WILD CRONE

It started off as quite honestly frightful, but, then, of course, ended like a romantic scene from a Woman's magazine. Knowing what eventually would happen can be quite off-putting, but, in real life, it is truly comforting to have that safety net waiting for your fall. The safety net of a happy ending.

She first emerged from the bogs and shanties of Eastern Europe, and then, I think, I changed my mind, because when I encountered her fell form, it was in Eastern England, not far from the creeks of North East Essex, though she was later to confess that she really hailed from the fens of Cambridgeshire, a little further north of where we then happened to be situated.

Colchester in Essex is crowned with the glory of being the oldest recorded town in Great Britain.

 

It has a Norman castle and Roman wall, as well as all the usual commercial accoutrements of a middle-sized town. I feel at home there.

 

So, I took my wild crone – for that was how even I saw her – to be inspected by my family in Colchester and, of course, they were quite perturbed when I brought such a sight into their living-room. I could then suddenly view her – shall we call her by her real name of  Pedra? – through the objective eyes of others.

 

And that was as a scrawny waif who seemed naked even when she was done up in winter clothes (which she always was, even in the summer), with tangled locks that seemed to breed more life than in any other part of her. Her eyes were dim, downhearted, indeed quite lifeless. Her pigeon chest imperceptibly rose and fell with the faintest breathing possible without the necessity of already being dead. Her legs were spindly, when one was given the opportunity to view them from under the heavy layers of sacking she called a skirt.

 

I dubbed her wild, because she was untamed, and often her mouth smiled and I could sense a fierce and feral beauty lurking within her just waiting to pounce. It was just such an assumption of beauty that had attracted me, although I had barely even glimpsed it so far.

Pedra sat demurely on the couch. My folk looked quizzically at her. One of them remained inscrutable, because his face had dropped so far, it had almost fallen off!

 

Eventually, I left with Pedra for a walk in the park, skirting the castle, then strolling down towards the boating lake. Having now seen Pedra through the eyes of others for the first time, I felt her bony hand within my relatively plump one, felt it with decided distaste. It was as if even my nose had been opened, as well as my eyes, for a stench of something quite indefinable ripened around us, and even the skateboarders in the park gave us a wide berth.

We sat beside the lake listening to the underhum of traffic with which Colchester always seemed to resonate, punctuated by klaxons and distant children's screams. I looked towards the water and thought the only thing to do with unseemly waifs and strays like Pedra was to bury them in water, whence this one had surely come.

 

I soon shook off this thought and turned my face towards her, to see if my earlier awakening to her true condition was still apparent. It was then I caught the fullest glimpse of an inner smile. I felt tears of joys pricking at the corners of my eyes. My nose tingled with a perhaps fouller stenches than before, but now disguised by the most precious perfume from the department stores of Paris. I looked into her eyes, my eyes sinking into hers, as into a well of Arthurian Romance and courtly love. I did indeed fall in love for the first, and probably last, time, as I lowered gently my lips to her lips. Tongue towards her tongue. A gentle fall towards her saving arms, a lovely abandonment to the folded lace of her soul, amid the scented accompaniment of wild honey and wild hyacinth and other wild sweet nothings.

 

My family couldn’t see what I saw in her. But luckily they believed in happy endings, too.

(unpublished)

Old Haunts

 

He chomped on an apple with the loudest fruit fart he’d ever managed to muster; stared across the river at where he used to play as a child, among the nettles, gripping toy aeroplanes like boomerangs and making brrrmmming noises to scare the blackbirds … and applying dock leaves to any stings he’d inadvertently suffered in the meantime.  Now a grown-up, and on the other side of the river, he yearned for the return of childhood’s simplicity – except things were simple now. 

Too simple. 

He was dying. 

Having met the cancer ward that’d make our world an orphan.

            He laughed out loud – startling fish – and wandered painfully along the bank.  There was no longer any dock leaf that could soothe his current sting.  He had it in his brain, his back, his chest, his … tantamount to totality.  A rotter of a fruit, rotting, not to, but from, the core.  Corruption came out of nowhere, it seemed, but, subsequently, went everywhere.  Like a desperate cow pie.

            Not that he was old.  Merely struck down in his middle years above and below the waist – whilst this was his last trip out unattended.  He’d begged and begged, despite the hobbling disfigurement of the counting-house rhymes in his head.  So the trip was reluctantly permitted by the hospital so that he could explore his old haunts. 

            The water blew bubbles, like his old bathtime farts.  The current stung.

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)

There's More to Bellini Than Norma


First published 'Zine Zone' 1998


Berghaus had his own armchair in the alcove. Mr and Mrs Swindon had become so accustomed to his presence in the parlour - following a dozen exhausted rent-books - they almost forgot he was a lodger. His face, after all, owned a generous brow teased by the tousled ends of his hair. A real gentleman, they conjectured, despite his intermittent designer stubble. There were even dimples which seemed to sink to the bone in his most lightsome moments.

Berghaus did not need to say anything to radiate his feelings, sad or otherwise. Mr and Mrs Swindon treated him as their own son, or at least a son-in-law. He possessed pride of place under the standard lamp, with an open Dickens on his lap. Wearing a pair of heavy-duty headphones on his ears, he tried to ignore the flickering images on the TV screen that the bleary-eyed Swindons found time to watch so avidly.

He had tried to interest the old couple in one of his passions: Grand Opera and, despite being set in their ways, they had at first sat patiently, closely attending to his views on this rarified subject ... until they realised it was all about raucous noises that only riled rats.

“I prefer the stylised beauty of Mozart to the more overt gothicism of Wagner or even Puccini.”

The couple nodded in unison, whilst pretending to keep close examination of his lips and at least one eye upon the silent screen and its teletext subtitles for the deaf.

“And I’ve always thought that there was more to Bellini than Norma.”

Again the couple’s studied aknowledgement and mutual humouring.



