Shamefaced
 Published 'Wearwolf' 1993 

SHAMEFACED

 

I had heard of claustrophobia. But when Simon told me that he suffered from a cosmic strain of it, I was so embarrassed I just didn't know where to put my face.

 

            In fact, as far as I could gather, when I asked him to elaborate, he often resorted to crouching in the broom cupboard under the stairs to escape from the sheer oppression of the open sky.

 

            "Are you sure you're not suffering from agoraphobia rather than claustrophobia, Simon?  It sounds as if you might be."

 

            "No, I feel I must escape the universe itself, you know, to put my body beyond its constricting margins."

 

            I laughed: "Maybe, death is the answer..."

 

            "Yes, it may be, but what if it isn't  -  it's a bit rash to try death out, before exhausting all the possibilities."

 

            For no reason whatsoever, my mind wandered regarding his phrase about "exhausting possibilities" and I visualised peculiar creatures lying all over the place panting desperately for breath...

           

            Then, it struck me that one of the creatures didn't have a face, which solved my problem, if not Simon’s. 

LONDON CHRISTMAS STORY

Are you sitting comfortably--since I am beginning. My name is Felicity and I am the happiest woman in the world. Why? Well, because ...

 

WHAT’S THAT NOISE?

 

How can I tell you about my happiness when there's so much noise? Is it workmen drilling? Or sirens wailing of another war? Sounds a bit like a fuss about nothing, as usual.

 

Well, come closer, my dear. I am happy because I love you. Why don't you look surprised? Why are your eyes so small? I am sincere. Come closer, since you don't seem to be hearing me.

 

Oooh, my mouth is now so very close to your ear, I can see all the white hair sprouting in and out of it. The noise is deafening and I'm afraid I shall have to shout. I am suddenly feeling very lonely. Please ignore that person staring through the window. And that other one. Men in church-dome hats.

 

I think we should pretend to ignore all of them. The noise I hear in the chimney is certainly far too early for Christmas. In fact, almost a whole year yet to elapse.

 

Ah well, the workmen seem busy hammering at my door. I turn your head. I kiss your cold old lips. What are those noises I sense clip-clopping on the roof-slates; certainly not the dear dear rain.

 

I am indeed so happy. I think YOU are your own best present.

“In the old days, children were delighted by the merest stockingful of fruit and coal, and Christmas plum pudding could be sown with any loose shrapnel like threepenny bits or tanners.” Rachel Mildeyes (THE GOOD OLD DAYS vol viii. Cone Zero)

FLAT IRON

I am a classical composer of music; by adding 'of music', though, is perhaps unnecessary, for what else do classical composers do other than compose music? However, it is necessary to clarify this in my case, because many people do not class what I compose as music at all. Some call it utter rubbish, being, to their unacclimatised ears, a noise or racket of alarming ugliness. Yet … I still compose it. I sit in a serious stance with my old-fashioned nib poised over the staves, believing every note I write is a mark of genius.

Concerto for Ping Pong ball and Orchestra. Black Elegy for flute and zither. Wild Onions, a chamber opera for water sounds and Welsh harps. These are just a few of my works, as you know. There are many more as yet unplayed, unperformed, unheard. Most reside in my head, giving off their own vibrations to the skull. I am serious about my music having a deeply aesthetic value as art. And I am proud to report that a few unlucky souls turn up at my concerts and pretend to enjoy the sounds they open their ears to.

Brenda was one of those. She did enjoy it, I'm sure; either that or her overtures to me as the composer were completely false. If she did not wallow in my music like a whale enjoying a bath in its own blubber, then she was a good actress at pretending to do so. She even bought the CDs!   Brenda couldn’t help being fat.

It was she who suggested the flat iron.

Now, I ought to make it clear. I was never completely in love with Brenda. There was something quaintly homely about the tender caresses she often gave me. She was a touchy feely person. One day, I would reciprocate, I vowed. But it was always put off until tomorrow.  It wasn’t because she was fat.

She had been married in the past to someone she called Alfred. Apparently, he was fan of pop music and endlessly played the Everley Brothers in the bath. They had not really got on. That was a pity, I'm sure, because Brenda was a fine housewife, one who cherished the dusting and the washing and the ironing. She had a thing about ironing, even in the age of drip dry and non-iron shirts.

The thing about the flat iron happened during the interval of the biggest success I'd ever had with my music. A concert which was more than half full in Huddersfield, and only ten people got up and left during the performance. One even shouted ENCORE at the end.  I was sitting with Brenda at the back, watching the heads move in time to the music. Wild shakings and noddings that had no rhyme or reason. Even their clapping was ragged and ill-coordinated. Yet, most of them stayed the course. And the reviews were singular in their acclaim. Reading between the lines.

