OWEN'S DAMASCUS ROAD

As he wended his way through the endemic mists that coiled about the mountainside, the warrior thanked God that he had been able to negotiate the morasses along the upward path. His thigh boots still showed the signs of the clinging weed, like the remains of a consumptive giant’s deep cough.

 

Owen the Curd sweated. The higher air seared the flesh remaindered by his outfit with the slow-moving funnels of its relative cold. He’d been told to leave the Lower Lands as a representative of the Curd race because, self-evidently, the God could hear prayers more easily further up the mountain. However, nobody had dreamt that, because of the mists, the God would not be able to be seen so readily as from the villages in the valley, during such two-way conversations which, in these parts, prayers had long since become. Nevertheless, being a race particularly hard of hearing, many misconceptions had grown up concerning the God’s own responses in those interchanges. Hence, Owen’s mission.

 

As he squatted on a tussock to catch a breather as it passed by on the turgid air flows, Owen visualised the God he had seen so often before: a moving face in the sky timelessly forming and unforming like clouds of flesh; the deep inarticulate thunder of the voice, much as a doctor’s must seem to patients in the local hospital; the forks of lightning jabbing across the cumulus eye-sockets; the groping fingers of roiling bone lovingly reaching out to those who prayed ... Once the image was fixed in his own flittering mind, Owen spoke:

 

‘O, God, I’ve been sent to pray for victory in the war against the Iron Men …Us Curds need your help ... Please answer our prayers ... This is the make or break of our race ... We’ve never before prayed so hard ... If you like, we’ll make it our very last prayer ... If only you would please, please answer this one prayer…’

 

Suddenly, out of the mist, there strode another warrior, towering above Owen, with muscles that rippled down the tightening cords of his neck and chest (bare, despite the nagging chill). The huge two-handed broadsword, actually scabbarded in the flesh and bone at the side of his body, sparkled by its own light as it was withdrawn.

 

‘Why should I answer you Curds, and not those prayers spoken with equal earnestness by the Iron Men?” came the roar, plucking syllables from the thunder like seeds from a pomegranate.

 

Owen was disturbed. This could not be the God of the Curds, for He did not resemble in any way the visualisation of the memory in the sky. Immediately suspecting it was a mortal representative of the Iron Men themselves, on a similar mission as himself, Owen stood up, his wet-weather gear cracking and crazing over with a strange geography of ice. He would have to undo all the toggles, before he could get to his own broadsword. So, he decided to play for time:

 

“…Because our cause is just.”

 

“The Iron Men’s cause is just too.”

 

It was a mystery to Owen how there could be two just causes in one war. This could not be a God in any shape or form. By now, he had disentangled his weapon, and slew the taller warrior with one fell swoop; his aim was true, slicing with consummate downward ease through the skull, the chest, and, finally, the swag of intestines hanging between the legs. There was no chronology of wounds, just the instantaneous act. The two halves split asunder, scattering a purple clotted brew in all directions. Owen thanked God that his wet-weather gear was still relatively intact, as the other warrior’s innards filled-in between the ice-limned countries on his sou’wester with the bays and gulfs of tropic spume. Owen’s face, however, was open-mouthed and, as a drowning swimmer would involuntarily gulp the bitter salt of the waves, he found himself sinking downwards with the outcome of his sword-stroke.

 

Eventually, in a state of utter exhaustion and choking upon the phlegmy knot of his own body’s anti-viral defences in overdrive, he staggered down the mountain, the mists left behind stained pink. Alas, he found all the Curds and Iron Men had killed each other off in even nastier ways than he could have dreamt after a lifetime of warriorhood.

 

As a brave man, Owen would have committed suicide, if his own body had not already done the job for him: he realised, in his garbled way of thinking, that there need not have been a war at all if both causes were indeed just. Or even unjust, for that matter.

 

The thunder rumbled above the unpopulated valley, as if God were moving his furniture.

 

 

(Mystique 1990)

THE LOAN

 

 

‘What do you want the money for?’

