Chattering Waves
    

The evening strained to eke out the scorching afternoon.

The day-trip families abandoned the beach, leaving just

silence to recall the excited chatter of children - amid the

crumbling sandcastle souvenirs.

Yet not onIv silence. A solitary young woman was taking

photographs of the encroaching sea.

I felt so alone myself, I nearly asked her to talk to me - but that would have been cheating.

Eventually, she told me about herself, things, presumably,

she could only tell a stranger.

Then I murdered her with my bare hands to put a stop to

this never-ending life story.

I left the camera beside the body with the relentless

tides trapped within.

   published 'ramraid extraordinaire' 1996 

One Up

 

The building looked to me as if it had been there forever. The ridiculous thought was not that ridiculous, for just around the corner I had aeen a statue of King Arthur. “How did they know what he looked like?” 

The question drifted up into the sky like a skinless balloon of air. Evidently, I was not alone. The pavement was crammed with late shoppers. None of them paid any heed to me, but who can blame them, I was paying less heed to them, than I was to myself. My wife said I was a selfless man… or was it “selfish” she said? ... perhaps she meant more by ‘selfless’ than met the ear.

  I entered the swing doors. The commissionaire asked me what I was up to. He had taken one look at my garb and decided that I was a suspect. Once, I had been in a pub when a dog padded in through the open door and did his business on the beer-stained carpet. Today, I felt like that dog. 

My wife always used to tell me that I needed to stand up for myself. So I did. I divorced her. No grounds, they shouted. No need, I replied, pointing to the stuff she left on the pavements. I digress. 

The commissionaire looked askance when I said I had an appointment with the chairman of the company.

 “You have an appointment, sir?” he queried in his ex-serviceman voice, “can I have your name, please?” 

I cringed at the grease in his voice, as he riffled through a big black book on his high desk. 

“Course I know my own name. Why do you ask when it’s written in that book?”

I pointed towards the lists of appointers and appointees, ending with a name that looked half right from my upside down point of view. 

“Ms Ample Clavinty?” The commissionaire’s eyebrows had now disappeared up into his hair as his question mark drove deep trenches into the name he’d read from the page. 

“That’s me,” I said, raising my voice an octave or two.

  “Oh, is it, sir?” 

He was evidently a sarcastic bugger. He went on: “The next thing you’ll be telling me is that you’re Queen Guinevere!” 

I breathed in hard, audibly. I would stand no more nonsense from this jackanapes, I vowed. I looked at the chap’s chin, the opening for the mouth, the humourless eyes, the intensity of his self opinion. It seemed he had been standing guard in this reception area since time began.

I could not think of a rejoinder.  I left the same way as I had come in.

  

(published ‘Dig My Dogma’ 1989)

Baffle (34)

A bellow in my hard of hearing ear was a way to alert me to a beneficial secret.  The secret, you see, was an uncoded clouded Baffle.  Near stone deaf, too.

Baffle (15)
The inch inched nearer to an inch, ever a measure short or long of perfection. So tantalising, it seemed I'd died but my life was still incomplete.

THe Fanblade Fables

The links to the ten fanblade fables:

http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/fanblade_one.htm

http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/fanblade_two.mws

http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/114

http://expressblogs.com/blogs/index.php?cat=1077&blog_ID=Simonymous

http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/10/11/99398.aspx

index.blog?entry_id=1588221

http://free-blog-site.com/denemoniser/archive/2006/10/11/99378.aspx

http://www.seo-blog.org/432_newdfl/archive/68773_fanblade_eight.html

http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2006/10/12/

http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2006/10/fanblade-9.html

http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/190.html

http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/10/14/hiver.html

Fanblade Fables (6)

A fable that has disappeared when it’s its time to be read and be absorbed and tested for truth or for life’s applicability is a fanblade fable. Yet when one can hear it sighing flickeringly in the background like Debussy injected straight into the vein, it becomes soon enough une jalousie sur le vent de la mer..

 

< Anything in French is a fable without even reading it! > thought Hiver Jawn, if he became a grown-up thinking back to when he was a child, and the sea was his real mother and his bedroom’s venetian blind a rattling that he never heard because it was always a rattling.

