Tight Corners

 

 (Published 'Purple Patch' 1990)

The streets were so narrow, the tall arched windows of the buildings stared greyly eyeball to eyeball, as if confident that taxes would ever be on doors rather on them.

"Oi!" said one greasy individual, "time was when you had to pay the government for every chimney you had on your roof."

"Oi! Oi! That's because people were religious in those days and didn't want God to get a cough as a passive smoker."

An oaken door creaked on rusty hinges, yawned wide to feel the spray of drizzle upon its vertical tongue.

"Oi! Don't give me that, doorways haven't any tongues," said a shoe which happened to be passing, fastened to someone or other's foot.

The smell of an evening meal wafted out into the narrow street, making the drains water.

And passers-by galore turned up their noses (and some their toes). One particular portly party got his belly stuck between the sides of a servant's entrance, so narrow the owners didn't have to pay so much tax on it.

There were grunts of people arguing around the next blind corner.

Oi! Oi!

TORCH MUSIC
A collaboration with M.F. Korn

George Llewellyn III was not exactly the typical suburban American. The generality of his neighbours, you see, had taken the trouble to clear their yards of endemic crabgrass. Not George, though. He was a bit anarchic on the quiet.

It was not as if his own parents were anarchic. They had got together in quite a planned sexual foray sort of way - a significant gestation period before the Millennium - and forged the makings of George. Nothing anarchic about that, I suggest. George's own children - mishaps, even miscegenations - were not, in any shape or form, anarchic personalities, despite their anarchic origins. They simply nagged poor old George into an early stiff gravity. Then went their own ways towards the stars.

So, George, left alone, still slightly anarchic, grizzled by once desirable grooves, enjoyed wading through the unkempt wastes of his yard - sometimes accompanied by one of his drinking cronies (usually ponderous Hoss), sometimes not - wondering if the skyline was really the sucking pit it was made out to be by the new Religiosos of 21st century downtown Towbar.

Then, he stumbled, upon a monolith. A monument of metal that had not been there the night before.

"My toe!" he cussed.

"Your what?" queried Hoss, spitting a quid of tooth-loose tobacco from his mouth.

"Shut your wipehole, Hoss! Can't you see this wadn't here before, now? Mother of Christ at Halftime, what is it?"

"You'd better watchit son! What the hell is it?"

Hoss swallowed a cuspidor's worth of brown fluid bacco juice backwash as his jaundiced boggle eyes popped out of his bulbous lard head.

The smooth, textural finish of the thing was immaculate and otherworldly. In the way that no 30 year machinist at the Exxon plant could have cut to specs if it were pure blue-twisted steel. Gunmetal but dark aquamarine, no, perhaps when they looked into it, they saw the black spectral absence of light - a proportionate object amidst these rings of smelly toadstools in George's yard, yes, of perfect dimension but a dimension of some other dimension, maybe not of this Earth. It stood magnificently, rising from the thatched rises of weeds and dandelions all ripe, like a futuristic Stonehenge triptych shooting to the celestial heavens from this rise of wild weeds.

"Don't touch it, Hoss!"

"I wadn't gonna touch it, now. Don't know what kinda metal that is? Do you?"

"I don't know. It ain't nothing like I ever saw before."

"It is kinda pretty, though."

A boy, evidently one of George's half-breed issue who hadn't yet left for the stars, yelled at him through a tattered screen door on the back porch.

"Daddy! Mamma said come inside and eat!"

"Go on and play Nintendo, boy! I'm busy!"

The boy cussed him behind his back, out of earshot and the door slammed on itself, the screen swinging in the wind at the concussion.

"Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat!" whined George in mock of the voice now gone - an ancient habit whence he couldn't help himself. Yet, he'd been damn sure all his children left home yonks ago upon some godforsaken hunt for a better future - and his wife'd been dead for at least a tandem of eternities, or so it felt. A bit of a ghost, no doubt. He shrugged and spoke the! same words in sepulchral hushed tones as if to seek pardon for the earlier mockery: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside and eat."

Hoss ritually repeated the refrain, if a little off trail: "Daddy, Mamma said come inside to come inside her." He chortled as he spouted residues of plug juice every whichway of the wind.