 

 

 

He stared across the large leather-topped desk, empty except for a blotter. His eyes were sporadically hidden behind glasses that reflected the window with the rhythm of his head movements, much like a pair of erratic lighthouses. So, the power of the stare was magnified by my inability to follow his look...

 

‘To ease cash flow problems.’ It was a pretentious way of saying I was stony broke. Better than showing him the holes in my pockets.

 

I eased out into day-dreaming: the bank manager was laid out in an open-topped coffin, one with curlicue knobs on. Sovereigns rested upon his eyes, glinting in the communal flame of many closely-stemmed candles. His hands, embossed with ring-studs of onyx and old gold, were poised in tranquil prayer upon the imperceptible rising and falling of his chest. The cuff-links were designed in the shape of black horses...

 

I unravelled myself from reverie, only to find it was my turn to say something. Conversations tend to be like that: duties on both aides (except, of course, my late mother, who’d only required someone’s silent face to bounce off a continuous flow of gossip and counter-gossip).

 

‘Sorry, could you please repeat the question?’

 

“What security can you offer on a loan, Mr White?”

 

I found myself idly looking out of the bank’s high rise window, where light was quickly dying from the sky. It was as if blueblack ink was seeping from one quarter of the universe to the other. A herd of dark clouds stampeded over the horizon. A union jack upon the flagpole of another building attempted to flee its perch, and join the pair of long johns that had escaped from some old dear’s washing-line; no doubt to create together some act of carnal patriotism in the night sky, in memory of the world wars that have grown out of fashion...

 

I was again stirred from my dusk-dreaming, only to find that my friendly bank manager was searching through his waste paper bin. He had it upon his desk, one of its jagged corners scoring the flesh of the work surface. He seemed desperate to find something or other. A scrunched up ball of paper. Evidently, I’d been let off the hook, at least for a while, so I returned to the back of my mind, where I felt safest...

 

I returned to the front parlour of candleflame and corpse. This time, I could see the faint ringworm blotches of moulder. The patches were randomly situated, one faintly outlined in bottle green upon the cheek, others in close fester around the knuckle joints of the left hand and a particularly large one on the sole of his bare right foot, made up of inflamed pores and overnourished goose pimples, threatening to turn all the colours that a rainbow disowned. The chest still rose and fell with the rhythm of the flickering waxlight, but I suspected it was that sluggish pulse inherent in body decay which caused this mockery of life...

 

“Ah, I’ve found it, Mr White. I thought I’d filed it there.”

 

He replaced the bin under his desk with a flourish, and started unscrewing the paper he’d retrieved. I guessed it must be some computerised rubbish confirming that I was uncreditworthy, because I’d once defaulted with a company that sent me assorted stamps through the post, as a result of answering an advert in the Beano comic. Who wanted ten identical editions of a Spanish stamp hearing the moustachioed features of an old geezer who looked more like my late Dad than was good for him, anyway?

 

Out of the window, I could see a whole fleet of ladies’ frilly underwear sailing into the dark blow of the night.

 

I decided: Why the hell do I need money in a dream anyway? I stormed from the interview room, leaving a bemused pile of bespectacled chunky green slime trying to slither from the chair into the gaping confines of the wastepaper bin carefully placed to receive him.

 

Only the jewelry retained any sort of integrity...

 

 

 

(Mind’s Eye 1990)

 

 

INCHWARE

 

 

 

I hardly recognised the lady. In her finery, she looked nicer than she did when I first saw her in the lounge bar of the Bell and Steelyard. On that occasion, the hastily thrown on clothes that she had automatically found at the forefront of her wardrobe had done her no justice at all. Tonight, however, she was obviously putting on an effort for me.

 

‘This is a much better place, isn’t it?’ I said, even before sitting down. My insistence on our first official date being at a venue different from that for the original off-chance encounter was based on a gut feeling that relationships could take no chances.