Laughter In The Distance

LAUGHTER IN THE DISTANCE  (previously published ‘Lost Pages’ 2005)

     The room was unaccountably quiet – in a way that made it seem more spooky than it was.  Charlie sensed that there should be more  noise, as he watched the people in it miming conversations.  They were trying – very successfully as it happened – to keep quiet for someone who was ill upstairs.  Charlie knew this fact because Susie – he thinks her name was Susie – told him that this was indeed the case.    

“Who’s ill?” Charlie had asked.  He asked it again because he was now talking – whispering under his breath – to someone else.  This time he didn’t even guess her name.

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” this new girl answered – so quietly that Charlie had to read her lips.

  There were at least twenty people in the room.  Some were still coming in, others leaving, a few neither.  A ghostly gathering – and growing ghostlier by the minute, Charlie thought.  He laughed to himself.  It was hard to explain the purpose of the room, let alone of the meeting itself.  The room was a cross between a lounge (or what they used to call front room, sitting-room, drawing-room or parlour) and a neutral waiting-room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery.  The electric fire with too few bars actually seemed to make the room feel colder than if it weren’t there at all.  Psychological, Charlie assumed.

 

 

He felt as if he were the only person of substance in the whole place.  The others acted so low-key, he wondered if they existed at all, barely negotiating the bad reception on a TV screen as they came and went. 

  

Charlie recalled he had earlier met a lady called Isabel Barnett – a name that sounded slightly familiar to him but he wasn’t old enough to check out a sufficient length of past time to judge whether it were a name that prefigured his own tenuous existence.

  

This Isabel Barnett was in fact the hostess who had greeted Charlie at the front door – a heavily made-up face with billowing gold-trimmed drapes below.  A mouth like a brightly pursed rose-bud  rather than one that was defiantly clamped shut behind lip-stick.

  

“Come in, Charlie,” she had said.

  

He remembered her welcome like the back of his hand…

  

***

  

“I thought Susie already told you,” the girl repeated, bringing Charlie back to the present moment.

  

“Told me what?”  he had forgotten.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs.”  This time her voice was not even silent miming.  Pursed lips had become gritted teeth, merely with the implication of articulated words.

  

***

  

Charlie was in the kitchen.  He was used to spending most of the time at parties in the kitchen talking to those who happened to be passing through to get a drink or some more food.  Charlie found the kitchen the best place at any party.  A sort of Way Station. 

  

This was not one of those parties, however.  It was a gathering of hushed whispers, some bordering on a silence beyond silence itself.  Even the silence of the grave was subsumed by shifting earth or the conversation of worms.  There was no music coming from the waiting-room or lounge.  And there was no booze, only cups of tea that clinked on their saucers like percussion instruments in a fastidious invisible prelude.  A delicate intaglio of glances and tunes underhummed from some memory of a signature tune in ancient wireless days.

  

Charlie soon returned to where most people found themselves.  As soon as he realised this wasn’t a party as such, the kitchen and its passing inhabitants lost all their fascination.  Mutual, he thought.

  

Isabel Barnett smiled at him from where she was standing alone.  Susie had vanished, probably to the kitchen, now that Charlie had left it.  What was the point, he asked, in holding a party where someone was ill upstairs?

  

Suddenly, as if in some oblique reply to his question, he heard laughter in the distance.  The distance was vertical … which was strange as, more often than not, distance tended to be horizontal.  Vertical in this case was, however, unclear whether it arrived from above or below – but it certainly was laughter.  Unmistakeable as it cut through the studied silence, despite its own tones of snigger and ponderous giggle.  So ponderous, perhaps, it was beneath the threshold of most normal hearing.

  

Charlie guessed this was the ill person laughing upstairs.  Laughter is a much better deal with death than groans of pain.  He laughed at his own thoughts and found himself suddenly in the company of Susie again.  Every girl here was called Susie, or was that just his imagination?  But imagination more customarily multiplied than reduced.  Isabel Barnett was more a single lady than a girl – yet still a mother figure – and Charlie could often see her fading into the background whenever she was caught watching him … watching him watching her.

  

“Who’s ill upstairs?”  This time it was a question, rather than Susie telling him he’d already been told who exactly was ill upstairs … or downstairs, depending on the floor where the questioned was asked.

  “How should I know?” said Charlie.  This was obviously not the same girl as he was talking to earlier … or even the nameless girl before Susie who had, reportedly, told him who was ill upstairs.  