The darkness was now taking store for the night - hugging the warm breaths of the stars to its bosom with fewer and fewer winks towards an approaching death ... hopefully a painful death of one of George's smart-arsed neighbours.

"Go get a torch!" snapped George. It being his yard, it was his right to make decisions.

Hoss scuttled off and the further Hoss scuttled off , the more George thought of a creature on all fours.

There was still sufficient seeping glow, by some trick of dusk, which allowed George to continue his examination of the metal monument. The rise of weeds honoured it with out-stretched leafy prayers. George knelt, too, as the wind again slammed the door.

It wasn't kneeling as in a genuflection, more that of getting a better look-see at his very own monolith. He daren't touch it, he thought; but why shouldn't it have been perfectly fine to touch it? - the contour, the smoothness, its capability as if it were charged with otherworldly kinetic energy, all wound up - but he didn't anyway.

The corrugated rusty shell of a 1973 Dodge Dart lay on its gut stomach, its life's breath long ago squeezed out of it like a carcrusher. Strewn about the tall sawgrass were rusty tools, a Big Wheel missing a back wheel, a jaded easy bake-oven caked in slimy mud and birdcrap, an old Sears washing machine engine, a Sears minibike chassis, gutted like a perch.

That night, despite the dying of the dusk, something compelled George to do something marvellous. Sucking in his slack dough pot, under the infinite palette of stars swirling, George cranked his Sears riding mower and attacked his lawn. He slew the five f!oot high dandelions, and longstanding perennial weeds, which before were so secure of their safety, and now which gallantly fell under the sheath of his power mower. The riding mower itself chocked and sucked in air, inhaling clouds of ragweed, dust, soot, old charcoal briquet mist of carbon, and minefields of petrified dog dirt. And yet the Sears mower persisted with George valiantly saddled atop his steed.

The odd thing was, George, who only liked Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb and Porter Waggoner tunes, found himself whistling the opening theme to Shostakovich's Fifth symphony, and actually heard the magnificent lush orchestration in his head, noticing well the ironical touches to the music that Shostakovich hid in there. And he hadn't the faintest idea why. As he cut a swathe around the pantheonistic monolith, and mushrooms, weeds and tentacles of crabgrass which radiated from several central hubs of root like that of octopi, he stared blankly at the black strangeness of the object, now whistling the second movement of the Shostakovich.

The stars suddenly seemed to begin talking to him in celestial harmoniousness. Melodiousness, too. Steeped and dipped in secret atonalities more fitting for Schoenberg than Shostakovitch. Holst made a ceremonial clash of astrological forces...

The noise was suddenly interrupted by the ponderous tympani of Hoss's paws arriving with a torch so powerful, George mistook it for a spotlight, shafting the night sky for the Luftwaffe around the peak of St Paul's Cathedral that he had seen in picture books. Silence ensued, as the Mower cut out. The stars were dead still. The monolith glinted in the strobes of a sudden electrical fault that seemed to beset the heavy-duty torch.

"Thought I'd bring the biggest baby in the shed," wheezed Hoss.

"I've been cultivating my garden, as Voltaire once told me I should," said George. He demonstrated with his wheeling arm the bowling-green garden his yard had become, the torchlight spluttering as it crested the black dunes of its imputed greenness. The monolith glinted like a wondrous emblem of Truth Foretold. There was a music about its shape neither man would have noticed, given the brash patchwork of a Towbar dawn. No, you see, with night, embossed by mankind's golden stuttering effulgence, showing the monolith up in its best light, there was a visible music moving around it like a kaleidoscopic halo.

"Who's Volt-Air?" croaked a kettledrum toad masquerading as a plugless Hoss, or vice versa.

As in answer, the monolith lit up like a colour organ and whined with its ondes martenot of Messianic fervour.

"Gee, Hoss, this like a Second Coming. I wish my dear old wife could come back and see it all..."

The door slammed, despite the lack of wind in the now soundless electricity of the air.