 

In retrospect, I should have been surprised at her willingness to wait for me in a pub, whilst still alone. Most women of my acquaintance would ensure they were later than the man, so as to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. Something I took for granted.

 

‘Never tried this one before.’ The lady’s reply was instantaneous. She nervously weighed the back of her bouffon.

 

‘I see you’ve already got yourself a drink.’ I nodded towards the half drunk remains of a fluid that looked like undiluted bleach at the bottom of a tumbler. ‘I’m not late, am I?’ I added during a pause for afterthought.

 

‘No ... no. It’s just that it’s raining outside.’

 

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ My face was large and I wore whiskers to cut down on the bare frontage. My old best grey suit cut into my behind proving, if nothing else did, that I was not in the same shape as when I was younger. I’d tried to liven up the ensemble with a floral tie. The white ankle socks you couldn’t see: my legs must have grown shorter over the years, too; whilst the flairs had grown wider, by the look of them. I felt self-conscious of my spectacles, like peering through a porthole in a ship. Without another word, I turned to the bar where I intended to obtain a drink for myself. I was not in the mood for one, but even I understood that you wouldn’t be welcome to sit down in a pub without one. I should have brought a thermos of tea and some plastic cups. It cost more than a bomb to buy even a soft drink in a place like that. A number of pubs have now started to sell cups of coffee but, even so, you felt a wally asking for one from a blousy girl whose only skill in life was pulling pints. I had chosen this pub because the clientele was customarily well dressed. You could tell a lot from a person’s garb. However, I was perturbed to discover that I had forgotten that the staff were definitely more than one cut below the average punter. A surly individual, whom I understood to be the manager, scowled, as I approached the bar. His suit did not seem to have had even the lick of an iron for several wearings. The tie was ill-knotted, more a Y than a small Q. His face was only something you could write to doctors about (preferably skin specialists). The manner of his service made me wonder if I’d done something wrong. Instinctively, I looked round to see if I’d soiled the carpet, quickly realising it was already one huge horizontal wall-to-wall dog dirt. The drink he poured out for me was flat. When I complained, he said it was not meant to be fizzy and, even if it was, it’d probably give me wind. I scowled back - a bit late in the day, but I hope he got the point. My mother always told me that you can say more with the face than ever your tongue can get round. If I say so myself, I’ve a pretty rum selection of old-fashioned looks for all eventualities. Not waiting to witness him reeling back on the balls of his feet at the severity of my cutting expression, I turned my back on the little downsquirt and made for the table where I expected the lady, my date, still to be sitting.

 

She was.

 

But who was that with her? Didn’t look like me. At least I’ve got some dress sense.

 

‘Are you going to introduce me?’ I cannot recall exactly which of the three of us said that. Three of us? Three of me? Three of them? Three of you? Three of her? Three of him? All seemed to ring untrue. Whatever the case, one of the ladies (or both?) had an escort for the evening, so I left without causing any trouble. I don’t suppose, in the event, that ugly customer of a pub manager would have stood for any nonsense. Looking back, that word seemed to make sense of the whole affair.

 

 

(Odyssey 1991)

LONELY HEARTS

 

 

 

 

‘It would have been a pleasure to meet you, given the chance.’ I said it again to myself - and then over and over to see if it made any more sense the next time.

 

I was due to encounter her -... yes, quite accidentally the day after tomorrow. I already knew what her name was to be.

 

The sad problems remained, however. Forgetting you afterwards. Denying the pleasure.

 

 

(Dreams & Nightmares 1995)

 

THE THING OF THE PAST

 

Every night, there was a monster in the road outside my house. I knew this because I was an insomniac and one night, upon impulse, I peered through my bedroom window. And there, dog-shaped in the gutter, was what I assumed to be a monster. It seemed the obvious thing to assume.

 

From time to time, the head reared on its neck and then flopped down again, as if it couldn’t be bothered to frighten anyone, even me.

 

Or was it too frightened itself to move?