Throughout the first half of the concert, Brenda had rested her plump hand in my lap, where I let it stay. I often unplumped her hand from its berth upon my body, but tonight I was thrilled by the reception of my music. Tonight, I even felt warmth towards those to whom I owed warmth (like Brenda), as I had often given undeserved warmth to those who had ridiculed my music. It is often difficult to explain such skewed emotions. I suppose my music described my emotions best. Tonight I tried to be more human, and let my words and face express my inner feelings, instead of my music.

So, I smiled at Brenda, encouraging her to speak. We very rarely had real conversations, especially at my concerts. Silence seemed to be the best option; indeed, some of my pieces incorporated that very silence into the fabric of the sound world I was trying to recreate through the scoring for various instruments. Instruments both conventional and outlandish. One whole movement of my Siren Suite depended solely on the ambience of the audience and concert hall. Each cough was an audience-inspired moment.  Even farting.

Still, the intervals allowed more scope for non-art communication. We could shift away from the pretentious modes of stony-faced listening and become less self-conscious and less stylised.

"Have you thought about using a flat iron?" she asked.

"For what?" I was half-listening to her, whilst trying to catch the eye of one of my faithful sponsors. A sponsor who was deaf, but seemed to enjoy patronising penniless composers like me. I wanted some more backing. But my heart melted. I was in a good mood. I had actually replied to Brenda's question, albeit with another question. I may have said it or I may have thought I said it, viz:

"As a percussion instrument?"

I smiled again. Two smiles in one evening were unheard of, but I instinctively had pricked up my ears at the suggestion of a flat iron. I actually tried to extend the audit trail of the conversation, much as a viola often does in conventional String Quartets.

"You mean hitting it with a metal hammer?"  I could actually hear the chunky clink inside the bone basin that served as a container for my brain. All composers, I guess, have these strange ideas and words for feelings they feel about their own body. Only ordinary people think of the head merely as a head. There's something special about artists in all walks of art, or they wouldn't be artists at all. Even one's limbs became ownerless appendages, given the all-consuming force of art that takes over the mind as well as the body. Still, Brenda was a simple soul. I never really troubled her with these preoccupations.  She had enough to cope with, being so fat.

"Do you know what a flat iron really is?" she asked, with a mischievous look about her. I stopped staring at a woman in a low-slung ball gown (you didn't often get those at avant garde concerts) who was tackling a huge cocktail at the Interval bar. I could see what Brenda must be driving at. It was quite an arresting thought, and the thought drove out all my wayward desires. A flat iron kept the heat after being left among the red hot coals, kept the heat whilst you ironed the clothes. It didn't run off electricity. It was an old fashioned way of storing heat. And, so, if it could store heat … the logical continuation of the thought need not be made. Music was just like heat, wasn't it, a storeable force. So an acoustic musical instrument that could store the music played on it during live music was a brilliant conception. And I owed it all the Brenda. I gave her a peck on the cheek.

We would have made love that night, had the second half of the concert gone to plan or even just followed the example of the first half. But there were several illnesses that beset the audience during the abrasive coughing movement of my Aubergine Dreams for French Horn and Prepared Piano. The after-shocks and echoes that had been pent up all evening in the sound-box of the hall's rafters suddenly erupted with full force and rained down plaster (some claimed it was asbestos) upon the audience, Brenda and myself included.

We left on good terms, though. She scowled at the state of my shirt's detachable collar and I could sense she imagined the terrible creases of its tail. She made it plain that she thought I needed a good woman to look after me. But love is often tantalisingly unattainable -- although my dreams, later that night, homed in on the woman in the ballgown at the bar. Brenda's flat iron was entirely forgotten for a long sleep of complete bliss as I dreamed of better leaner fish in better deeper seas.   Brenda was only indeed one such dream that sometimes escaped to the outside of dream.......

I was rudely woken in the morning by car klaxons betokening a new day, new accidents, new encounters, new sound systems and dustcarts clanging as they collected the world's rubbish. I washed and shaved in a daze, and then I pulled on my wrinkles, without even a single thought for the deflated body thus wrapped up. Irons have sharps, as well as flats.   (unpublished)

Henry Moore

 

Written 1967 and published in 'Purple Patch' 1993

 

Round, smooth, sinewy, full of holes,

The scupltures of Henry S. Moore

Recline in my mind

With the exactitude of a nightmare,

But only vaguely seen,

Frustratingly snatched at

Before they fade through the smoke of ages,

Back to the primitive gulf of stone,

When sex breathed in stone,

Palpitated with unknown forces

Of Lawrencian mystery,

Churned through the black loins of the core

Of origin,

Only to decay, fragment, fracture

Till Moore urges

His tingling fingers to fondle

The seething souces from form,

Till only Moore sees the core,

The essential key to the mystery of living.