Though there was no glass but instead punctured rusty screen, a beatific light penetrated through the porch, of myriad colours to reveal the image of a Byzantine stained glass portrait, piercing the moth-ridden humid air into the sky. Blazing forth like an incandescent kleig light, the image was that of George as an old man, very old, lying in a bed in a pure white room. Hoss began crawling around on all fours, grunting like a pliocene ape, his cranium becoming bracheocephalic in nature, that of a Neanderthal, pointed skull. George's half-breed son came out of the door, and it appeared that he had rearranged his Nintendo 64 Gameboy to that of cleverly bypassed and manipulated circuitry, and he was holding this entertainment apparatus, which was clearly not for entertainment anymore. For some inexplicable reason, the wire extension to the Joystick was now soldered to a perforation in his left temple, that of "jacking himself in" to the now much more sublime and complicated Nintendo apparatus.

Hoss climbed the pecan tree, scuttling up its branches in a very economical and easy manner, grunting the whole way, the lycanthropic fur patches now visible through his workshirt, which now was in tatters due to his morphism. George stared into eyes of his son, and they melded into one symbiotic blend. The monolith beamed like a popsicle of pure evangelical white light, humming unknown microbytes of mathematical symbols unknown to the race of Man. Knee music. Torch music. The song went on.

George said, "Son, did you send the signal?"

Son or Song, he wasn't sure which. But the boy, his temple bearing wiring, replied, "The signal is going to the stars."

Hoss had regressed to that of a sort of pliocene or equine ape, oblivious now to the transcendence of George.

George woke up in a white room, one hundred and ninety years old.

The monolith grew as silent as the old Dodge Dart in George's backyard.

George blinked.

When he opened his eyes, he was sucking his thumb. The blue-green globe of Earth lay beneath the placenta-sac which contained him. George was a star-foetus.

Anarchy was his watchword. Or his curse. He tried to clamber back - through the nettles and crabgrass - to some semblance of reality whence he could take an overview. Towbar township floated in some aetheric miasma of religious half-growth - cults and cuirasses covering its crystalline chest. And the monolith rose from between his loins, playing such glassy music - unheard, even in the circular arguments of a minimal millennium. It became, eventually, a choral Requiem with an infinite number of deaths at its heart. His afforested garden-centre had given birth to a stiff gravity.

"Oi! Oi! Cuckold!" shouted Hoss, as he gallopped away on heavy hooves, towards the Rose Garden. Hoss himself, after all, was no more than a centaur, one with a cockadillo coxcomb.

George tried to shave his chin, this time, with the Sears. But then his dear dear wife emerged from anarchy and made his monolith stereo.

(Only the Bartok joke from Shostakovitch's Leningrad Symphony played out towards the playful end of time, where a better future waited, if not for George certainly for those he loved.).


Previously unpublished

Ultimate Creative

EVENTUALLY TO BE PUBLISHED IN PRINT

Cold Poker

Published 'Whispers From The Dark' 1995

  

The house had grown overnight. He was sure of this if of nothing else. That must explain why his own body seemed smaller than when he fell asleep.

 

Waking up from dreams, one usually needed to spend at least a few mental somersaults to acclimatise the self to reality. However, it was not long before one accepts the dreams for what they were: simply that, dreams.

 

Today, he woke from a dream which seemed like his real life and into a real life which seemed like his dream. Disorientated, he lifted the covers to look at his naked body. But it still seemed trapped in the dream.

 

His wife had left a crumpled dent beside him. She was evidently stepping somewhere in a distant wing of the terraced house, by the sound of it.

 

He tried to recall the whereabouts of the bathroom. The noise of rain on the window reminded him that the summer had been one long drought until now. He remembered the droplets racing down the ancient panes of childhood windows. But that seemed like a memory of someone other than himself. The past is not a foreign country but an alternate world.

 

These thoughts were untypical of him. He doubted his own identity even more than his sanity... until he recognised his wife for what she really was, coming in with a raised poker filched from the companion-set in the main living-room.

 

He got up, knowing in his heart of hearts that all scullery maids like him should have been hard at work long ago ... or else earn more ugly red welts on the smart end of her body.

  

 

Vicious Circle

   VICIOUS CIRCLE

 

Published 'Connections' 1995

           

Peppered with picnic parties across Gushing Downs: a loom of dawnlight; twirling parasols; bright checked tablecloths spread over the greenest grass possible outside of a painting; wicker baskets brimming with edible goodies of every dietary persuasion; and joyful, sexy people. 