 

So, every night since then, during those inevitable hours of sleeplessness, having had my fill of real dreams, I staggered over to the tattered curtains and, through a keyhole-shaped slit, fastened my cooling eyes upon that pulsing mound.

 

Each night a smidgeon larger than on the night before.

 

#

 

“Are you awake?”

 

Someone was making a hell of a row upon my bed­room door. I had fallen into a fitful sleep, which I usually managed to do Just before dawn.

 

“No! Go away!”

 

And whoever it was did.

 

The previous night had been the seventeenth time I had watched the monster. It was strange that I could recall the exact number of sightings, but not make comparisons of size between the first and the last of them - if, Indeed, it were the last sighting. Like all of life, finalities only emerge in retrospect. Middles unmea­sured. Beginnings often unanticipated and unrecognised.

 

That voice at the door began to haunt me. It was not familiar: a female one, but with undercurrents of masculine depth. Probably a passer-through. Squats are like that.

 

Eventually, I dragged my scrawny body from its pit. I frequently wish I could refer to myself without the use of the first person singular. I is so definitive. Makes escape impossible.

 

I needed breakfast. But the cupboard was noticeably bare. Whoever had disrupted my belated sleep had evidently filched a bellyful. And scarpered with it. With no bye or leave. In hindsight, the food must have been disappearing over a period and only today did I notice this since the cupboard was finally empty.

 

I needed a gulp of air. Tentatively, I opened the front door. Not even a tell-tale stain in the gutter where the monster had seeped its innards for most of the night.

 

The cleansing-cart came early to these parts during those most sleepful moments.

 

“Hey!”

 

On the other side of the road was that stranger who had earlier accosted my bedroom door. I waved curso­rily. I had been brought up to acknowledge people. Politeness bred to the very bottom bone.

 

He or she was crossing the road, apparently to have a talk with me close-up.

 

“Yes?” I asked, in the hope of getting at least one word in edgewise.

 

“Big news! The place is going under the hammer today.” He or she pointed at the squat whence I had just emerged. This was not exactly big news as bad. It foreboded the end of an era.

 

“How do you know?” I need not have worried about the allowances made by the stranger for normal conver­sation. In fact, the only reply to my question was a tap to his or her nose.

 

I shrugged. I had heard such stories before. People often delight in bringing bad news, even if the news isn’t true. Then, I recalled the bellyfuls of grub pilfered from my larder-cupboard.

 

“Hey! Did you pinch my food?”

 

The stranger smiled.

 

 

MUCH LATER:

I have forcibly dragged the culprit to my kitchen and prodded my longest finger as far down its throat as I could. What lies on the linoleum makes me think that there will not be an eighteenth sighting of the monster.

 

Sleepless nights are sure to be a thing of the past thankfully.

 

 

(Published ‘Carnal Chameleon’ 1993)

 

MUSTARD KAT

 

A collaboration with Paul Pinn

 

 

                Your memory wavers like a fading photograph of a distant unimportant relative. However, your surname sticks in mind, gives you away.

                Charnock - charlock: a weedy annual of the mustard group; bright yellow flowers reflecting the day in cornfields down by the chicken coop where, back in some lean year, during a crisp brown fall, a rodent's nibbled teeth gnawed at an empty moment under a sick grey sky that frowned in vague torment at yet another lie as I left you to die, a bewiskered woman, a filamentary mole, burrowed 'neath the nap of past events, your spoor ugly hills 'midst other peoples' dreams.

                Hah! And to think you posed as something exotic hidden in a brightly coloured shell, like a pacific mollusc, expecting me to coax you out. If I had I would have missed the catch, and let's face it, there were plenty more fish in the sea without me having to spend time on thee, slug in a pretty shell, crossing your legs for me.

                But it's no good trying to escape from you. Every night I dream of flawless prisms of faceted gold glittering becalmed in a sea of mud, strange creatures milling around in attentive excitement, burbling and guzzling, probing and uttering sounds of pleasure, inebriation, desire. And when muddy hands reach out to touch the prisms and capture infinite spectrums, to twist and torture their colours, caress and love their brilliance, your form appears and turns my guts, and the prisms laugh, weave a slick temptation, flash smiles of silver beauty, a perfect manipulation with which to confuse me.