Not created, behind the mask of rebellion,

Of automatic fumbling,

Of surly surrealistic brandishing of fear,

But spawning a chunk of rigid core

Out of the cortex,

Out of the nadir of civilisation,

And raising it to the zenith

Of clean, white swirls of chiselling,

Of edgy scraping of stone,

To upturn the nerves into aesthetic response;

And Moore

Is the core

Which obeys every law of nature,

And disobeys

Those God chose.

 

Just Married
JUST MARRIED

When they entered the town that was tucked away in the French hills, the sky was already closing in with the swelling swags of darkness. He had heard tales of such places where honeymooners were often welcomed with rites enacted under a sailing full moon: as they staggered into the last valley, he told his companion about the pots of wild honey that locals toted from the slanting outward doors of their cellars and they would then force-feed the newlyweds, whilst chanting ribald rhymes. She didn’t believe him of course. He didn’t suopose she listened to his crazy legendeering, for she was more worried about finding lodgings for the night.

Dogs seemed to bay across the valley, from each extremity of the town, as if passing messages of their coming to their snoozing masters. The couple would need to steer clear of the dogs for, unlike in England, rabies was rife hereabouts.

They held hands as they talked among the ghosts of their fears.

“Darling, have you noticed that most French butchers have a skimpy array of dark meat on their slabs, with hardened, dried-out edges. They have no connection with the plentiful variety of English cuts...”

He could have bitten his tongue off: he did not have need to hark back to the argument they had had earlier in the day: he had made her feel sick with speculations on the nature of the meat served uo at the auberge that very lunchtime.

“Dick, please... I still feel queasy... Look! All the lights have gone off in the town all at once.”

In one fell swoop...

“It must be some kind of curfew or blackout.”

It was then that they heard the droning noise and the whirr of wings above them. The last they felt was the blood congealing in their veins. The last they saw were hordes of figures with nets over their faces being led towards them by straining dogs across the dark emerald fields of pruned trees. And the last they heard was the chanting:

“A real live English loving couple,
Let’s oil ‘em, make ‘em supple.
But first, slice off his sting!
Before he sheathes it in her thing...”



(Published ‘Arrows of Desire’ 1989)

ASHLEY LIME

Published 'Odyssey' 1993

Ashley Lime worked in an insurance company and arrived daily in the office mausoleum at precisely seven a.m., early enough to catch the batting-lady still passing a feather duster over the desks. She topped and tailed the loose ends, freshened up the jotters, primed the blotters, stirred the pots of correcting-fluid, laid out the virgin sheets of carbon paper...



Ashley's parents had been surprised at his arrival, since all their astrologers, clairvoyants, mediums, marriage guidance counsellors, radio phone-in experts, agony sister-in-laws, social workers and old friends had all said that, in the circumstances, Mrs Lime’s pregnancy was not even a possibility.



"Morning, Mr Lime, I'm just off now, back to me ol' hubbie,” said the batting-lady. “Have a nice day, love."

Ashley sat down at his own personal desk, dealt out the insurance documents for the day like clock patience and, lastly, while resting his chin on the bridge of his hands, he kept a weather eye open for the bustling arrival of his colleagues.



Mrs Lime's belly had been as flat as a pancake, her body-clock as regular as Uncle Tom's fob watch and, in any event, she had often been sick in the mornings since that summer camp with the girl guides when they force-fed eveybody's bacon and eggs down her gullet simply for the sake of a silly joke.

Ashley's father had put his arm around her and said, never mind, all children are the cruellest beasts that God ever created and, furthermore, it is no good harbouring resentments against your own body.

She had bitten her tongue, before not saying that she felt like chopping off his whatsit and putting that in the cot instead.



Ashley should give home a tinkle to tell his wife that he had arrived safely at the office. No doubt, there had been some holcaust on the railway that morning, simulcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and she would be worried about his being mixed up with it somewhere along the line.

The relentless telephone tone jabbed his brain like the needle of a slow motion Singer sewing-machine.

There was no answer!



So, when a living thing did arrive, against all the odds, Mrs Lime called it Ashley and cradled it in her arms, trying, from time to time, to adminster the kiss of life. She then plunged what she thought was its face against her dry pap - but, eventually, she gave up and went to the bathroom to wash off all this pre- and after-birth that had erupted from her body with no sign of a real baby amongst it.



Had he dialled the correct number? She always picked the phone up after the third ring. Dial again, Lime! And he did - but still no answer.

Today was suddenly taking an untidy tangent and, to cap it all, colleagues had by now started trooping into the open-plan office, gabbling about the day's disasters. Thousands killed here, thousands (different ones) killed there. A nuclear meltdown a day keeps the doctor away.



My name, I think, is Ashley Lime.

The world is all around me like a mystic vision. I try to learn from the senses, but my eyes, ears, nose and fingers simply belie the evidence of their own reality.



He dialled home all day, even questioning the integrity of the whole telephone system with Directory Enquiries. They gave him an alternative number, but that only ended him up on some damnable radio phone-in where he was expected to comment intelligently on a local epidemic.

