(revised version)
"Be it with a careless whisper or a deliberate shout, I want you to tell me a secret. The sooner and the secreter the better."
Arthur had spoken and Gwenda replied:
"If it's a secret, I ought not to shout it—nor whisper it, for that matter, in case you don't hear it properly."
They had done their utmost to ensure not being overheard by third parties—sitting, as they did, on a park bench, in the guise of a couple of conspiring spies, with a combined all-round vision of anybody approaching them. The nearest sign of human life was a trio of children some distance away playing a seemingly crazy game of hide-and-seek out in the open park, with not one hiding-place in easy reach. A little girl had her two palms tightly pressed against her eyes which, thought Arthur with uncharacteristic obliquity, gave the impression that she prayed to a flat God from an even flatter Earth. He laughed at the childish antics. The girl was counting numbers, no doubt—whilst the two older boys flattened themselves into the ground nearby, in the presumably bizarre hope that the grass-blades would conceal them.
Gwenda regained Arthur's attention: "Didn't you hear me?"
"Yes, yes, I heard you allright." He laughed at the paradox. "Say it how you like, it's all the same to me."
"I'm blind and I really only cared for one of those boys," said Gwenda, amid a tinge of tears, with only a slight nod towards audibility and the now empty park.
Two secrets for the price of one, thought Arthur, as he and Gwenda rose from the bench and separated—both of them confused as to codes as well as requitals, but knowing that only the past had spies.
Gwenda Urquhart became a woman who thought she knew everything about everything. But she knew nothing about imagination. Either things were or things weren’t. Yet, eventually, she was to discover that between the “either” and the “or” was a space large enough to hold a whole ocean of things that neither were nor weren’t.
She did not start life as a blind woman and was not strikingly pretty, though it is not too far beyond the bounds of belief that she was once passably attractive when she finally left the school that had been the whole of her life up to the age of 14. Her headmaster—and only the memories of some of the ex-pupils who attended that school (none of whom Arthur had been able to track down) would be able to remember his name—patted her on the head and said: “Gwenda, one day, I have no doubt...” (but he did have some doubt, as all have who say “no doubt”) “...but, Gwenda, always remember your old headmaster’s advice, beware of easy virtue as there is many an evil man who would do anything to catch a sight of your unclothed bosom—spurn them, I say, give them no truck, and if they only want to feel them through your clothes, I have no doubt that you will give them the edge of your tongue and the look of your old-fashioned eyes...” (and at this point the headmaster stared up at the ceiling) “...and may Our saviour Lord Who looks ever upon His flock and about Whom we have spent all our time at this school teaching you, may He cast plagues upon those who accost you in such an unseemly, unsavoury manner...”
Gwenda Maybury (as she was then known) did not reply. But as she ironed her aprons, come her sightless years, she unaccountably recalled that interview, so strange in retrospect. She also recalled a whole ocean of other things that queued up for recalling. For example, Misanthropy-On-The-Naze. She had by then become dim of vision, but still seeing things like asides from migraine. The flashing coloured lights wheeler-dealed across the upright displays, further engendering misplaced hope by giving the punter the chance to tug the forelock of fate with the small mercy of manipulating a bagatelle's two-timing “flippers” at each side, returning silver balls into a whole new campaign of cascading and tricksy shenanigans: accumulating points towards an illimitable target, the biggest number you can contemplate, the size of which only God (and perhaps the owner of Misanhropy's amusement arcade) was aware.