                Alas, the prisms fade as the gold facets dissolve into a glaucous backdrop, and your form remains bearing a warmth that sickens like the stench from unwashed armpits, and in that hour before wakefulness, you touch my body with a coldness straight from the sneering face of Time. And so the inebriated grow sober and lose their desire, and I awake, hungover but relieved, calm enough to face another day, close-shaven and without the Slough of Despond.

                I can think of your sister then, young Kat, who slinked like a horny wraith down to your father's cellar, pushed open the freshly painted door, and drank one of two vats clean dry. With her hippy hat she looked quite pretty, as she sat and watched a cat chase a rat round and round the other vat. But the cat was slow and fat and lost sight of the rat, which ended up sleeping on the brim of Kat's hat, the cat drunk on the contents of the second vat, Kat floating face down in what was left.

                Vats without bottom, young Kat. Vats without a top. They're cylinders which I dream through from beginning to end. Prisms I crawl through - breaking each golden shaft of dreamlight and letting it mend behind me. I seek your golden eye - the light at the end of the tunnel - a little girl's eye, whose innocence can only cast such heavenly guidance. You see, Kat, it was your sister who should've had it up to the neck. Not you. Not you at all.

                A circular tunnel is the worst tunnel of all - which is my own particular cellar - and it's where my bottles of red are stored, like glass sleepers. Until I touch them and find them softer than shellfish without shells. Wobbly containers, each with its own coiled-up soul of slumber. One drips a white cat-lick substance that the cork itself seeps.

                I wake yet again to summer. The meadow wafts with motes from shedding plants. Motes not moles, Kat. It's my whiskers that itch when you kiss my lips. Not yours. Picnics are nothing without the wine-cooler close by. Have another glassful before we retake the rhythm of our love. You're nicer than those characters I used to read about when I was a child - those peers of mine that Enid Blyton sent on adventures........into cellars.

 

 

(Psychotrope 1996)

Boot Heels

When Bob Dylan sang about the tambourine man, I felt older than I do now. That’s probably because I thought I knew everything then and, of course, I knew nothing at all. And, other than this realisation in retrospect, I’ve learnt very little since. Or maybe the encroaching effect of premature senility is giving birth to my second childhood without my knowledge ...who knows?

Listening to the jingle-jangle of life these days is like waking up gradually into a nightmare. The sleep in between is the bonfire smoke of death becoming whiter and whiter with the bones on which it feeds. Or something like that. The words flow in. My mind accepts thoughts too easily. That must signify the first dosage of dotage. And, again, the words flow in before I can stop them. Or am I giving birth to a different mind without my knowledge ... who knows?

Somebody else’s mind? That’d account for the madness. In fact, it rather absolves me from all responsibility with regard to the flow of words

- convenient, to say the least. But whose mind? Yours? I doubt it. Anybody with the sanity you boast, surely, surely, wouldn’t have reached this far in my ramblings. So, I suppose, logically, it COULD be yours, then. But, pray, do NOT proceed any further. That way lies more madness than even you would credit. It can only get worse.

 

Planet Firehearth gave off no heat, when you approached it, seemingly heading, as you were, from all points of the known compass. The planet was invisible to the naked eye other than its disguise as a blotchy white moon. And you had been out of Earth’s gambit for some time, unsure whether you were still the subject of betting in the Circles of Jove. You had tried, so far successfully, to avoid the enticements of crafty time-slots, knowing that the dark wheel still turned above, like Fate - making you think you had now fallen in a Black Well rather than a Black Hole; in any event, those in the real know probably deemed you little more than a speck of dust.

You had Welsh parentage with a hint of London Cockney. Your hands, having lost the use of their arms during a particularly violent elbow fight in some alien’s cock-pit, grew straight from the shoulders like stunted wings. Your face was as round as the old Earth moon, a moon you hardly remembered, towards a replica of which moon you were now gliding, moons reflecting each other like ingredients in an ancient computer game which only lunatics could play.