When the tea-lady came round, whom he usually knew under the name Gladys, she pretended to be a complete stranger, saying that it was more than her job was worth to pass the time of day with the likes of Ashley.



Am I monster? Or, at worst, man? I wonder if God, were He alive, would He recognise the likes of me. I doubtless fall short of his ideals. Nevertheless, what more can I do to match them? I've done enough, surely, to rest assured.

And death, if nothing else, is assured.



The batting-lady arrived to find him still in the office, the last one to go as usual. She "did" around him and then helped him stack up his index cards in a neat pile. At least SHE was familiar.

He asked her to drain the inkwells and remove the sediments to the Ladies. She did not care for this job - worse than stomach-pumping Gladys' tea urn or scraping out the waste bins - and she gave Lime an old-fashioned look fit to set him reeling back on the balls of his feet. But she had a certain fondness for him, and no mistake.



So, I seek only one thing: a sign of myself: because my original parents have denied me birth, have slaughtered me before I was old enough to stop them, even before they forgot about me by first changing the past itself.



He travelled home, heart in mouth, fearing what might face him in the shape of his wife.

But she was there as usual, puckered lips as ever raised to greet him. Then he noticed a blemish on her left cheek, like a wen. It was not worth making a fuss about, as there was only one stiff hair sprouting from it. But, that was not all, her arm hung pathetically shrivelled by her side like a shameful part.

No wonder he had got a wrong number that morning, in view of such evident dis-figurement.



At the sea's bottom, the lissom weeds sway in a slow dance with darting colourfish and, among them, Ashley crawls, crab-like, dragging the disease-riddled foetus of his twin brother.



He put his wife to bed, in the hope she would improve by morning. He kept vigil the night through, tending to the weeping sores that broke out around her front-loader.

He must have dozed off, because following the dream of the sea creature, he saw the bald head of a vile bird forcing itself through the bedroom wall, as if from a giant cuckoo-clock. Its neck was long, indeed, but before it could reach out to give Ashley a peck, its snapping beak abruptly hinged back on itself and swallowed whole the wattled head whence it came.

Ashley glanced at his wife who was at that moment tossing in the bed - and she cried out in evident desperation to what had become a blurred image of her husband: "Ashley, everything in me is coming free and flopping about..."

Ashley Lime shrugged - he put it all down to what he called “things he couldn’t possibly understand”. He would ask the batting-lady about it first thing in the morning.



And if death is the most certain thing in one's life, the natural conclusion is that everything else is more uncertain - even the fact of one's birth.



But the next morning, there were many insurance documents awaiting Ashley Lime's urgent attention, so all such thoughts fled quickly from his mind. No impulse, then, of course, to ask the batting-lady whether blood is God’s correcting-fluid.

There should be a piping hot carton of tea at precisely eleven a.m. and Gladys, the tea-lady, might ask if Ashley’s wife was well, as she often did. THEN, he should be able to get to the bottom of some things - to the bottom of body-clocks or what might not live amongst the dead tea-leaves in Gladys' huge slopping tea-urn. He’d even fathom why most memories are false, but when faced with the only true memory which is death, then why had he no need of it? Why is the only connection between people an interruption?

Skin Deep

SKIN-DEEP

Published ‘Atsatrohn’ 1993


Lisa tried ever so hard to keep the flat clean. She'd recently moved there, vowing to top and tail its residues every morning, but the road to Hell was surely paved with such intentions of Godliness. So, as the days ensued, small chores were gradually left undone, the devil's motes accumulated in the guise of common dust and grime grew unsightly as entropy encroached. Everything became a mildewy mountain that Lisa convinced herself was unscaleable.

Having barely quit the nest twig-twined by her mother, Lisa was hit hard: crockery with organic stains; bedroom ceiling crazing over with more and more cracks, whilst their patterns seemed unchanged from one day to the next; varieties of mould spanning the mineral, vegetable and animal surfaces of daily life - well, she even believed that her inability to cope would, sooner or later, cause the walls to collapse like a house of cards.

Daytime was easier, since she could escape into the streets, where she began relaxing, convinced that she wouldn't be held responsible for the city's deep-skinned fuckweed.

"Hey, lady, stick yer nose in that!" One of the food vendors shouted to her from a stall which he was clearing after a day's business. This was evidently his normal sales-cry for cut price bananas. He prodded his finger into a brown mushy pile on his trestle, and laughed his tongue out.

Lisa cold-shouldered him and continued towards the theatrical quarter, where she hoped to feel less like the interface between flesh and stone or between blood and gutter-swill. Everything was on show for what it was worth, whether good or ill, where personal responsibility and humanity's common savagery could walk hand in hand. Lisa laughed for the first time that day, as the ludicrous words which her thoughts employed came to mind. Yet her thoughts had false bottoms. She didn't even know she had such quake-lines in her mind.