But, now, the arcade is shuttered, the sea-front deserted and the heaving of autumn seas edging nearer to overflow, as the council cart, with a revolving pulse, yellows the night from its cabin roof. It’s touring the streets, with its bewhiskered paddlewheels churning up the gutters, freeing them from the sludge and detritus of summer: discarded buckets, sandcastle unionjacks, rude hats, regurgitated fish-and-chip suppers, mutant condoms fingering out into spider shapes, crystallised candyfloss like sea-creatures’ abortions, tangled strings which once belonged to glove-puppets and soggy saucy postcards scrawled over with undelivered wish-you-were-heres picturing enormous bums, even bigger boobs, triple entendres, bulging pouches and tiny aprons. Gwenda’s craft of life had often hit reefs since leaving school and had been sunk to the bottom, where other eye-putrid fish-heads, such as she was fast becoming, drifted and dangled where the tides took them, in and out of the darkest sea-caves of desolation and dissolution. She rubbed hard with the edge of the iron to remove a particularly stubborn crease her fingers felt, but her mind was elsewhere. If she actually thought about what she was doing, she would no doubt not do it at all: probably true of all women who end up ironing heavy-duty aprons only so that they can wear them.
Blocks of breeze took the wind from Arthur's sails. Yet allow Arthur to start from the beginning, as opposed to the end or even to an undistributed middle. He ate his heart out over Gwenda from the day he first met her. She swayed into his life, a pirate brig flying a skull and crossbones, dressed to murder, a warpainted figure from all his déjà-vu dreams. As thin as a rake, her hard edges were indeed plain to see, yet revealing a heart of beaten gold along with all the sheer-nylon bravado and false economies of self-confidence. Yet none of it made sense at the end of the day. Why would someone like Gwenda take even the slightest notice of Arthur? He supposes the answer did lie in the unanswerable realms beyond death's hymen. In other words (for surely these can't be the only ones), she anchored herself in his soul's seabed—having an intimation that he was immortal ... and, thus blended in bliss, her faith was grounded in his. She was a virgin and he was not man enough to dismantle her. Their affair was so Platonic, they conducted Socratic dialogues with others of like mind. There was, of course, many in the current world who eschewed the physical sides of themselves—a sign of the times stemming from anxiety rather than spirituality. They formed circles, merely hand-in-hand at metaphor's diktat, oscillating without osculation, simply celebrating the cerebral passions, screwing minds without bodies. Arthur and Gwenda were pure thought, an ecstasy of self, onanism made manifold.
The men in Gwenda's life had been many and various, Arthur included. One had led her to a city (far from the seaside she was born), a city she previously didn’t know existed, where fire escapes were bent and twisted into painful sculptures around living ghosts of those that once had failed to climb down them in time. Another took her back to the seaside—and on the pier she played bingo and, come winter, when it was all boarded up, she took herself along the prom, seeking out those men of whom her headmaster had once warned her.
Outside Misanthropy’s Hotel Despond, there stands two men, once, no doubt, holiday-makers, but now deserters from overdue homecomings and from the inevitable return to the treadmill that keeps their families in Sunday dinners and the annual visit to the seaside. Towards the top of the hotel, the electric sign still flashes on and off, certain of its letters missing. It fills the street with an intermittent red haze, illuminating the men’s faces, revealing their stone expressions and surly resignation. One of them curls his lips as he takes another drag from his last cigarette of the season, and says:
“They’ll be battening down in Misericordia, by now...”
A third man called Mr Urquhart has now approached them and, in the weaving lights from either the hotel sign or from the sweep cart or from neither, he can be recognised as one of those accessories to the End-Of-The-Pier-Show which every night during the summer, entertained the pre-bingo audience ... with clattering joanna or punch-drunk puppets or cheap talent competition or all three. This man was the ventriloquist, a semi-professional, who spends the rest of the year working for the council on the sweep carts. His mouth does not move as he speaks:
“It gets me through the endless winter here in Misanthropy-On-The-Naze, dreaming of all the hot summer fun we had, you know. Do you remember Ol’ Ma Manning? She showed her knickers twice a week, for a free go on the bingo. There were numbers all over them, all the sixes, clickety-click, seventy-six, sunset strip, hangman’s noose, Blind Nine...”