You sighed, for you felt Fate was still out of your hands. Pumping on the pedals, your crate widened its trajectory for Planet Firehearth, which was now indeed giving off a faint white heat. But, in accordance, you thought, with quasi-Einsteinian physics, the heat was coming in the opposite direction to its source. A real Johari’s Window through which even Schrodinger’ s Cat wouldn’t dive, albeit chased by Pavlov’s Dog.

You felt hungry: no one had thought to feed you, mainly because the lights in the years had flickered past, out of control, like the cranking pictures of an end-of-the-pier peep-show. But, now, the years were slowing, crystallising ... and making you think about your belly kept in a jug of pickling plankton by your side.

A belly like that was all very well, but not very satisfying; you would like to feed it a tranche of beef, before long, followed by your latest obsession, pickled onion and cheesecake. But then the Mad Cow in the moon would make your innards erupt like meat comets.

 

They often seem to play pop records at funerals these days. Suppose it’s a sign of the times - that people are dying younger or should I say being killed younger. Ought to make me feel sick, but it doesn’t. Almost as if I’ve been desensitised, overdosed on violence and expendability. Everybody’s tainted by international conflicts and civil wars, some of which have created situations which I once believed could never happen.

OK, OK, Hitler did his damnedest to be damned. But when you get three-cornered disputes so bitter that each side fights tooth and nail to defeat the other two, whatever the cost in human suffering, uniquely without the apparent need for treaties or side-agreements between any two against the other (which would have been more in tune with hunan nature), well, I’m speechless with despair. Gives me nightmares. Yet again, I shrug it off, shocked only by my ability to shrug it off.

In many ways, I’m the greatest villain of all, by the very act of not caring. Or do I care? If I didn’t care, would I be chewing my nails like this? Wouldn’t I just let sleeping dogs lie or, rather, let them spit and scratch each other to a death worse than Hell itself.

All this talk of the way things are today leads me naturally to my reason for writing to you. I know we’ve not met since those heady days at University all those years ago, but I remember you as someone with a real heart. You cared deeply - not for a feeling of self-satisfaction nor for any hope of deferred divine reward - you cared selflessly, straightforwardly, even gratuitously.

I learned a lot of lessons from you, watching from a distance as I did. You may not even remember me. I was that girl, usually in a green frock and rather childish hair-ribbon, who more often than not sat at the front of English Literature lectures. Weren’t they boring? In retrospect, that business of intentional fallacy, verbal icons, and evaluating a poem as if it were a sculpture rather than putting it in historical/biographical context - all hogwash! Poems are written by people. People live, breathe, think about their environment. They don’t write words, as if they’re insulated by the bizarre theories of semantics. Words are not pure artefacts. They are steeped in our heritage and, dare I say, the Collective Unconscious. When words are used, then all of us use them.

Everybody should have the credit - or the blame. Likewise, the events and emotions that the words describe should be part and parcel of each human being’s karmic baggage.

Even the most instinctive native in a South American jungle has to bear his own particular share of the world’s collectivity. Don’t you think I’m right? Isn’t what I’m saying here the road to caring, to that form of caring which you knew was the only way to care, those very many years ago?

I’m sorry for being so verbose. I wouldn’t blame you if you screwed this up and filed it in some area of the past that has gone bad like an old meat. Yet, rest assured, my writing to you, Onion, like this has allowed me to see more clearly. I’ve removed a few misunderstandings. Clarified a complex or two. Removed my neck from the ultimate hang-up. Incidentally, I got your address from a mutual friend. Do be forgiving, should you ever discover who it was. What are friends for if not to betray other friends for each friendship? And so on forever, until we are all friends. The whole world a chain-letter of love and forgiveness. So, I hope you’ll write to someone else we knew at University in the same vein. So that he or she can do the same. Until the Ying, Yang and the universal You are fighting only for the right to be the first to forgive.