Susie offered a kiss.  At first, Charlie assumed it was destined to be a mere peck.  But it was more than this – and indeed at-close-quarters was where one was supposed to be at parties, Charlie knew.  Yet he was shy.  Nevertheless, he allowed her to press her breasts into his chest – and both of them snogged and petted with barely perceptible gulps and gurgles and intermittent excuses of breath-taking or coughs on bodygas or embarrassed laughter.

  

Isabel Barnett stared at them.  Charlie knew this fact instinctively and he remembered, with a shiver, who exactly was ill upstairs or even near to death, in fact – as he continued to hear laughter in the distance.  It amused him, placated his worries.  He had to grasp the nettle, take life in both hands, as he  led the girl called Susie upstairs – away from Isabel’s increasingly distant clucking.  Not even in two minds about it, he wanted to hear Susie’s laughter louder still.

 

  No point in being in a Whodunnit if you knew who was about to do it, thought Charlie.  Stifled laughter as the mystified ghosts dispersed from around both culprit and victim.

 

DFL's Baffles - No. 5
Inching towards being called a fable, the baffle slipped and became an allegory too short to be called anything.

THE DEAD HAND

 

“You know - dreams sort of fritter away along some narrow blurred margin of existence for ever and ever.  Flitters of image, to which we return from time to time when we’re not awake and ready to dream.”

 

            The man speaking had been a complete stranger only hours before, but Eloise now listened with growing, if guarded, respect.

 

            “So, the dreams carry on eternally, all dreams, everybody’s dreams?”

            Her voice piped plaintively.  She’d never been one for making a mark.  She was a sounding-board that merely sounded out external realities, with only the gentlest touches upon the tiller of conscious communication.

 

            “Yes, dear lady, eternally and infinitely.  It is true also to say that we return to our own shapes of self that interact between the jiggling channels of dream.  When we’re not in residence, the shapes simply sort of carry on without us.  Yes, they can indeed exist without us, those selves we think we are when we dream.  We just re-inhabit them when we think we are dreaming.  In the meantime, they own the bit of our consciousness that never wakes.”

 

            “How do you know, when most dreams are forgotten?”

 

            “Quite simple, dear lady.  Think for a moment.  Vulnerable and beautiful creatures such as yourself can only find sufficient illogic in a dream to bring you to talk with hard old strangers like me.  So, even now, you must be drifting along that rippling course which itself travels onward over the weedflows of the dreambed...”

 

            To his horror, Eloise’s face suddenly took on a new strange hard look itself, as she felt the tiller spring to life in her dead hand.

 

 

 (Penny Dreadful 1999)

 

 

 

REFLECTIONS

 

 

The vampire vampired vampires — there being no better verb to describe what vampires do. So, there is a definite need for such a verb as to vampire. The noun certainly exists, however, even if the thing which the noun names does not.

 

In any event, whatever the grammatical niceties, the vampire in question vampired other vampires. Better than a self-draining onanism. Better, even, than vampiring rosy-cheeked maidens (especially from the victim’s point of view, needless to say, whether or not there was any need to say it). But if vampires don’t exist prima facie why all this concern over one particular vampire whose fancy was to vampire others of his (or her) kind? Well, in short, and with no further preamble, I was (if not am) that vampire.

 

My teeth were long and so sharp they would have given off silly sparkling stars at their points if I were in a cartoon on TV. I could not reflect very well. (Well, anyone can see that for themselves, so no need to dwell on that point.) I had a strange inexplicable loathing of anything connected with the Christian Church. A regularly occurring aversion to daylight. A phobia of garden fence manufacturers. And, surprise surprise, a shake-down full of crumbly dirt. So, if I were not a vampire, nobody was.

 

And I went vampiring at night (the verb being intransitive as well as transitive). I met others of my persuasion. We sucked each other off. Really lapped it up. Then home in time for a good day’s kip. Often, the sun would be just rising as I turned the key in the door of my lock-up. And prickles would rise on the back of my neck. I knew I was being watched. One’s body always sensed such things. Ring-fenced. Criss­crossed. Each had its reflex reflection in my body and/or mind. I even knew when somebody was writing about me, circumscribing me. I had dreams, erotic dreams, wild wild dreams as well as more mundane ones, any such dreams as the writer cared to give Earth stowaways such as me. That’s how I knew. And I also know when he (or she) stops writing - I stop vampiring.

(Bats & Red Velvet 1993)