 

          "Nice day, Susan."   A hand both saluted and shaded the sun.

 

          "It'll be even nicer when the wine coolers arrive."

 

          The voices of chirpy, dimply children mingled with the deeper grown-up sounds.  The clink of glasses.  The buzz of bee.  The chomp of molars.  The giggles of those deep in love with each other.

 

          "It'll be great when the competition begins."

 

          "Yes, it'll soon be time."

 

          A stranger might have questioned what competition was in prospect.  Three-legged or egg-and-spoon races ... or both together?  Tug of love?  The loudest laugh?  The furthest roll of the hoop?  The fastest spin of the top with a cracking whip?  The prettiest frock?  The sweetest smile?  The longest beard?  The shortest?  The ugliest pulled face?  The biggest this, the smallest that? 

 

          The most durable picnic?   The maroon-party to beat all maroon-parties?

 

          No, it was probably none of these.  As a rubicund retainer arrived with cases of chilled white wine and amid the consequent hilarity surrounding the popping of corks, it gradually became clear to the stranger what exactly was to transpire.  Each group was sited beside one of the many natural geysers that abounded on the Downs.  The openings were controlled by manual valves - and the intention was to release them in one fell swoop, whereby the winning group would be the one with the tallest and longest lasting fountain.  A special prize was to be given for the fountain that emerged with the fanciest configuration. 

         

          As the sun dipped below the distant wooded hills, it spread along the horizon like thick cut marmalade.  The wine corks took up new crescendoes of popping, as bonfire beacons were set alight across the Downs by each picnic party.  Then, there was a secret starting signal (which was only obvious retrospectively to the stranger) - and the geysers were released in a perfect flashpoint of simultaneity.  Some spluttered in short silver cascades or spirts of gurgling spray.  Others were sufficiently tall to steal gold from the sunset and become gushing giants of myth and magic.  A few, even taller, sported every colour of the rainbow plus colours unknown.  Yet, there was one geyser, the tallest of all, which lost its colour as it sprayed new-born stars across the darkening sky - and at the mountain-peak of its fountaining power, it formed a mighty dragon's head.  The roar from the head's gargling mouth was incredibly even louder than the geyser which had originally given it birth.  The picnickers were cowed by the intrinsic, if short-lived, magnificence of such a white-water beast looming from the earth in cataclysmic contrast to the rearing tides of night... 

 

          After eventually packing their hampers, the parties wended their way home across the Downs, each jollifier with a blazing torch.  The stranger followed, keeping himself to himself, and softly sobbing.  He had stayed on the Downs long enough to watch the geysers being pent up within their rightful confines of dark earth - except, of course, for that single squirt the picnickers had forgotten to cap within its oubliette: it continued spluttering, perhaps pathetically, perhaps otherwise, to form snowdrop petals in the marooned night. 

 

          The stranger knew, despite the carefreeness of those he followed, that the treasure which Dragon Earth greedily guarded was itself: teetering on volcanic brinks ... and the stranger shuddered with ultimate fear. 

 

          O Stranger, O Saint George.

 

 

 

THEIR COLD TOUCH

   Published 'The Unnameable' 1994  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Can I borrow the use of one of those?” asked the Tinker Man.

 

He pointed at Peter’s fingers.

 

He then proffered a copper ring which was fastened to one end of a thick thread, the thread’s other end leading from a fly-wheel, a fly­wheel that spun eccentrically on a large Meccano model—a ring which Peter allowed to be placed on his finger.. marrying him, as it were, to childhood’s contraption.

 

After about five minutes of intense scrutiny of the Meccano model—kneeling down to view its innermost sanctums—the Tinker Man told Peter to tug sharply on the ring. Before thinking, Peter jerked the finger and the machine started whirring like a clock about to strike. And Peter became the small boy who used to play with the Meccano set: a small boy in over-large short grey flannel trousers and with a missing finger which he recalled being severed when he foolishly revolved the pedals of an upside-down bicycle and tried to stop the spokes spinning with the said finger.