One day, the Swindons’ daughter Petula returned home, having had a hard time with someone who was fast becoming the best candidate for her first ex-husband. The Swindons, of course, bustled round her, tending to their darling’s needs, making oodles of heart-warming tea, clucking sympathies twenty-four to the dozen in their endearingly incomprehensible way, and maligning that brute of a man she had been enticed into marrying. They also flicked glances at Berghaus so that he too would try to bolster their daughter’s spirits because, despite being a lodger, he had all the duties of a family friend. So, Berghaus smiled knowingly from between the noisy ear-vice of his head-phones.

He had met Petula only once before, during her brief Christmas visit with the husband six years ago, when she had been a delight to behold with many split skirts: one for each of her moods. The husband had been all mouth and trousers, true, but was very generous with his money, giving the Swindons large Christmas presents and his wife costly jewellery. The marital problems that had now overtaken them, Berghaus guessed, were ones concerned with the source of such riches having dried up. The husband had been summarily dismissed from his employment for breaking the Data Protection Act - was what Berghaus gathered. He didn’t like the look of the barely noticeable bruise on Petula’s upper left leg. It seemed to portend more than what was on show.

A day or so later, Berghaus found her sitting in the kitchen darning one of Mr Swindon’s socks over a wooden mushroom. The old couple had gone to what they delightfully called their Doorpost Club which happened every Wednesday afternoon: a tea dance affair by all accounts.

“I’m sorry to hear that things have not been going too well, Petula.” Berghaus shuffled, embarrassed at finding himself alone with her.

“Thank you.” She looked prettier than when she had arrived in a flurry of tears and luggage. Calmer, too. More stoic and forebearing.

“Shall I make us a pot of tea?” he asked, as he inadvertently discovered a loose tooth with his tongue.

“I don’t like to drink tea any more.” She had evidently not had the heart to tell her Mum and Dad this fact, since a strong hot cup of the stuff was the first thing that had met her when arriving upon the parental doorstep. Berghaus suddenly saw a face at the kitchen window: whiskery and scowling. That was all he remembered. The moment had been very short.

Scuffing his feet by the sink and realising that Petula could not have seen the face - her back being turned to the window - Berghaus was naturally perturbed by the incident. There had been an uncanniness about it but one which he found difficult to define: marginally this side of normal: the safe side. He hastily poured himself a cold drink and left her weaving the midget loom she had already erected over the head of the wooden mushroom.

When Mr and Mrs Swindon returned from the “Doorpost Club”, they were blushing with elderly excitement. Grunts and grimaces, as they told of this and that: Marjorie had broken her ankle in the ice last week; Claudette was seeing a little too much of Mr Smith-Bobrowski; Charlie Musker had died of something strange; Dame Florence sent her kind regards to Petula and would like to see her at the club some time (men were getting younger and younger all the time the Dame had said); the brass band had not been able to get through the snow, so they’d danced to records (not quite so satisfactory, since the dance floor’s vibrations were more attuned to live music); and, by the way, Charlie Musker had left a lot of money to someone in Redditch; what’s more, Lady Dora Slight was coming round tonight to see Petula.

The brass band roaming the icy steppes of Hertfordhshire seemed an amusing concept to Berghaus, whilst Petula seemed irritable at the last piece of news regarding Lady Dora. Berghaus was then abruptly granted another glimpse of the whiskery face, followed by loud fumblings at the back door. Mr and Mrs Swindon didn’t notice, but Petula visibly blanched. There were no vocal accompaniments from the budding intruder and the door eventually came to rest on its hinges. The storm was over ... at least for a while.

Berghaus looked as sympathetically as possible at Petula. She returned his glances unalloyed. Having been told to grin and bear misfortunes all her life by suffering parents, she was now reaping the reward of such lessons. She even began to smile when Mr Swindon cracked a joke about her darning, wielding her wooden mushroom, as he did, pretending to be a conductor of one of those opera orchestras so dear to their lodger.

Berghaus decided to leave them to it and enter the security of his sound-proof ear-phones. Verdi was already on the turntable, so there was little fuss and bother. Eventually, a while later, he re-emerged from the armchair’s sanctuary, only to hear the voice of a strange woman coming from the kitchen-diner. It sounded shrill and strident as if she were rehearsing a recitative from a Rossini opera. Must be Lady Dora.

Supper was a memorable affair. Lady Dora had been invited to share the meal, together with a gentleman companion with whom she had originally arrived. He was evidently her latest beau, a portly individual with scrupulous table manners. Although his conversation lacked point, he certainly made up for this with the number of words he used to fill in the otherwise embarrassing silences. Lady Dora and Berghaus were the only ones who made fitful attempts at repartee, whilst Petula and her parents found sufficient pleasure in merely eating. Petula in particular appeared unwilling to speak even when spoken to. Berghaus kept glancing at the window in case he missed another glimpse of the chap with side chops. It was dark outside now, so it was difficult to imagine the golliwog shape that would probably indicate the chap’s return. Nevertheless, eventually, there it was, a shadow sucker upon the glass.

Berghaus stood up and pointed. Petula screamed. Lady Dora and her companion were left with silent open mouths. Mr and Mrs Swindon turned towards where Berghaus pointed ... but, too late, since the shape had disappeared. But the door’s hideous rattling resumed from late afternoon. This time, Berghaus held out no hope for the hinges as he watched them buckle. Again, however, the din subsided and there was noticeable relief upon all the faces inside the kitchen, despite the fact that some of them failed to realise what it was they were supposed to be relieved about.

Lady Dora scuttled between the two elderly Swindons, calming them, laying her hands upon the tops of their heads and purring like a big cat. Her gentleman companion stood behind Petula, his hands sliding down her shoulders towards the breasts, clucking with sympathy. Berghaus was the only one physically disconnected from at least one other. He was reminded of a sextet piece from Rossini’s La Cenerentola. Or was it Bellini’s Norma? He had uncharacteristically forgotten.