The other men nod, but do not listen, for they are preoccupied with the dirty weather that is now threatening to come in off the sea. They wish they were back in Misericordia or Parsimony, further inland, where their children, even now, stare into the night, wondering when their daddies will come home; their mummies have told them that their daddies are still on holiday; perhaps the silly buggers have one more End-Of-The-Pier-Show to enjoy, the last of the season and, then, will creep home, heads bent, to the duties to which all men must face up.
One of Gwenda’s past lovers (if ‘lovers’ is not too kind to describe those to whom Arthur later referred) had a way about him that distinguished him from the others. With eyes like dark pools, he caught her on his hook, line and sinker and showed her what else lurked along the sea-bed of his soul. The next lover had no soul at all, but what he had instead was nothing of which Our Saviour Lord could have knowledge, she thought, for he had sucking sides and utter emptiness. And many other lovers, each different from the next, but each hating her to the same extent as loving her.
Then, one day (exactly when I’m not certain), there came Mr Urquhart, whose soul was even emptier than the one with sucking sides. But, first: she left the seaside town because she could no longer stand the stench of blind fish. She bid farewell to the men she’d known one by one and, naturally, there were a few words of recrimination and a thousand if-onlys. She played her last game of bingo, which turned out to be her first win. A cuddly teddy bear, one which she immediately named after her late headmaster, was passed over to her with a few souvenir beer bottletops (that were used to cover the bingo numbers called). Thrusting it into her bosom, she fled with ne’er a backward dim glance at the coming of winter’s sweeping.
Urquhart, Winter's ex-ventriloquist, has taken out his dummy and the rain drips down its yellow plastic face. A gottle of geer, who wants a gottle of geer. The two other men, bemused, disappear into the public convenience nearby which, by tomorrow, will be the last facility to be barred up for the off-season. One more night of relative comfort in the cubicles, one more night before decisions need to be made. The council cart is returning on the opposite side of the street, a lightship floating across the shimmering, swelling puddles; it will pick up the ex-ventriloquist at the corner of Litany Street. He listens to the rumpus coming from the end of the pier. The fat woman is playing a Russ Conway medley, the gap-toothed sit-down comedian is telling third generation ma-in-law jokes, Ol’ Ma Manning is getting all eager in her seat waiting for her big moment, the audience is clapping half-heartedly, for they’re only there for the bingo.
Gwenda, one day, told Arthur she needed to fall and rise in love with another—and would he, could he possibly unsnag her ankh from his angst? He looked as askance as someone without a face was able. Would, could any potential lover possibly offer the same degree of immortality as oneself? She shrugged without shoulders, laughed with tears in her blind sockets, scowling out rips in her face. Love was evidently to outweigh life for Gwenda. She was now of an age when her various sightless instincts wanted a child of their own, embodied by her body, crafted in her humous halls. Such consummation elsewhere implied Arthur’s abandonment, a pluckless pizzicato upon staccato seas, tacking the empty waves of chance, voyaging the vasculature, cresting the cruciform crescents and breasting the breeze blocks to find his mooring and his berth. Yet an end entails its own endlessness, whilst middles and meanings are nothing if not metaphors. The only hope is that the Child is Father of the Man and can ease ankylosis in angel-fish.
Gwenda tramps to the edge of the seaside town where she hitches a lift back to the city ... and he who picks her up on that fateful night is none other than Urquhart (dramatic inicidental music)...
Urquhart is not going to any particular city but he takes her the whole way, writes a farewell letter to whom he calls a tiny girl friend somewhere on the south coast and sets up home with Gwenda soon-to-be-Urquhart. But, today, Urquhart has a secret: a secret of which even now his wife is unaware and he himself does not fully comprehend it. Like all ventriloquists, he does not exist. He never existed. And he never will. She did not guess for he acted quite normally, bringing in a goodly wage by selling policies to the dying, filling her bed with fishy farts, teasing her up with his timely foreplay, widening out her defences (which were still spinsterish despite her many seaside lovers), entering her mouth with his searching tongues, splicing the mainbrace of her innards, dreaming of her, making her blind eyes dream of him, and all manner of such devices to make her believe that he was as real as the next man. The seas are becoming heavier now like an army commissioned as an impatient vanguard of winter. The ex-ventriloquist speaks quietly, but the storm is growing steadily so noisy that he can hardly hear himself:
“There’s nothing special about the sea. That’s where we all originally came from, after all.”