 

The Tinker Man smiled as he held up his own fingerless fist and faded away. But Peter had already forgotten him, as he stared into the nursery fire, where lines of sparks climbed the back. He thought they were armies marching to a war in the darkness of the chimney. He turned away from the embers, which had been long left untended by the grown-ups. Since his bedtime drew on apace, he looked toward the toys grouped round the cot. His clockwork train remained derailed beside the inattentive teddy-bear. Lead soldiers and their steeds lay about like stage stiffs from Tom Thumb’s Theatre. Remains of a dismantled Meccano model were strewn across the carpet. Many figures were already asleep and one in particular, called Griff, lay unnoticed near the dying light of the fire. Griff had indeed accompanied Peter to tea with the grown-ups and had helped him name the fruit-stones around the edge of his pudding-bowl. Griff had been a lead soldier, before his painted uniform had worn off.

 

 

“Griff’s alive, isn’t he?” said the woman to the messenger at the door. Tears began to well in her eyes.

 

“He’s missing...”

 

“Who’s he missing?”

 

The question was fired like a gun, with no realisation of the ludicrousness of asking it. She wiped her hands down her apron— for she had been caught cooking. She almost smiled and then wept bitterly. An elderly gentleman came to stand behind her, emerging from the gloom of the hallway. His pipe was in his hand—being prepared for speaking his mind—but all he could do was rest his hand on the woman’s shoulder in a pitiful attempt both to comfort her and to steady his own wobbly legs.

 

The messenger thought it best to leave. As he strode down the garden path, the tired couple still wide-eyed at the doorway, like model people who were tokens of weather to come. He wondered why they had given their tired old eyes the bother of silently counting the silver buttons on his uniform.

 

 

Peter lay awake.

 

A depth of overlapping shadows.. .noiseless movements of nights past and nights future as they sought union in that one night of nights...even the toys (Griffo among them) sank into the deep-pile carpet, for fear of such a night. ..the fire was a dead eye in the corner... and Peter recalled that the last fruit-stone he had counted was not the Tinker nor the Tailor, but a Soldier on the brink of unutterable pain.

 

 

The woman lay awake, too. Griff was surely her only son. The snoring mound by her side was no longer her husband but the faraway hill where her son had died. She had her legs curled up to her chest, as if afraid to lower them to the colder reaches of the bed. Down there would be she knew not what, but what was indeed down there would soon need to come up for air. It was only a matter of time.

 

 

On the roof, just above Peter’s nursery window, was something else that had wanted air: a shape that numbered the slates to pass the interminability of that night of nights. It curled up on itself, to keep warm, for the house where it had chosen to brood, was at the centre of a frost-hollow. Within the nursery, Peter stared from his bed and listened to the crackling of the window’s pane. The sight of Griff’s dark blob on the carpet eased his dithering with false dreams...because, quite simply, there was a horse on the roof, if one that was barely alive and now only softly snickering.

 

If in other bed-ends, and on other roof-trees, there began to quicken the once dead sparks of existence, it was too late, since the red streamers of dawn were just around the corner. Peter finally slept for a few fitful hours. When he awoke he saw that Jack Frost had splattered crazy patterns of pink icing across the bright-seeping rhombus of the window.

 

He turned on his side and smiled at his waiting toys. Griff lay beside the fallen ashes of the hearth.

 

 

 

The messenger returned. The old couple noticed this time that he didn’t have any fingers on one hand.

 

Griff had been found, he told them.

 

She again wiped her hands down her apron and, bewildered, she seemed to check whether the pattern had come off in the process. She stamped her feet, one after the other, as if to warm them up or count time to some in-built rhythm. The elderly gentleman rose up from the dark backdrop of the hall and said: “That’s good news. When will he be home?”

 

“The body is here now.” The messenger pointed to the van in which he had arrived. “I’m afraid it’s not a pretty sight—identification you see was most difficult. We just need your final confirmation.”

 

The couple stood and stared, whilst the ugly corpse was frog-marched up and down in front of them. His last parade.

 

As the weather was exceedingly nippy they afterwards went into the kitchen to warm themselves in front of the woodstove. They had toast and wild honey for breakfast and spent the rest of the morning talking to someone they called Griff.

 

“How about some damsons and custard for tea, Griff. You like that, don’t you?”

 

Thus, Peter never answered.