He took up the discarded wooden mushroom still bearing the half-finished sock and waved it about like a magic wand. He was slightly perturbed that the window now framed a full moon, more bright than he’d ever recalled ,with markings quite different from those he recalled from his childhood astronomy book. At least, it must have stopped snowing.

In the distance he heard the sound of a brass band playing carols ... as the door imperceptibly began to revive. Berghaus yearned for the refuge of his trusty ear-phones. But nightmares woken into are more dreadful than those waken from. Petula walked to the back door and opened it. There, she kissed a wolfish man who waved his own tail about with his clawful of fingers - hugely howling, as if he wanted to scorch the lining of the throat. Or strip the skull-lining like old wall-paper.

Mr and Mrs Swindon, together with Lady Dora and her limping consort, fled past the now dissolving shape of shagginess, as if they believed staying in the cosy house was more horrific than risking the night outside. Petula turned towards Berghaus with a smile on her lips, her face webbed over with a darning of darkness and her toadstool tongue poking for a second kiss. Berghaus held one long note of baying bestiality, performing a solo at the dead stereophonic centre of his own cosy head-space. But it wasn’t his voice.

Brakelights
BRAKELIGHTS

First published 'Crimson' 1995



The side-mirror on the car door reflected my own face instead of that damn pile-driver of a speedster who hugged my bumper. The rearview on the windscreen was equally dislodged - and it now dawned on me what it was to have no eyes in the back of my head. Although reflections were, at best, one notch beyond the norm of dream and with even reality itself not the most bankable of products, I struggled to adjust both mirrors. Yet the car itself ill-compensated for my endeavours due to the unusual slope of the road's camber, each of the contraflow cones at a perceptibly different angle from the next.

I wished I hadn't broken my sight-line. The night was darker this time, too - and more blurred: glowing slugs of yellow, red and white seeping into each other like a Pollock painting. The windscreen itself was caked with flies, turning scarlet as I spattered into them.

It was so warm I wondered if I were over-heating. I peered at the gauge, but couldn't read it properly: two needles, both flickering madly between hot and cold. The speedometer wasn't moving, despite my quick changing perspective. The petrol indication was on the blink. But I couldn't have run out of petrol. I had only just got a sumpful at the service station. I felt my stomach and smiled. I imagined my arm was the gear-lever and it stirred the engine, donating my blood as a supplement to the oil level. The tatters of flesh acted as a further lubricant to the meshing cogs and fans. Then, it felt as if splinters of bone infiltrated the system. The engine over-choked. Honking my guts out. Lungs on their last legs. Spirit barely level. I only hoped I would last as long as the vehicle.

Corkscrewed my neck to see whether I had shaken off the pursuer. Two bright eyes searing the darkness, the sharp shadows of twin upraised mudguards even blacker than the night, the crenellated grin of the radiator bloodied by my rear lights, the number-plate picked out like the mirror-image of a dead language. I pressed a button, pretending to be James Bond. I full expected jagged steel tyre-spoilers to jab from my underbelly into the pursuer's path. Instead, the side windows descended into the doors with a mocking hum, exposing all the fish-mash brain and tangled bone.

The current night abruptly clarified into an apparently more dependable reality - and, with this new perspective, I was the pursuer, not the pursued: rather a shock to be dead on a tail, my own sucking-sump of a belly eager for another re-fill. A pair of crimson eyes ahead engorged larger by the second as my own reality roared through someone else's fly-splattered dreams.

Why

Published 'Purple Patch' 1992 

WHY

 

The River was found behind the tall residential towers.

 

Came as a surprise as I walked upon the zigzag tiles of Deptford Wharf. I suspect the River had always flowed along there and it was the Wharf that was the modern intruder.

 

I could see the pyramid-topped tower across the water, with flashing lights warning off stray aeroplanes from its outlandish height. I fell upon a bench of neatly gashed black iron, from where such ingredients of the Docklands complex opposite were not exactly eyesores. More like heartaches.

 

Why. That was the teaser. Having had a bitter row with my daughter the previous evening about her boy friend and having said a lot of cruel words I didn't mean, because I do love her - in view of that, I forgave those responsible for the eye-line upon the opposite bank. They probably didn't mean it, either.

 

And that's that I suppose. Life in a broken nutshell.

 

False Ceilings

Published 'Elegia' 1992 

 

How long that particular ghost had been a haunter, nobody knew.

 

Ricky lived in a house wherein his parents had spread seed for more than a generation. He was the prime stock, the elder brother, the one who, however long in the tooth, would take over from them when the death threat had worked itself through the various layers of red tape.

 

The other siblings, some of indeterminate sex, clustered at the foot of the television, mooning up at the screen. They cared little for the future, except for the scheduling of programmes. However, a girl among them, Lucinda, had only one eye for the flashing screen in the corner of the parlour: the other eye was for the more hazy, slightly less understandable, gradually more noticeable flickerings in the opposite corner by the hallway door. Being the Fifties, reception was brilliant in neither corner. None of it was in colour, of course.

 

Ricky knew about his parents' bedroom in the higher reaches of yhe suburban house, where they kept themselves to themselves. He was yhe only one allowed into its sanctity, where sleep was punctuated with fitful lovemaking. The movement of their limbs in the half-darkness was, to Ricky, a cannibal's slow-simmering thick-cut stew, as he came upon them from the landing. Breathless after the ascent of the steep stairs, he was eager to tell them of yet another sibling's arrival, yet one more set of eyes to feed, a further reason to buy a bigger television to prevent arguments over viewing positions.

 

The parents would wave him out of the master bedroom, indicating the paltry postal order left on the tallboy by the oriental wardrobe: as if it were the end of their responsibility: and Ricky would, with hangdog face, slouch back down the stairs towards the lower floors.