Eventually, she'd've to leave the shimmering arcade and return 'home'. Night brought new ills to the city streets, from which even the flat seemed haven. She scrutinised the flashing lights, each coloured bulb being a constituent of a saying or a title or a message or dancing sequinned lady beckoning man to her embrace. Lisa shivered off a sob. She felt need of her mother's enfolding arms and bruised breasts upon which to rest a worried head.

A man accosted her. He had crept up to her ear like a stealthy cat and whispered sweet nothings in a foreign language. She did not appear to care, since here she was as anonymous as everybody else. Were a knife to be surreptitiously eased between rib-bones to carve an arc from her heart, she'd die in peace with a self she no longer recognised.

But she returned, she knew not how, to the street where her flat was to be found. She sensed her own personality slipping back into position between the ears, as she recalled with a shudder the unfinished washing-up, the dust-clogged hangings, the undarned trappings of her lost youth. Mother had died too soon, before Lisa had fully emerged from the eggshell that had been moulded around her by hen Aunts who could never countenance the way human beings tended to give birth. They'd thought Lisa too pure for those honking party-games in a brown butcher's shop...

Lisa's thoughts tailed off again, before she could grasp their meaning. The flat was opened with a key that grated in the lock. Not bothering to switch on the lights, she fumbled her way to the bedroom where, if she were lucky, she could collapse under the quilt without even seeing any of the dark rubble around her.

The bed sucked Lisa in even before she realised she'd reached its unmade mouth. The innards were in tatters: shredded by long toe-nails. Only Lisa's head remained outside, a sweetly pitiful expression fleeting across its features under cover of darkness.

The lower ends of her body were the first to become as one with the bed's thick-cut soup of animal, vegetable and mineral. Then, she heard street-callers, costermongers and a solitary cat's-meat man distantly selling their wares to those of us who only come out after dark.

Tomorrow, Lisa vowed to top and bottom the whole world.

A Dream Of Real Air

published 'Peripheral Visions' 1992

 

A DREAM OF REAL AIR

 

There was no use denying him access to the parlour.

 

He was my son after all, and I couldn't see him curled up like a whelk in the cold scullery all night.

 

But when, on that retrospectively fateful weekend, he brought a young lady to visit, one with a dagger-fish brooch on the left lapel of her cavalry-twill costume top - ­well, I would have needed to resort to the direst vocabulary to warn them both off.

 

I was indeed sure there would be no safety in numbers. I wanted to continue my life in the magic realism of solitude--and, so, it would be necessary for me to get in my tantrum of making the pair of them unwelcome before they had the chance to sneer at the shortcomings of my abilities as a host.

 

It is difficult to disentangle my reasoning on such an occasion, as the words slide too easily from my memory, staining the screen of my mind's eye with a pattern of meaning comprehensible only to Hottentots; I even won­der whether I’m actually capable of perpetrating the Queen's English, let alone that alien dialect which the Old Space­ships once crated to Earth in the beaks of insane, if articulate, chickens.

 

Back to fundamentals.

 

I opened the front door upon hearing the knock, thus allowing dustmotes and sunlit air to swirl past me. He had warned that he might be coming for a long weekend, if time permitted. There, though, with him, was this female with goggle eyes, both feet planted on the balding doormat. She peered over my shoulder into the well of the hall.

 

''Yes?'' I scowled. Well, I think that I scowled, since only in stories can a narrator really see through the eyes of others. I had already decided to treat them both as strangers--that was at least what my son deserved by bringing someone I couldn't trust at first sight.

 

"Hello, Dad ... can I introduce Felicia Kelp?" He did not spell out the name so, even now, I’m unsure as to whether even the Hottentots would be able to get their tongues round what I visualised as the correct words.

 

I glanced into the sky blue yonder and caught the fleeting sparkle of a star-hopper slowing down for Heathrow . . . or, at that hour, it may even have been Gatwick. Light travel (or travelling light as the popular song of the time put it was so inconsistent. Tachyons had not really bottomed out until AJ Sylvester later dissected one under a micro­scopic microscope, using a near endless array of diminish­ing pulleys to guide a scalpel manufactured from one highly sharpened molecule.

 

Just as I was about to answer as unwelcomingly as possible, I heard a furor from the chicken run in the back garden. The squawking and screeching was fit to raise the Devil on his hindmost. Something had disturbed the crea­tures' equilibrium. Either too much grit in the meal or the barely perceptible shift of the Earth off its axial cord, which tended to happen nowadays, had gone to their coxcombed heads. Luckily, the moon no longer toppled into the sea, as it did back in the more poetic days of pre-reality--only to be put back in the sky by everybody's image of a God with flow­ing white beard, trident and sharkbone corsets.

