Food for the Past
FOOD FOR THE PAST

Richard Wiles estimated that his turn would come towards the end of the long day. He had counted at least four hundred individuals being called up to the front, in all manner of dress, some in worse shape than even himself. Some were still in hospital gowns, others in black fresh from a funeral and a few in bandages (the latter being the survivors of a bomb outrage, the distant noise of which they had all heard in the Hall earlier in the day...).

It was difficult not to see how bizarre this would appear to an outsider. The polished, fluted pillars stretched from the varnished parquet floor to the gilded statuary of the far-flung ceiling; the place had the aura of an erstwhile church and the visible smells that the Lance Vicar’s perforated evening star gave off were not very far removed from those various blends of incense and burning spice to which Wiles had grown accustomed as an impressionable, old-fashioned child.

“Healing” was not quite the right word. It was more a cross between confession, the laying on of hands and insurrection... In the candlelight Wiles failed to see where the hands (and whose) were being laid but, sooner or later, he would be called himself.

He heard the thud of another bomb.

Before he could make renewed psychological adjustments, his number was called out on the over-echo of the tannoy; all the faces of those remaining turned round towards him like a scattering of winter moons; he rose from the bench (one that had been used by his ancestors for as many years as the history books record) - but, today, he was the only one left (though, on rising, he had an unexpected fleeting vision of his grandmother sitting at the other end of the bench as a child, with a flowing back of hair, china doll with rosebud lips and bedraggled pinafore sitting on her lap, the eyes of both the child and doll icily staring into the distance, until just the doll blinked...).

And now the bench was empty, a whole dynasty having disappeared.

As Wiles walked tentatively down the gangway, he heard another bomb.. .or an echo of the earlier one … or even a bloom of residual carnage from another war, another history.

Drawing closer to the rostrum, he could see the Voyante swinging a star round her head - and, with an even bigger star hanging like
a pendulum, the Arch Medium Himself; the scented air became headier; his limbs heavier; and the footlights overDowering as he clambered up to the platform, as if boarding a lifeboat from a grey, sliding sea of near death.

The benches behind were now next to empty, he being at the tail end of the proceedings. Therefore, the chants of the congregation had grown thin, leaving the whole ceremony more like a Christian festival from its turn of the two thousand years.

Richard Wiles, with a long bloodline stretching behind like a primordial tail, fanning out cousinwards almost to encompass a whole generation, closed his eyes, relieved at such a gift of darkness, and felt hands about him stroking, massaging, probing, digging, prodding, pluming, fluting, extracting.

Soon he will no longer be Richard Wiles.. .but, before he finally withdrew from that persona, to become just one more cannon-fodder warrior in the Great Wars of History, he glimpsed again his grandmother and her doll. The latter wept.

(published ‘Aklo’ 1989)