 

It was the darkest landing of all, midway between the attic and the cellar, that Ricky saw Lucinda in company with a haunter (a ghost that had "come out” without fear of the consequences). She had hitched her skirt to the upper thighs, lounging across several treads of the stairway, feet tucked up towards the buttocks. The haunter was equally relaxed, hanging from the false ceiling which a previous dynasty had built to prevent the stairs becoming frighteningly precipitous.

 

He could not be jealous but, being the elder brother, Ricky felt responsible for his sister's love life, especially when it involved the long dead. The haunter seemed a trifle too laid back for its own good, as Lucinda coquettishly cocked her head in its direction.

 

"Be off with you!" Ricky boomed. The echoey darkness took away the edge of urgency. It was merely one more noise that time held endlessly in its maw: its only significance being in retrospect, when all the fateful twists and turns had been aggregated and assessed.

 

The haunter found it easy to ignore Ricky's interruption for, to such an entity, Ricky did not exist. It could hear the undergrunts of the television a few floors below, but that was more like the unbroken hum of reality. By contrast, the odd punctuations by those such as Ricky, who had broken the rules of fate, well, they were merely to be shrugged off: and, as soon as ignored, forgotten: as soon as forgotten, never to have existed at all.

 

Ricky watched the black and white shapeless whirligig assume dominion over the stairway. The fuzz and static of false hopes, condemned, derelict dreams and misguided visions made the whole area throb with bewigged and bepowdered figures. Escaped from one historical moment when heritage was only just beginning to be self-­perpetuating, these were the scions of the house, the long lost brethren who had knitted a whole skein of cousin arteries with few, if any, dropped stitches. It was a pity they had only twenty years in which to work and develop, since the house had only been built since just before the Second World War. During the blitz, ghosts had become more plentiful, but they were not of the right calibre, merely preening dandies, fancy dress pranksters, masqueraders of false-­bottom history...

 

As ghosts always faded behind truth, Lucinda herself became another ceiling, straight as a die, a smooth white slope, with baroque scrolling as it turned corners: the mock stucco...

 

Ricky descended to the television room and blew on the screen to brighten up the image. This was to allow the remaining siblings to see in closer to the heart of things, where a tube swelled, a valve fluxed: a box of tricky delights: a cage of ghosts: and somebody banged on the ceiling to complain about the volume.

 

He sobbed, for Lucinda had never existed. Her death wish was never to be granted. If he had known she was never to be his sister, he could have tried to love her properly.

 

He still had one dream to live, when he would become a haunter too and walk as if on air, between the cages which contained those who once sat outside staring in. Or perhaps he was just another breed of ghosting upon the shimmer.

 

 

"Ghosts often disguise themselves as white ceilings."

--Rachel Mildeyes ("Upon the Nature of Real Ghosts".)

 

 

The Curious Satchel

Collaboration with David Mathew & MF Korn 

Goddamn it if I don’t have the worst luck!

 

 

     This was how Tom was now complaining inside his head – where the words echoed like steel drums.

 

 

And what’s the time anyway?

 

 

The ultimatum was what broke the marriage.  His wife’s voice rang in his ear: ‘I’m leaving you!’

 

 

Seconds earlier: ‘Choose, Charlene. Him or me.’

 

 

     In his hours of scalpel-sharp post-relationship analysis (or what passed for the same, when aided by a bottle of something cold but warming), Tom Warple would nail it all down, with a self-righteous slap on the desk-top, to the time that Charlene had insisted he made a choice. She had wanted him to choose between his family and his work – which was impossible. Tom had known at that moment that the cracks had deepened; the fractures that the union had taken along the way were beyond repair. An ultimatum leading to another…

 

 

Tom had the receiver in his hand. ‘1:Home.’ He was calling to talk to Charlene, and something felt unusual. Tom was disturbed by the fact that he had grown up so much in the week they’d spent apart that he was now ready to call her while sober. Maybe this was because he’d had a remarkable day. Remarkably bad, that was – as if a day involving an abandoned, greasy green sludge of space trash could ever be regarded as good – and yet he hadn’t touched the pint of Old Grandad that he always bought in the morning, with his cigarettes and the sandwich for lunch. As usual, he had left the booze to chill by stabbing a hole in the top of the water barrel and dropping it in. It was five p.m. And Tom felt good. Tired; but good. Although he’d once quipped to a friend that being a self-employed detective was great because alcoholism was tax-deductible, he was enjoying being on the straight and narrow. Let’s see how I feel afterwards, he thought with unanticipated alkalinity.

 

 

The phone rang. And rang.

 

 

‘Jesus wept,’ Tom said. ‘Pick up the phone, Charlene!’

 

 

A man called Eisenson must have been cursing in a similar fashion at nine-thirty that morning – if university science professors actually swore.

 

 

     Tom was on the commode. As quickly as he could, he had made it to the drilling trill; said his name…

 

 

     ‘This is Dr Eisenson,’ the caller had said. ‘You did some work for me last year? My wife was involved in an affair?’

 

 

     ‘I remember you, Dr Eisenson,’ said Tom. ‘How’d it work out?’

 

 

     ‘We decided to patch it up,’ the other man answered. ‘Perhaps she was right – I wasn’t paying her enough attention: immersed in my work…’

 

 

     Don’t want to hear this, thought Tom. He had spent his time on the can by conducting a gamble. He wanted to know which of his friends would side with Charlene and which with him. There were negatives in both camps. Everyone knew that Charlene had had a string of affairs; but then, everyone knew that Tom drank and considered a good morning to his kids every day the extent of his parental duties.

 

 

     ‘What can I do for you, Dr Eisenson?’ asked Tom. He made it a point never to forget when a qualification had altered a Mister into something else. ‘How’s the world of E equals MC squared?’

 

 

     ‘I have something I’ll pay for you to look after,’ said Eisenson.

 

 

     ‘And what’s that?’       

 

 

‘A briefcase.’

 

 

     Don’t waste my time, Mister Einstein. ‘And what’s in it?’

 

 

     ‘I’m afraid that will have to remain a secret.’