 

Without a further word (saying nothing was in­deed more unwelcoming than pointedly expressing my grievance in stronger language), I showed them into the parlour. There was a put-you-up in there, just big enough for two thin ones, I indicated. I saw Felicity Kell (or what­ever her Christforsaken name was) studying the framed photographs on the mantelpiece. One was of me and my late wife.

 

"Mr. Lewis, you sure looked young in the past." That was no way to inveigle me into accepting her as a complete stranger no longer (or even an incomplete one). I could imagine, indeed, nobody stranger. Before I could protest, my so-called son intervened.

 

"What's wrong with my own bedroom, Dad? Hasn't it still got hot and cold running water?" He motioned as if to take their suitcases to that very room.

 

Whether it was the deep rumbling of the star­hopper landing across the other side of London, he did not seem to hear my reply:

 

''You're not taking any see-through floosies up there, Johnny me lad. Your dead mother would turn over in her bed."

 

He shrugged. He knew I had spoken something, since I had watched his eyes trying to follow my lips. For a man, his eyes were very widely set apart. In his heart, he must have been aware of my misgivings.

 

"We'll go and feed the poultry for you, Dad." He took his lady friend by the arm (both of which were ex­tremely short for her body, I noticed) and directed her towards the front door, via the parlour door .

 

"Done it already," I said, pointing to the carriage clock which was between the photographs like a sentry of old. The imperceptible swing of its pendulum proved that the ancient maxim of time never standing still was worthy, at least, of scrutiny by that breed of scientists even now living in the think-tanks of old Ministry of Defence establishments dotted along the eroding coasts of downtown Great Britain.

 

The lady, who had evidently stolen my son's heart, made herself at home. She spread her legs in an ungainly fashion as she settled down in what used to be my wife's wicker basket, allowing me to see as much as the stocking­-tops, but no further. My son smiled at my blushes, if blush I did.

 

In an attempt to bring matters to an even keel, he started on one of his long boring conversation-pieces about the ancient research into how fish think, make music. High­faluting college talk, I called it. He needed his brain flushed out. The lady said nothing, while tugging at the harness of her bodice and wriggling to remove her most sensitive areas from the basket's various discomfort points. Then, without prior warning, the shrill alarm in the carriage clock blurted out.

 

"Time to fill the house!" I shouted, scorching for the tap by the open radiator.

 

I was just in time. The lighter-than-air water gradu­ally filled the parlour, before our lungs could burst from our mouths like punctured balloons. The water was lukewarm in view of the season. It was strange what routines post-­reality brought along in its wake.

 

That's the way the world is, these days. At least, the three of us stopped the inane chatter. Creatures under water can only open and shut their mouths in the arcane rhythm of misspent speech. When words are empty, lip­-reading is worth no more than braille to those now limbless coffins of flesh which were once called human beings kept locked up in disused nuclear shelters, as they are--for their own good, let me add.

 

My eyes slid round to my temples, slugs that merely looked like the marbles children used to play with. Despite this, I could still discern my son's grinning from side to side, as I think he knew I knew he probably hated the lady (whatever her name) and it was only a matter of time before he unscrewed the stopcock of the sewage outlet under the television set. But would it be wide enough?

 

The sun shafted through the parlour window and milled with the multi-coloured plankton that swirled from the secret coral seas beyond the stocking-tops.

 I would have told my son not to darken my door again, if I hadn't first fallen asleep and dreamed of drowning.     

 

Furlough

Published 'Purple Patch' 1992

 Clive told me that he viewed life as a holiday from a far more serious and potentially sadder period that surrounds it upon all sides.  

 

On our frequent meetings together, propped up at the Turk's Head bar, I was subjected to the outlandish ideas that he'd harboured about our sabbatical from the after-life and so forth. I put it all down to pub talk, because men are renowned for jabbering gibberish over a jar - merely for the sake of macho bonhomie and easy badinage. Alcohol oils the wheels of the human cabriolet I always say, as it wends its lonely road between birth and death.  

 

However, where Clive differed from most men of my acquaintance, he was dead serious about the garbage he spouted. One pig ignorant statement for every gulp of best bitter... 

He eventually took his beer belly to Our Maker. It was sudden. He was killed by a pedestrian ,whilst driving his car! And, he wasn't  kerb-crawling either!            .

 

The story goes that he had stopped for traffic lights and some­one opened his door and jabbed a knife into his neck. No obvious motive. The murderer was apparently a man in an anorak who merely strolled away, meticulously obeying the pelican lights. 

The various onlookers were doubtful as to the exact circumstances and none of them chanced a citizen's arrest. In fact, one of them said the perpetrator was a young lady in a floral dress. It all seemed pretty extenuating to me.  

 

Well, I found myself arranging Clive's funeral, due to lack of anyone closer coming forward, and his will made me executrix.  