 

A little boy in a Victorian nursery sometimes stared into the spluttering hearth fire newly ignited this crisp winter morning by his Nanny. He watched the coal-sparks scale the back towards the gaping chasm of the chimney, as they marched in glorious sacrifice to their cause - some of which sparks, he guessed, would still be alive after they left the jurisdiction of the house and sprayed into the moonlit sky. Wars were often being conducted up the little boy’s chimney; he could hear them popping in the night, before the ashes crumbled into the hearth with several sighs, like a tooth fairy dying. That would be the token for sleepy-byes but, even then, there was no respite from dreams.

Meanwhile, you disembarked above Planet Firehearth. On waddling out of the hatch, you farted, a gentle, unimposing old maid’s breaking of wind, but one that nevertheless floated you towards Planet Firehearth at the bottom of the Black Well, as pale and round as your own face. You were in free-climb and nothing could now be done and, odds were even, you would reach Nirvana before breakfast time.

 

I heard from Onion that you’ve written a crazy letter to him. Now I’m really annoyed. How dare you? I should never have allowed you to convince me that you wanted his address to invite him to a University reunion do. And all those other addresses I gave you - have they all received a dose of your idiotic ramblings in a letter? I hope not. I shall be persona non grata, if so. Assuming your letter to Onion was similar to the one you sent me, I’m not surprised he was so upset. Yes, you put the fear of God in him. Me, too.

Don’t you realise it’s dangerous to play with people’s minds? Who knows what repercussions you’ve already put in motion. Sick, I call it. All that talk of funerals and pop records. Whatever was your purpose? It certainly wasn’ t world harmony, as you seemed to imply. Hitler thought he was doing right. But that didn’t make it right, did it? I suppose you’ll maintain that we’re merely bandying words and words simply mean what we want them to mean in the context. It’s like saying if I call a lion a fox, and then someone else does, and then someone else, and so forth, the meaning of the word will eventually become its use, and a lion will always

be known as a fox. Believe me, things don’t work like that. People are straightforward and don’t like their cherished logic being undermined. Quit while you can. Lay off.

 

Nanny lullabyed the little boy, while the moon cast one of its freak shafts through the nursery window (divided into varying silver bars of visionary effulgence) and spotlit his ludo board and purple shaker and mutilfaceted dice and counters ... all scattered carelessly by a tired boy before preparing for bed. As myriads of dust motes milled amid the heavenly beams, the boy felt disturbed by the idea of breathing them in, as he inevitably must. No fault of his own. Like markets, entropy could not be bucked. But, then, the moon must have suddenly gone behind a cloud for the motes had thankfully vanished.

And you uttered a polite swear word in a language not dissimilar to Welsh. Your hands flapped powerlessly at your shoulder blades, your chest was burning tight and you cursed as your blow-empty belly dropped like a stone towards what you now knew to be the real Fire-Earth at the bottom of a real Black Hole. You tried to guess how long the belly would take before it hit the moving orange waves below ... but, before it imploded like a divine burp and became just one more gunshot in an endless war between future and past, the last spark in your soul expired with a sigh of fading flame. And the little boy wiped a single shiny tiddly-wink of a tear from his eye. Nanny, with an induced twinkle in hers, lent him a lace-trimmed hankie. She dreaded it might be a foreign body in the boy’s eye, some sparklet of dust at this very moment inveigling a way towards his heart via the optic fuse, a mote that was probably the silver germ of a Victorian ghost intent on incubating in the boy’s spermbank of a belly. Perhaps, even dead aliens had volition.

 

I’ve heard from that woman again. I think whatever you wrote to her has done a lot of good. She apologised for her earlier letter and said that we need not worry as we were the only ones who received such a letter from her. It looks as if she was trying to create some triangular trouble between us - and I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t been stewing over both of us all these years, wondering which of us she fancied most. Or she’s got a screw loose. I hardly knew her at University. How about you?