 

 

     ‘Sure. But secrets cost extra, Doc. And prompt further questions.’

 

 

     ‘Such as?’

 

 

     ‘Such as: is this secret something that I’m gonna get my door kicked down for?’

 

 

     ‘Unlikely. Next.’

 

 

     ‘Gold? Cash? Diamonds?’

 

 

     Eisenson chuckled. ‘With respect, Mr Warple, I’m a university scientist. I don’t live in a Five and Dime novel and I’m not a crook. I’m asking you for a simple favour, for which I’ll pay your going rate.’

 

 

     ‘For how long?’ Tom asked.

 

 

     ‘Twenty-four hours.’

 

 

     Tom didn’t particularly need the work. ‘A grand,’ he gambled.

 

 

     ‘A university check will suffice, I take it?’

 

 

     ‘It’ll do,’ said Tom, astonished and cross with himself. If he’d known that the bill was on the college, he would have doubled the amount.

 

 

 

 

 

…the worst luck!

 

 

Tom was still complaining inside his head – his skull was echoing the words as surely as a chant in an Egyptian tomb.

 

 

…time anyway?

 

 

But he knew that in a stupid coincidence both his watch and the office clock had stopped working a few hours earlier. And the building was too quiet to provide clues.

 

 

     The telephone rang on. There was no point in not holding, he’d convinced himself.

 

 

     But where was everybody? The little cinema inside Tom Walpole’s head was able to concoct any number of dramas: the natural consequence of an adult lifetime in the detection business. Charlene – her small frame almost smothered by the wide, hair-laden shoulders of a mystery man; Charlene in mortal terror. A car as twisted as a stomped-down Coke tin, from which a slow stream of burgundy ran – the four people within now mannequins, glove puppets, dolls…

 

 

     Answer the phone, Charlene, for crying out loud, thought Tom.

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Eisenson arrived at a hair before eleven. Far from the urbane professional that he had seemed on the horn, he had pulled on an attitude of terror. It occurred to Tom to ask what had bothered the other man so; but he didn’t. In fact, he believed (arrogantly, and as it was incorrectly) that the professor’s nerves were connected to the business that he had to conduct with Tom.

 

 

     ‘This it?’ Warple asked, with perfect redundancy. It was a case, wasn’t it?

 

 

     ‘This is it. And you’ll take good care of it, won’t you?’

 

 

     ‘For as long as your banknotes convince me to, Doc.’

 

 

     ‘I see…’ said Eisenson. Then he punched through some kind of cloud. ‘Oh, I see,’ he added, and he made a big deal of angling for his wallet in the left inside pocket of a jacket that had not only seen better days, but had seen better decades.

 

 

     ‘The magic pill of money,’ said Tom. ‘Different flavour every time, but always delicious.’

 

 

     ‘Whatever you say.’ But then Eisenson began to shake: an immediate but frightening manifestation that had Tom reaching for his mind-stored medical factbook. Drunk? Half-baked? What? Certainly the doctor was gibbering like a fool…

 

 

     Could the day actually get any worse?

 

 

The whiskey! Tom decided. Give him a belt. So saying, he stepped to the water cooler and fished out the bottle.

 

 

Eisenson drank like a man who had recently been deprived of clean water. And then he started on with an alien language – some weird and violent vocals. Tom didn't know what the guy was saying.

 

 

‘…spirits… apparitions…’ was all he could get.

 

 

The wimpy little fruitcake – as Tom had deemed him - said unexpectedly, ‘Don't open it.’

 

 

The case? Of course the case…

 

 

 

 

 

‘You have to choose, Charlene. It’s him or me.’

 

 

     This uttered, with battle-fatigue weariness, towards the end of a stark three-dayer: a seventy-two hour argument. Some kind of record.

 

 

     ‘And who are you to offer me final chances, Tom?’ said Charlene. ‘Maybe I should bark one back at you. It’s our family or your job. Now tell me: how did that feel?’

 

 

     ‘You’re asking something impossible!’

 

 

     ‘Sure. And it feels like you’re being diluted, doesn’t it?’

 

 

 

 

 

Still the phone rang on and on, like a siren, unattended; like freakish weather. But Tom could not think of anything that he wanted to do more than talk to Charlene. He felt Christmassy.

 

 

 

 

 

…And of course he used a monkey key to pop the briefcase.

 

 

I’m only human.

 

 

     But he wished he hadn’t.      

 

 

It pulsated ghostly within and  oozed green. It looked like the fried ball of ice cream one would get at an upscale Mexican restaurant. The sludge that dripped off it made Tom gag.  Evidently fresh from outer space – or so Tom’s rough-and-ready explanation guide would have it – the object was still throbbing with its power over inertia. 

 

 

It kept Tom’s eyesight fixed, even if he was not by now in the room with it: he was back above the vinegar drain, unloading his dinner as well as last month’s breakfast.

 

 

Tom failed to recognise the precise cargo that was being jettisoned. He thought: Time’s been goosed. And he praised himself for feeling less spooked than that doctor. He could handle this.

 

 

Handle what?

 

 

Dr Eisenson had off-loaded a few minutes earlier a cheque that would probably bounce, even if it was a University check, because large chunks of money never came Tom’s way. He solved cases. Getting paid, it seemed, was a different deal entirely.

 

 

 

 

 

Meteorite?

 

 

Whatever it was, it gloated … and sucked gently on the moment. It loves being owned, thought Tom. Like a family cat. 

 

 

 

 

 

Something familiar came to Tom’s mind again:

 

 

     Goddamn it if I don’t have the worst luck!

 

 

      Thunder sneezing through his nose and ears.

 

 

      And what’s the time anyway?

 

 

 

 

 

      ‘I’m leaving you!’

 

 

      But what had he said as a retort?

 

 

     ‘You have to choose, Charlene. It’s him or me.’

 

 

      That was what he’d said. Now, yesterday, and tomorrow.