 

Now I sup unladylike pints on my ownsome and can often be dis­covered muttering to myself in the Turk's Head. Sometimes I think I'm Clive himself on a moratorium from death, but that no doubt is yet one more case of mistaken identity.  

The Man With No Name

Collaboration with MF Korn      

 

 

 

 

 

The cowboy slouched into the saloon, his tremendous girth waddling through the swinging doors.  His name--hidden from his peers--was Billygoat.  He traded under a different one. 

 

 

       He kissed the hot syrup neck with a slavering joy and told the bar-tender to deliver some more. He used to be the skinniest runt.  But wagonloads of beans and fixins, salt pork and jerky took care of that.         Everyone in the place looked over, some of the boys smirking.  He looked around, not caring.  The bar was festooned with dancin' gals, some better whores than others.

 

 

     "Hey, Tenderfoot, what's your poison?" said a gangster from a different side-step.

 

 

     Billygoat tapped his holster meaningfully; there was more shot in Laramie, he mimed, than the deepest gunsling backyard of any Prohibition era, bar none.

 

 

     The person who spoke to him had a strange mellifluous voice, as if it were an echo in a canyon.  His face was even stranger as well, the dark features, and odd oblong look to it.  He had dapper clothes, a real dandy, but the suit of clothes that hung on his skeleton frame was ill-fitting and no longer the well cut suit it once was.  There was a stentorian breathing

 

 

pattern, and a strange accent augmented the overall demeanor of the guy. He wasn't standing up straight, and Billygoat didn't like to be hassled by no city folk that didn't belong in those parts anyhow.  Hell, Billygoat thought, I hadn't even whetted my damned whistle before someone starts up on me.  He wondered, does this dandied dude have some truck with me?

 

 

     “I have juices that real thinking heads have a-plenty in their soft centres,” the dapper dandleprat announced, fondling his own finger as if it were a trigger.

 

 

     Billygoat couldn’t help but notice that a creature, of sorts, quite out of keeping with any traditional take on reality, had by now scuttled into the bar and squatted, preening itself, on the dandleprat’s shoulder.  Its body was tantamount to an arm’s length of  loose-limbed neck, with a single-spout snout, and resting between a pair of scrawny sack-like humps.  As the dandleprat stroked the creature, it spat a curd of see-through cream straight into Billygoat’s chump chops.

 

 

     "What in the hell?----" Billygoat said, trying to spit out the foreign matter.

 

 

     "Come here, my precious," said the diminutive.  "He does that sometimes.  Don't be alarmed, kind sir."

 

 

     On any given outlaw day, Billygoat woulda shot the man straightaways in the brain.  In the back, front, side.  But something kinda nice cleared his sinuses and pleasure sunk into Billygoat’s bulbous lard head, underneath a ten gallon duster hat.  He ended up swallowing the rest.  He looked around, dizzy.  The boys didn't see that, he reckoned.  Or I'da had ta kill a man.

 

 

     The creature winked at him, or was that his imagination?

 

 

     "Sir,” said the creature’s keeper. “My name is Winkencrump.  I'm a mortician.  Or at least I had a funeral parlor in Tuscon, but I want to set up a little business here in Laramie.  And what is your name, kind sir?"

 

 

     "Billy.  Goat.  My gang calls me that.  Born a two-midwives in hell itself.  A lot a folk is afaid o' me."  Something infinitely pleasureable sprang a fount in his cranium.  He couldn't seem to think about things. About watchin' his back.  About who's comin' after him with a knife, in his blind spot.  Outlaw thinking which was usually on his mind was clearin' out.

 

 

     "You feel strange, right?"

 

 

     The barkeep had been eyeing this strange diphthong of a man since he came in with his creature.

 

 

     "Mister, you'd better buy a drink or you is flat outa here...And there ain't nothin' like that allowed in my saloon.”

 

 

     One of the dancing whores tried to pet the creature.

 

 

     Billygoat sucked at a bottle of pother he’d garnered ‘stead of syrup.  He’d have to teach them a thing or two.  He’d have no truck with impostors from otherworldly gunslug wastes such as Cagney used to forest with his jugular twangs.  Only necks could be sliced at both ends and still live the half-life of a worm.  Camels, too, but they didn’t come out west till Wyatt Earp croaked.  And again that was never to be between the book-boards of  THIS dust-covered reality.

 

 

     The creature, meantime, was enticingly off the shoulder, snuggling now upon the buxoms of a well-heeled whore.  Its soft-boned helmet nuzzled into the deep chasm of her fleshy soul. It seethed with the breaking news of love as her painted claws ripped, in passion, its upholstered humps.  Loose covers were unwound turbans.  And slickness was the melting sorrow that exuded from conjoined pores.

 

 

     Billygoat took the dandleprat outside and said they had to see the sherrif about a bank raid.  It was as if they now both realised they were meant to meet here, today, now, then, forever.  Conspiracy was not even close enough a description.  And, with the creeping creature crumbling behind them like a spent whimper, they unwound their snickering steeds from the saloon’s biting-board and trotted towards the House of the Blinking Star.