It’s rather like being haunted by the ghost of a nobody. Just a blur from the corner of my eyes in TS Eliot lectures, now forced into focus as a real person twenty years later. Incredible.

Thinking about it, perhaps I should write my next novel about her. In fact, she might have quite inadvertently done me a good turn with her idiotic epistle! My last blockbuster sort of flunked, didn’t it? Maybe, she will be the spur for me to get back into the swing of writing.  I badly need a bestseller again. All this just might be the catalyst. An ill wind. Which brings me to suggesting that we two get together again for a bit, since we are in the mood of reprieves! I’m sorry we ended in tears last time. Maybe, it’s time I peeled off another layer, eh? My old nickname of Onion did signify something at University, but blowed if I can remember who at University coined it or why. Perhaps I made people cry. Who knows? Look forward to hearing from you.

 

The words have ceased flowing since a woman has entered the room, one who switched off the Bob Dylan record. She was my wife when I was her husband. I only know her name because she has it sewn on her overall lapel - she’s about to depart, you see, for her job at the fast food chain.

“Seen my handbag?”

Her voice is strange, but I don’t feel able to tell her HOW strange. It’s as if her lips have not been dubbed properly by some inefficient backstage technician. Or she’s using foreign words and the translation is ill-matched.

“No. You probably left it at work.”

“Don’t be silly, I had it last night. Remember? I turned it out on the table. Found your medical card in there. And my pay slip...”

Ah, that was how I knew she worked for a fast food chain. I’d been worrying about that.

“It must be somewhere, then.”

I bit my tongue. Somewhere is a big place. Could be anywhere. It was to late to UNsay. The handbag would have to remain lost in no man’s land, as it were. And I’d have to do some pretty nimble footwork to explain it away ... or, better still, explain it BACK.

 

Thanks for your letter. I ‘ye written again to Onion to apologise for my first letter. Later, I intend to write a third one to apologise for my second, thus neutralising the first apology. That way, I have the best of both worlds. And I have the exquisite pleasure of apologising twice to him. But to you, of course, no apologies at all. I merely acknowledge you have an equal right to be a character in Onion’s fifth novel as I do. “Ghost of nobody” was an expression he used in a letter to you. But, as such, we’re better than most people who are proper nobodies without the ghost of a chance of even becoming icons. So, I’ll see you in Chapter 4 where we were foreordained to meet for the first time and where we’ll collude in rivalry. My fingernails have been filed into claws, ready for the Pinteresque fray. Similes ought to be full-blooded metaphors, don’ t you think? Or perhaps you don’t have the same generous share of Onion’s omniscience as I do. Pity he’s always burnt everything he writes.

 

I wandered the circle of sands, digging fitfully with a child’s spade, to see if the handbag had been buried at a random spot. The sea’s tinnitus surged in my ears. There was a little boy with his Nanny playing pies and castles by the edge of the waves. In bathing trunks. Studious.

Upon the distant horizon, there was a three-funnelled steamship. Instinctively, I knew my wife was on board, canoodling with every sailor she could lay her hands on, blouse undone to the navel. I waved ... knowing that I was too far way to be seen, even if I could see the steamship. The boy waved too, although he didn’t know why. That’s the charm of childhood. You still know nothing, but believe there is something waiting in the wings to be known, something special, something for you to discover when your boot-heels are set to wander ... something somewere.

 

You munch quickly on the oniony beefburger so you don’t have to taste it. You wipe the ketchup that has fallen on your army uniform. You try to write a tear-stained letter on a serviette. There’s a familiar song on the jukebox which you try to mime (rather unsuccessfully). And a ghostly waitress who doesn’t seem able to stop smiling at you. Perhaps is a big word. But, perhaps, love is better than I remember it. You look through the salt-stained window and see that the boy has disappeared. His pies and castles, too. And, no doubt, the slots your heels made in the sand. The moon shines down a tunnel of ash motes. There’s a bonfire on the horizon.

(Chronicles of Disorder 1997)