 

 

 

She was a little girl in pigtails—a real dish of a face and knobbly knees fit to tweak the strings of the crabbiest heart. She took the boy by the hand into the woods near the village where they lived—telling him that she would show him the hospice. His imagination was really on overdrive as they tried to reach it. She knew parts of the wood he did not even dream existed, where the translucent golden girders of the early sun twirled like circus spotlights, passing through their bodies as if even real people were ghosts. Before long, she pointed beyond the trees. They skipped and hopped and giggled, holding hands, fingers entwined, her leading, all the way across a meadowy clearing, in full view of the shimmering white sky.

 

And then they saw more clearly the dark rambling house with too many tall chimneystacks and stained roofs. The windows glinted with winks. People in dark clothes, with the odd glinting button, were going in and out of the front entrance, some always staying in, others out. There were interspersed a few desultory horses with their long heads lowered in grazing.

 

“That’s the hospice,” she said.

 

“That’s the what? The hoss-piss? But where’s the...?”

 

The boy merely breathed the reply. He pointed, but his finger seemed to enter another world: fading from its knuckle-root outwards into cold.

 

She looked blank—and walked towards the house alone.

 

 

 

The woman woke and turned to the still mound beside her in bed: the once innocent boy turned husband turned old man, now at last dead flesh. A happy, yet fruitless, marriage. Thankfully, he would not need to suffer the institutionalised indignities yet in store for her. Women always lasted longer. The world’s weathering seemed to suit them better. She wove her own hands together in the darkness, recalling days when other fingers—her husband’s fingers—had entwined amongst them. Abruptly, she felt their cold tinkering touch.

 

 

 

 

Dear Suzanne

  Published 'Xizquil' 1994

Dear Suzanne, 

Why do you keep ringing me? I’ve got nothing more to say to you,

 

Love, Antony x

 

==

 

I know that last night we spoke again at length on the phone, trying to work it all out. But, really, when you get down to it, what is there left between us — merely a touching of strangers on an underground train. So, Suzanne, I’ve come down to Brackensea in an attempt to forget you. The ocean ( as my mother always said) is a fine companion at such times — taking stock, while watching waves make and break. Loneliness is listening to the surf at dead of night from a one-bit lodging. It is strange how I can never express myself properly. Yet words could not even hope to connect two skulls socket to socket. My tongue’s in knots when you take me unawares with your phone calls — I always end up saying things I never intended and then blaming the words themselves for having clandestine meanings..

 

==

 

As you haven’t rung since my last letter, I thought you must be dwelling on my fanciful talk of waves and words and so forth.  So I have decided to scribble out a few more thoughts, in case you’re still under the impression that there’ll ever be anything between us again.

 

Those loud friends of yours, those who always seemed to be drunk - they never took to me, did they? They were never able to get me to play their games. Fucking stupid (excuse my French!) games, if you ask me. Colin lying on the floor pretending to be a dead cat. Hannah —that was her name, wasn’t it? — allowing anybody to undo her bra straps (she’d got nothing to speak of up top, anyway). And Bruce, he tried to make me jump from the box at an Albert Hall live broadcast - said it would make those wireless listeners sit up. Whatever next! I know they’d have grown out of it in time, but not before someone breaking his or her neck in the process. I suppose I loved you too much, Suzanne, to wait around and perhaps see you hurt.

 

We only kissed once, but I’ll remember it forever.

 

==

 

Not hearing anything, I assume you must have gone off with your family to Florence – something which was once planned (in my hearing). Upon reflection, it was rather cruel of you all to sit around making arrangements, without even realising that I might wish I’d been invited to accompany you. You readily accepted my advice on the travel details.

 

Has it occurred to you that we only knew each other in the winter? You must look nice in summery clothes.

 

Brackensea will soon be closing down for the winter. Even holidaymakers with their silly kiss-me-quick hats have tears in their eyes — from the cold wind perhaps — or from a grief which only holidaymakers can feel at the end of the season. The amusement arcades have shutter-men making preparations. The Ferris Wheel almost seems to roll along the promenade in search of its hibernation. And I must go now, too.

 

==

 

I tried to ring your flat, but the phone didn’t answer. You must still be away with the family. The moment I realised you were going to a foreign country, I thanked heaven that you’d be away from some of those godawful friends of yours. See? — my first thoughts were for your well-being, not mine. Your father said he’d always wanted to go to Florence. Hasta la vista! (excuse my Italian). Your father was certainly young for his age.