And, as if hypnotised by the mind-reading act that he always had to follow on to the stage, he strides along the boardwalk planks that creak in the wind. Between their gaps, he can see black boiling pools revolving within each other. Through the useless turnstile, towards the darkened theatre, he is counting backwards from the biggest number he can contemplate ... and his dummy leads the way, on short stumpy legs. Either Gwenda was a fool or she cared not at all whether Urquhart existed or she cared even less whether she herself existed ... or tickling her teddy bear into fits of telling laughter or seeing her headmaster in bed with her tut-tutting between her breasts or Urquhart becoming, if nothing else, a short-arse vision of Her Saviour Lord.
The landscape was ink-blotted with the shadow flocks as they migrated against the seasons: a shifting archipelago of silhouettes traversing the undulants of beach. Yet it was a beach without a noticeable sea. Gwenda flicked her sweat in all directions with a tattered face-cloth as if that action alone could create residues of loose slime tantamount to a pond if not such a sea. She laughed at her own fantasies. There were enough autonomous fantasies on this trek to keep a thousand writers going for a thousand winters, so no need for her faltering attempts at waywardness and daydream. Indeed, the sun had burnt itself into one huge orange furnace—its only margin being the horizon. Each clutch of shadow-casters was frazzled before finding impulse enough to find its own shade. The migrations were simply another version of holocaust and diaspora. She had left the park at Noon and left, too, those who played hide-and-seek between her ingrowing shadows—Noon being the worst possible time for transporting a human body.
Gwenda was indeed a fool to believe either things were or things weren’t. Either that or she herself had gone, never-to-have-been—leaving the empty apron on some kitchen floor. No strings attached.
She knew she died (for what else is blindness?) and if she didn't hurry she would miss the actual death. So life was risked just for the sake of her death. She shrugged. Life was funny like that. So having already laughed, she relaughed. Better than shrugging. Less muscles involved. And minimal was best, at this time of day. Last night there had been a real dream in which a monster had exercised its parasitic droit de seigneur: a dream so unlike the open-hearted dreams that beset dreamers in the plains: a dream so real it had borne the message which instigated today's ordeal. Not that she died, perhaps, but was to give birth. Or, at least, the message was a surrogate message, the ordeal itself being the true message. Death or life. Pain or ecstasy. Whichever the message, her lot was confinement amid the sealess strands: beneath a sun that was merciless to everything including itself: a skyful of sun—all this to be followed, the message said, by a gnawful of vultures breaking their way out through her stomach-wall, sucking her gristle as they went, without recourse to an easier exit from the uterine underworld. And once their appetite had been assuaged they might just peck out her useless eyes and become one more black island of wings revolving thirstily above the breaking waters of sand. She shrugged. The monster had Arthur Urquhart’s name. She reshrugged. Such raising of the shoulders in a moment of resignation at least fended off any message of death. Yet only if they came down again to finish the shrug.
In Misanthropy-on-the-Naze, someone or other threw the switch on the Hotel Despond’s sign and, punch drunk, went to bed for the winter. The council workers locked up the supposedly empty public convenience, one night earlier than normal, got back on board the sweep cart and drove it further inland, its yellow pulse gradually withdrawing its reflections from the empty sea.
The secretest secret of them all was that there had only been one man in her life and he had cared for her even more than blindness deserved, mimicking all the types of man (from kind to nasty) that any ventiloquist could encompass. The most he ever managed was to feel the beginnings of her bosom through a starched apron. The deepst reef of them all.