 

 

     Tom had been caught in the loop that the ‘meteorite’ had brought with it, pulsing with no past and no future. Only a never-ending present moment – as it messily transpired - of being sick and unsick.

 

 

     Thanks a lot, said Tom Walpole to the back of his skull.

 

 

     I’ve got to give it back to Eisenson.

 

 

 

 

 

‘I’ve got to give it back to Eisenson,’ he said to Charlene.

 

 

     This uttered, with battle-fatigue weariness, towards the end of a stark three-dayer: a seventy-two hour argument. This is some kind of record, he reflected. Tom had picked at his cat tattoos for hours. He’d eaten ice cream on the kitchen linoleum. He’d eaten extinguished matches and laughed at reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie…

 

 

      So why did Tom now have the telephone receiver in his hand? Why was he paralyzed in his chair?

 

 

      I want to know, he thought. I really don’t remember.

 

 

      And why was he pressing ‘1:Home’ on the SpeedDial? Not to talk to either of his sons or to his daughter, he was sure. They’d never loved him anyway; and the twinkle of paternal pride had taken only the first few years to be doused.

 

 

      No. He was calling to talk to Charlene, and something felt unusual. I’m going to be sick, he decided. It was in the tone of voice that people used to announce that they were going to leave their jobs.

 

 

 

 

 

Tom found himself talking to his own voice on a disconnected phone.

 

 

      Where?

 

 

      Pick up the phone, Tom begged.

 

 

      But he could no longer recall whose voice he needed to hear.  He heard vortices of unplumbed space in the receiver.  Cosmic spirits, galactic entities unleashed, whispering to him in wavy static.

 

 

      That was what he heard. 

 

 

      And the ‘meteorite’ oozed and ebbed; it oozed and ebbed.

 

 

Freighted By Frights

         

         

          FREIGHTED BY FRIGHTS ....

by Gordon Lewis and D.F.Lewis.

         

          There was something about the cut of the man that struck a chord of memory, harkening back to a brotherhood that some called warfare. Even the back of the man’s head looked familiar. Walking some 25 yards behind the man in question, Kevin reasoned it couldn’t be who he thought it was. Not only did they originate from different parts of the British Isles, Kevin had heard Sam Morrison had emigrated to Canada soon after his discharge from the army.

          Over twenty years had passed since he had seen the back of Sam’s head on the parade ground of an Aldershot barracks at the beginning of National Service. Not a complete waste of time for Kevin, since gaining experience in the Royal Corps of Signals, had been instrumental in placing him in a very good job with a major telecommunications company.

          Kevin was sure his memory wasn’t playing tricks as he increased his pace so to catch up with man, who he was sure was his old mate Sam. Reaching his side he tapped him on the shoulder to say:

          “Hello Sam you old devil, where have you sprung from?”

          It was indeed Sam Morrison that turned to see Kevin — but had he only seen his face from a distance, he would have passed him by as a stranger. But at close range it was the eyes, there was something about the eyes that told Kevin he hadn’t been wrong. But the face had altered. It was weather­beaten, etched with worry lines as well those of premature aging.

          For a suspended moment of time they stared at each other until Kevin spoke again:

          “It is me, Sam...Kevin... Kevin Courtland, surely you remember Aldershot twenty years ago, we were in the same squad... Infantry training… you remember...”

          Sudden recognition dawned on Sam’s face... “Kevin... Ginger Courtland that ever was. Is it really you?” The worry lines disappeared as his face lit up at the sight of an old mate from his past life.

          “If I had one wish Sam, it would be to meet you at this precise moment. I am a stranger here and in desperate need to speak to someone like you. My father died recently — they say he took his own life, something I am convinced he would never do, there has to be some other reason for his death… again I say he would not have committed suicide, never in a million years.” Kevin spoke these words quietly in measured tones. Amost like an automaton.

          The death of Kevin’s father was in fact the reason for his presence in this strange town — off the beaten track in a part of the country sparsely populated by smallholders. The connection was tenuous but Kevin felt drawn here...

          “Hey! ‘Kevin’ seems more natural than ‘Ginger’.” Sam laughed, the lines on his face returning, but this time as laughter ones. “Well, your hair’s more grey than ginger. One should not fight Middle Age, but embrace it...”

          Kevin laughed in tune with the rather insulting comment as soon as he realised his old National Service pal was still the same carefree bloke, albeit scarred by time’s passing.

          Shoulder to shoulder, they headed for the nearest pub. Then esconced in the chimney corner of a rather old-fashioned pub, with two bottles of lager being rather youthfully drunk from the necks, Sam asked:

          “You say your father killed himself, Ginger?”

          “So they say. That was the Coroner’s verdict, But I have my doubts.”

          “It’s obviously draining you, because it’s the first thing you actually mentioned to me after meeting up after all these years!”

          “Yes, I suppose it is strange, Sam, me blurting that out, even before we had chance to exchange pleasantries.”

          “It was almost as if you expected to meet me here and you had your statement prepared...”

          “Blimey! You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m not even sure what I’m doing in this part of the country. Dad had a cousin a few miles from here who ran a vegetable farm and a retail outlet. I think my father spent some of his school holidays there.”

          “You’re not sure?”

          “No. But that’s enough about my tale of woe, Sam. What’s been happening to you since we last met? I thought you’d left the country.”

          Kevin studied Sam’s eyes. They told a thousand stories. But only one of them would turn out to be important.