 

Did I tell you that I can actunlly see the beach from my window? It was cluttered with wind-breaks and crouching children for most of the summer. Now, it’s almost deserted. I can just make out the dark shapes of a couple throwing pebbles into the sea —trying to make them skim, no doubt. They’re now walking along by the sea’ edge – it’s the blurring of the late afternoon which makes them seem joined at the waist rather than hand in hand. I wonder if their romance will last.

 

I can’t stop giggling. I just imagined that couple out there were two of your so-called friends. That’s why they’re now lying down, pretending to be beached whales, presumably!

 

I didn’t know until recently that all your friends were really what people call ‘yuppies’. I’ve read about them in some old colour supplements in the lounge. That they go around saying ‘Yah!’ and ‘Crikey!’, wearing pin-stripe shirts with studs through the collars, and sloane-ranger costumes. Seems to fit them, eh? But, now, a dying race - quite out of fashion. I wonder if Colin, Hannah, Bruce et al have sobered down, too. Anyone reading this letter in a few years’ time will probably never have heard of the word ‘yuppy’, let alone its meaning.

 

I still can’t stop giggling — better than crying, I suppose.

 

==

 

I expect you’ll get my letters all in one go, when you return from abroad. If I’d known, I’d’ve numbered all the envelopes.

 

The lodgings are suddenly full of people — come here for Christmas.

 

(Incidentally, while I think about it, when you’ve been abroad for a long time, don’t you think your own street is either narrower or wider, like a foreign country itself, don’t you think? (excuse my English!).

 

Anyway, that couple on the beach I told you about last time — they wave at me sometimes when they see me with nose plastered to the window. I can just see a flicker of black at their shoulders. During the night, I expect they’re no longer there.

 

The sea sounds more brittle in the winter — no longer the hissing strains of the spume running over the shingle,but more like glass shattering — each wave a suddenly crazed car windscreen. All this is to give you a sense of ambience, Suzanne. And I sit in the corner of the dining room at my own separate table. The other guests stare at me. Surely, I should be staring at them, since they are the newcomers, after all. Most of them are downright obnoxious, as silly as your so-called friends used to be. In fact, one of them reminds me somewhat of Hannah (if that was her name). I begin to wonder whether it may indeed be Hannah. She often smiles my way (underneath the stare), when I look up from the soup.

 

After Christmas, I wonder whether I should leave Brackensea and return to London. I expect Florence is wonderful at this time. A renaissance of a place.

 

==

 

It’s too cold even for that couple to be on the beach. Snow instead of sand. Chunks of frozen lumber being landed from the sluggish sea (excuse my sudden ambition to be a poet!). The whole place looks like a fucking dump.

 

The Christmas roisterers left the lodging yesterday. The one who looked like your friend Hannah had a most unfortunate accident. During a party game, she had an eye pierced with a knitting needle. The ambulance was here relatively quick, despite the weather. We’re currently awaiting news as to her condition. The girl’s friends told us they would try to return in a few weekends’ time - to visit her in the local hospital.

 

later. — You won’t believe it, Suzanne, but I’ve seen that couple again. Not walking on the beach hand-in-hand, this time, but actually cavorting in the sea! I don’t judge the incident, merely describe it, and leave it at that. (Excuse my sang-froid).

 

The lodgings are quieter now. The landlady and I often have a hand of whist. Mrs Tidy is her name, if I haven’t mentioned it before.

 

 

==

 

Dear Suzanne,

Nice of you to ring, after all this time. Yes, I can confirm that I’m still in the land of the living. It is peculiar, however,  that you never receved my letters since the first one - especially as you never went away as planned. Little matters it, though - I never had anything more to say to you really. I’m writing this in the dining-room at my separate table. No guests – except for another man who grunts under his real words. I can’t say I like the cut of his jib.

 

No, I don’t think I’ll be able to accept your kind offer to accompany you and your family to Florence this spring. It would never work out, you with your sparkling personality and me with mine.

 

Sorry to hear about Hannah. And about Colin and Bruce developing pneumonia.

 

I’m nothing, if not in love with you.

 

Antony. x

 

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)