 

 

     The dandy mortician’s horse was rather strange:  It had a covering of goldfish scales instead of regular horse hide.  The creature sort of floated besides the man as the strange trio of Billygoat, Winkencrump and sidekick kicked up dry dust on the midway. 

 

 

     “Here’s my new funeral parlor, The House of the Blinking Star.  I kind of would like to show you around.”  They dismounted.  The goldfish-scaled horse folded into a cube the size of a breadbox. 

 

 

     “How’d that happen?”, asked Billygoat, still numb from the fat neck wattle up. 

 

 

     “It would take a long time to explain.  Come on in.  Let’s talk about your bank robbery you would like to plan.”  They walked in after Winkencrump waved a wry skeletal paw at the smooth futuristic finish of the door, which made the door not open like normal, but wink, blink and dilate.

 

 

     “Shucks, mister, you sure got some fancy place here...”.

 

 

     The creature floated through the door backwards on its back, three feet off the ground.  The floor was that of a sort of living carpet which fanned like a field of wheat.  It made Billygoat feel real nice.

 

 

     The walls were splayed gossamer and ephemeral laser-melts showing vast vistas of unplumbed galactic space.

 

 

     Gangster films  and staroperas, however, got on Billygoat’s gruff. 

 

 

      REAL reality was wild west, whilst wraparounds of imagination seemd to steam them back and forth between quite different grips of genre.  He had to get a handle on why they were there.  The sad creature bleated at his feet, pangs of something akin to wistfulness gazing up from its sightless snout.  Winkencrump gave it a kick, which ricocheted around the flinching walls and even made the horsescales outside wince with ringing. 

 

 

      “Hey, Goat, why you’re too fat for ramraids,” said the mincing mortician.

 

 

      “All the better to head-butt any bank safe worth its salt,” rejoindered the now thoughtful cowboy.  Billygoat, indeed, was no pasteboard gringo.  He had emotions, even possessing depths that would outclass a right old rodeo of cross-currents and wild motives.  Indeed, he needed to ride his own mind as if its bucking would never stop, except by force of death in some derring-do.

 

 

      “The bank’s doors, Goat, are not as wide as those swing ones at the saloon.  And, what is more, they’ll know who you are even with your Lone Ranger mask on!” 

 

 

      Billygoat sobbed to himself, whilst stroking the crumpled neck-creature as a diversionary tactic.  He’d never make the bestest bandit, even in slices.  At least hardly no-one knew his name.  No name, no shame.

 

 

      “This little device will get your robbery going.  It melts any substance on your planet with one press of the substrate indention.”

 

 

                        “Subtrace wha-a-t?”

 

 

                        “Er, trigger or button.”

 

 

                        “Oh, let me see that thing.” 

 

 

      Winkencrump floated it across the surreal room of the futuristic funeral parlor.  Caskets of laser netting floating halfway up the walls, if they were walls.  Bodies of alien creatures all apparently deceased lay within these caskets.  One of these caskets appeared to be the size of a grand piano.  It was empty, too.  Billygoat didn’t do no wonderin’ about who that was for.  He just thought that green slivery aliens all spindly and blotched grey, and spidermonkey purple rodentoids laying prone in laser caskets were something to look at for a second or two.  He knew he never would understand about no creatures like that.  He was a wonderin’ if this here Winkencrump might be old Satan hisself.

 

 

      Billygoat pointed the device away from himself but unbeknownst to him he was pointing the weapon at his own fathead.

 

 

      “Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttt! Popppp!”   The room of wispy natty strangeness lit up like a supernova for a second, and then cleared abruptly. 

 

 

      All that was left of Billygoat were his boots and a fused skeleton, in melting cauterized energy.  Little sensors in the wall cleansed the air.

 

 

      The stench went away.  Winkencrump smiled and pointed a device at the ectoplasmic blob of Billygoat.  It floated straight into the casket neat as those devices do.

 

 

      But scenarios fought the last battle.  Wild West versus Space Opera versus Gangster versus Surreal Arthouse.  And dust-laden Dodge City, if not Laramie, stood thankfully firm.

 

 

      Meanwhile, the creature took matters into its own hands and rode the bucking goldfish bronco straight at the bank’s vault doors, its six-shooters firing like it was intent on killing the whole crew. The set was only a frontage.  And the creature died a pulsating death in a spasm of premature ejaculation.

 

 

      The cowboy smiled.  He had seen the crumpled wink of a one-spout snout and felt tides of muscle within himself move the fat and lard into deeper ribs of gung-ho machismo.  The Man With No Name.

 

 

      “Billygoat, I love thee,” the creature whimpered at the end.

 

 

                        It must mean him.

 

 

 And even cowboy heroes cry.