          “It doesn’t seem like twenty years since we parted company, Kevin — though when I think of my experiences since our days in the army, I suppose quite a lot has happened. There’s not a lot to tell that is exciting enough. I did leave the country, I tried my luck in Canada for a number of years, it was too bloody cold for my liking, especially after our tour in the Middle East. I stuck it out though, there was nothing much I could do about it really. Then fate took a hand, I had to return to England for family reasons. My father died, but not in circumstances such as yours. He had made me his sole heir, and I have to say his legacy surprised me somewhat. But there was a proviso — I had to carry on the business he left and take responsibility for my mother’s well being. He had had some luck with investments, sank his money in a business venture which flourished somewhat. It runs itself — more or less. I leave it all to an excellent manager and a small staff of good workers — though I keep a watchful eye on the business, the reins are in my hands, so to speak... Agricultural supplies is our main source of business, though I personally dabble in stocks and shares — successfully I might add, following in my Dad’s footsteps I suppose. Apart from that I live a quiet life, I never married, though I’ve had my moments — seems most of the women I met didn’t quite come up to my expectations. But that’s enough about me too, it seems the pressing business is the suspicions you have about your father’s death... Do you think somebody had a hand in his death? Anything I can do to help? Time and money mean nothing. I know this locality like the back of my hand. What exactly do you intend to do whilst you are here?”

          “Thanks Sam,” said Kevin. “Perhaps you know my Dad’s cousin. His name is Courtland too — Tom Courtland, as far as I know he used to grow horticultural items… sold the results of his labour in a farm shop adjoining his land.”

          “I never thought to connect you with that scallywag, wouldn’t trust him with anything, dropped him off our customer list years ago. He still has the place though, must get his supplies from somewhere I guess. His holdings are near here, a few miles to the West, near a village called Furness. I’ll give you a lift out there if you like, my car is in a nearby car-park — just around the corner. I’d better not have any more of this strong lager though, a bit of all right isn’t it? I hope we have time later to continue with our reunion. Come drink up, I’ll drive you out to old Courtland’s place, though I’m sure he won’t be very pleased to see me... or you perhaps...?”

          Both Sam and Kevin were silent for a while. The strangely stilted conversation had lasted for a long time but only certain aspects of it would be remembered, those sections which carried suspicions and freighted frights. These emotions, however, at that stage in the pub, were not even sown let alone reaped... when empty beer bottles were collected by a ginger-headed barmaid. She was called Moose — a pet name given to her by her grandfather because of the outlandish hair-style sticking up (he said) like antlers! Moose watched the two men leave and she shrugged. All she’d overheard were the pleasantries and small talk rather than a story about suspicious frights. Had she heard more, she may have interrupted with additional information of her own: legends in the town which had done the rounds in her infancy but later told to her by the same grandfather who had laughed at her hair-style.

         

         

          The sun was low as clouds drifted towards it from the sky’s zenith, creating a curdled egg yolk of dusk. The land was stubbled with meaningless hedgerows, meaningless because they seemed to divide nothing from nothing, except derelict hen-runs. Here and there were farmhouses, some dully lit where the shutters were not pulled sufficiently tight, others with yawning gaps where roof met gutters. The wind soughed, tugging at the flickering top-knots of two dark shapes as they strode southwards towards a destination which both seemed to hope would stay at its due distance… judging by their zig-zagging route. Mumbles could be heard, but nothing of any possible meaning could be gleaned from between the sounds of night creatures hooting and braying.

          Then, suddenly, given the best vantage point, one could glimpse, just above their shoulders, a more substantial outhouse, flanked by thatched stables, with light shafting out to carve a path for any who should dare approach it. They only half-noticed these buildings, since the lagers Sam and Kevin had imbibed had further loosened the tongues of these two recently united friends. Yet their conversation was even less memorable, less likely even to tease let alone scare.

          The drive from the small market town of Bluntstone had been taken leisurely, stopping on occasion to take in the scenery that really needed to be looked at, not simply as passing landscape. Sam stopped the car finally in a small lay-by some hundred yards or so from the large village of Furness for a more lengthy tete-a-tete. During this discourse Sam told Kevin that he was not really the biological son of the father he spoke about. It wasn’t until the death of the man who adopted him, giving him his name of Samuel Morrison, did the truth emerge about his true origin. Not that there was a lot to tell except that he was a foundling child left on the steps of the vicarage back in Bluntstone. Though Sam had tried to find his true biological parents, all his efforts had been doomed to failure. The scrap of humanity in a cardboard box was all there was, not a shred of evidence to go further back… in the end Sam had just accepted that his parents were the Morrisons.

          They left the car to walk the short distance to the village, by this time it was late afternoon, a gathering dusk was spreading over the land. What were they doing there? They felt as if they were walking in circles There was no real reason to suppose that Tom Courtland could shed light on the mysterious death of his cousin, Kevin’s father... Kevin was clutching at straws, this visit to a distant relation was to tidy up loose ends. He had to find out if his father had visited his cousin prior to his body being found dead at the foot of the cliffs some miles up the coast from Furness, his broken body identified by papers he carried, but nothing to give reason to his flinging himself to the rocks below the cliff.

          Kevin and Sam eventually arrived again at the track leading to Tom Courtland’s run down old farmhouse until they came to the side road where once stood a farm shop... now just blank windows met their gaze. The outhouse looked in a high state of disrepair with no sign of life. This time the thatched stables gave out bleating noises not unlike a cross between creatures of feather and fur.

          It seemed as if they were on a fool’s errand, and Kevin said to his friend, “I thought you implied that Tom Courtland was still trading, we are not going to find any thing out here. Even his stables have been taken over by wild animals and squawking chickens by the sound of it!”

          Sam stood there, immobile for a while, then he turned to the house, he muttered with a conspiratorial whisper:

          “I’ve got a feeling we are being watched, I’m sure I caught sight of someone up at the bedroom window of the house.”

          Inheritances and legacies were things that were in the blood as well as in solid objects of value. Both Sam and Kevin felt this — but not in so many words — as the face behind the crazed pane was younger than Tom Courtland could possibly be imagined to be — with a bestial cast that anyone should try and conceal if they wish to be considered of human stock. It was Tom, but equally, it was not Tom at all. The bright ginger hair should have turned grey by now. The eyes sparkled, the nose was a ploughshare. And all this was actually seen in deepening dusk and amid the distances of the flat scrubland! Sight was now so sharp-edged.

