write this. Flicking through them I had forgotten that I had written reviews of most of the issues, which leads me to the following final thoughts if the magazine is truly to be laid to rest. Most of the comments below relate to the stories contained within the five issues of Nemo, but they could just as easily apply to Nemo as a whole:
Ninety pages of short fiction in the purest form imaginable
Utterly totally and wonderfully surreal
Impenetrable
Pythonesque
Almost too good.
Painfully vivid & devastatingly realistic
A soupçon of surrealism
Nemonymous: It’s been a hell of a ride, and the world has been made a better place because of it.
© John Llewellyn Probert (2005)
JLP has been writing for the last three years and his stories have been published in a number of small press outlets. Go to http://www.johnlprobert.com where you can find a full list, as well as a very nice picture of him.
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First review on this site.
Anonymity is liberating. It can give people the courage to write material they would never consider publishing – even thinking – under their own name, and who hasn’t felt the almost illicit desire to fire a letter off to the newspaper while asking for your name and address to be withheld, or posting on an internet message board and abusing your fellow users in the most vituperative language in the safe knowledge that they have no idea who you are.
Nemonymous prints stories by authors who shall remain nameless, at least until the following issue, when all names are revealed. I think it makes you read the stories with closer attention; it’s a levelling device, and if, for example, you knew a friend of yours was writing in that particular issue, you wouldn’t be able to skip ahead to that story and ignore the rest. Each story I had to read with more concentration than I normally would.
Not all of the twelve stories in the issue I was given to review work, but I’ll criticise in a general sense rather than taking the opportunity to be flippant, mean-spirited or offensive about each of the stories I didn’t like. I think the problem with a lot of the writing is a common one, in that some of the authors don’t trust the fact that less can be more. In many of the stories, there are too many failed metaphors, too many adjectives, and a sense that the author is struggling to convey a sense that what you are reading is writing, and not just a story. The magazine ends with a quote from Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, and most of the writers feel they need to end their story with the equivalent of that dwarf in the red raincoat, something shocking and unexpected that will linger on after you finish. It can get a bit tiresome being presented with the same dwarf in a different guise twelve times in a row.
Of the stories that do work, some are enigmatic, like ‘Driving in Circles’, about a warring couple lost in the dark while driving away for the weekend, gradually drifting into a fortean, prehistoric landscape. Others are poised and precise, while being similarly cryptic, like ‘Solid Gold’, which follows an abstracted woman who has created a perfect and sterile faux-bohemian world for herself, and then sullies it by dragging a rusting, greasy car engine into her flat.
The standout story though has to be ‘Running Away to Join the Town’. In exuberant, Ray Bradbury-esque prose, the author describes the arrival of a sinister gothic carnival in a small town, and the effect it has on a spoiled young boy. Excellent, jagged phrases are littered throughout the story; the ‘hooligan industry’ of the mysterious fairground as it sets up on the village green, or the ‘ochre octave of teeth’ of the vicious performing bear. Although this can occasionally lapse into the overwritten, (‘buoyant jocularity’ being one example), the prose in this story isn’t as strained as it is in some of the others, and in any case, it fits the theme and subject of the story exactly. The inevitable twist makes its appearance at the end, but is thoroughly appropriate all the same (if signposted a little too obviously by the title), when, like a child taken by the faeries with a changeling left in its place, spoiled little Marcel is kidnapped by a despondent clown, who takes his place at home. To be fair, no one who writes about sinister gothic carnivals can hope to disappoint if they are even halfway talented with words, but finding out the name of the author of this dark and entertaining tale is reason enough to want to read the next issue.
© Richard Strachan (2005)
Richard was born in 1977, and has printed stories and articles in various small press magazines. He is currently working on his first novel.
www.nemonymous.com