          No cliffs around here for an easy escape from life, thought Kevin.

          Except the sheer sides of the universal mind, echoed a thought Sam could not prevent himself from thinking.

          Sam put his arm round Kevin’s shoulder, as if to comfort him. And the vision of the windowface vanished. Tom Courtland must be dead himself, they both surmised. They did not even bother to explore further. The stables, too, would hide forever what they might have contained.

         

          Sam and Kevin indulged in crazy pub talk — so as to avoid concerns both felt. They stared eyeball to eyeball over two more bottlenecks. There was a resonance between them beyond friendship, even beyond kinship.

          Moose shuffled over and smiled cutely, then a wicked smile beneath her outlandish ginger thatch of hair. And both men did not need to wonder whether she was a Courtland, too… dyed though her hair was now seemed to be.

          Inheritances and legacies were evidently mysteries beyond even procreation. Any permutations of a thousand, nay, a million stories, making one.

          Foundlings, changelings and other hybrids of paternity eventually crystallised into mutual brotherhoods that were more than just fighting shoulder to shoulder in those wars humanity managed, in its wisdom, to populate with a mock common enemy. Moose’s departing smile was mistaken for a wince; the two men, now nameless, smiled, too, their eyes glistening...

          Arm in arm, they left the pub, singing:-

                  “Frights and feathers and fathers and fur,

                    Nights that brothers’ bloods do blur...

         

          Their songs echoed off into the distance as Moose slipped the latch, ready for bed, to dream of Red Indians and other non-sequiturs. She knew, however, that the Universal Father was a changeling Himself. Or at least a supicion.

         

         

         

         

          THE END.

         

Foxflesh

I must tell you of the time that I first came to the Clockhouse Mount - a year last Spring, I think it was, friend. Do you know the place? Yes, it's in the outer South London suberbs, in Surrey really, but you have to climb along a very long hill out of Cullesdon and when you get there, you see the Green, fronting a run-down parade of shops and, further over, the "Pail of Water". Mrs. Dobb, the landlady of the Pail, she knows all the gossip of the Mount. About the Sawdusts of Number 4 Rich Land: Jackie Sawdust once blew his nose, you know, in public view, he blew it so hard that he just stared into his handkerchief not knowing it was his brain wriggling there, he stared just a few moments, yep, before he dropped down dead. About the Clerkes of Long Land: their younger son was levanted by the Surrey press gangs for labour in far off spice fields. About the losers and the winners of the terrible family feuds. About this and about that...

There is a golf-course on one side, some other cul-de-sacs leading to small-holdings and desolate fields of staring horses, tangled woods and deadfalls, overgrown bomb-holes and the rusty discards of shortly forgotten squabbles. You know, they say that the clouds swag and belly heavier over the council roofs of Clockhouse Mount... and, as I plodded up, that day, in the hope of my first homely tankard at the Pail, large drops spattered from a previously clear sky. Even at noon, dusk was gathering itself and some laggard golfers were standing along the side of the road holding their clubs like spears, making funny faces beneath their tartan berets and wriggling their chequered trousers as if in some crazy fashion show. They would soon be off, no doubt, before the light had finally disappeared.

I looked across at the downbeat parade and saw that the shops had shut, not for lunch as I had thought, but because I, a stranger, had loomed up from Cullesdon and they feared what they considered to be my unwholesome custom. I shivered for had the Pail, too, locked its lounge and saloon doors? The locals were inside, apparently persuading Mrs. Dobb to let them have further illicit flagons of the home-made brew, as I forced an entry through an unoiled latch-door. The bobbled heads looked up, scowls muttering across their faces, and one signalled for me to sheer off.

"Dear Sackalive!" cried Mrs. Dobb, from behind the bar, a friendlier aspect indeed appearing to fleet across her countenance. "I didn't think you'd make it".

"By Cock!" I replied, banging my feet on the floor, "That was a long walk up from the town."

Meantime the locals gathered closer to me and one even fingered my turn-ups in some strange rite of inspection. I looked at the posters and the customary wall-scrawl, to see if this was indeed the day of the darts match that I had been promised. But, no - imagine my despondency, when I saw incomprehensible messages pertaining to a Wicca Meet, destined for that very night ... and further bills bearing such things I cannot now spell - Cuthloo, Shib-Shubbing in the snug, Yogger-Nogging in the saloon and, what was it, an outing at the weekend to the Goat of a Thousand Young for a turdle-eating competition.

I skipped pretty niftily from the pub, for, as they say, you shouldn't turn a heavy stone if something's moving it from underneath.

I ran ... but it was difficult, for what I had thought originally to be rain was in fact now great bulbs of bursting liquid cascading from, not clouds, but shifting, floating monsters in the sky. They extended and retracted, in turn, long arms of blackness, from several interlocked central bodies and, if I were religious, the nearest I could get to describing them would be a hell's brood, an overnourished confluxion of sky and foxflesh betokening the fall of old disgraced gods ... and several smaller versions were creeping over the brims of council roofs...

I ran ... but golfers and pub locals surrounded me. One, of the name Tokkmaster Clerke, as he later told me, wielded a massive rutted file, its frightful crenellations glinting in the flashing of the wings in the sky. I was held fast by one whose nose dripped as Tokkmaster moved the file across my skull. At first, my hair fell away in lumps and dropped to the ground, followed by my skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed, and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. My skull scrunched. My teeth were on edge, as the grating continued, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted. Fretted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and Kneaded.......

* * * *

I ill recall must of that but I live now with the Sawdusts of Clockhouse Mount, and they call me Jackie... They make me worship the great old gods of the Surrey Badlands and the Southern Mysteries... The top of my head is like the skin of cold stew, so I now always have to wear a hat: Mrs. Dobb made it, kindly, out of vinegar & brown paper... and the filing Clerke, he says he's my pal now.


Published 'Dagon' 1987