Misanthropy-on-the-Naze

(revised version)

  

"Be it with a careless whisper or a deliberate shout, I want you to tell me a secret.  The sooner and the secreter the better." 

 

            Arthur had spoken and Gwenda replied:

 

            "If it's a secret, I ought not to shout it—nor whisper it, for that matter, in case you don't hear it properly."

 

            They had done their utmost to ensure not being overheard by third parties—sitting, as they did, on a park bench, in the guise of a couple of conspiring spies, with a combined all-round vision of anybody approaching them.  The nearest sign of human life was a trio of children some distance away playing a seemingly crazy game of hide-and-seek out in the open park, with not one hiding-place in easy reach.  A little girl had her two palms tightly pressed against her eyes which, thought Arthur with uncharacteristic obliquity, gave the impression that she prayed to a flat God from an even flatter Earth.  He laughed at the childish antics.  The girl was counting numbers, no doubt—whilst the two older boys flattened themselves into the ground nearby, in the presumably bizarre hope that the grass-blades would conceal them.

 

            Gwenda regained Arthur's attention: "Didn't you hear me?"

 

            "Yes, yes, I heard you allright."  He laughed at the paradox.  "Say it how you like, it's all the same to me."

 

            "I'm blind and I really only cared for one of those boys," said Gwenda, amid a tinge of tears, with only a slight nod towards audibility and the now empty park.

 

            Two secrets for the price of one, thought Arthur, as he and Gwenda rose from the bench and separated—both of them confused as to codes as well as requitals, but knowing that only the past had spies.

   

Gwenda Urquhart became a woman who thought she knew everything about everything.  But she knew nothing about imagination.  Either things were or things weren’t.  Yet, eventually, she was to discover that between the “either” and the “or” was a space large enough to hold a whole ocean of things that neither were nor weren’t.

 

            She did not start life as a blind woman and  was not strikingly pretty, though it is not too far beyond the bounds of belief that she was once passably attractive when she finally left the school that had been the whole of her life up to the age of 14.  Her headmaster—and only the memories of some of the ex-pupils who attended that school (none of whom Arthur had been able to track down) would be able to remember his name—patted her on the head and said: “Gwenda, one day, I have no doubt...” (but he did have some doubt, as all have who say “no doubt”) “...but, Gwenda, always remember your old headmaster’s advice, beware of easy virtue as there is many an evil man who would do anything to catch a sight of your unclothed bosom—spurn them, I say, give them no truck, and if they only want to feel them through your clothes, I have no doubt that you will give them the edge of your tongue and the look of your old-fashioned eyes...” (and at this point the headmaster stared up at the ceiling) “...and may Our saviour Lord Who looks ever upon His flock and about Whom we have spent all our time at this school teaching you, may He cast plagues upon those who accost you in such an unseemly, unsavoury manner...”

 

            Gwenda Maybury (as she was then known) did not reply.  But as she ironed her aprons, come her sightless years, she unaccountably recalled that interview, so strange in retrospect.  She also recalled a whole ocean of other things that queued up for recalling.   For example, Misanthropy-On-The-Naze.  She had by then become dim of vision, but still seeing things like asides from migraine.  The flashing coloured lights wheeler-dealed across the upright displays, further engendering misplaced hope by giving the punter the chance to tug the forelock of fate with the small mercy of manipulating a bagatelle's two-timing “flippers” at each side, returning silver balls into a whole new campaign of cascading and tricksy shenanigans: accumulating points towards an illimitable target, the biggest number you can contemplate, the size of which only God (and perhaps the owner of Misanhropy's amusement arcade) was aware.

   

But, now, the arcade is shuttered, the sea-front deserted and the heaving of autumn seas edging nearer to overflow, as the council cart, with a revolving pulse, yellows the night from its cabin roof.  It’s touring the streets, with its bewhiskered paddlewheels churning up the gutters, freeing them from the sludge and detritus of summer: discarded buckets, sandcastle unionjacks, rude hats, regurgitated fish-and-chip suppers, mutant condoms fingering out into spider shapes, crystallised candyfloss like sea-creatures’ abortions, tangled strings which once belonged to glove-puppets and soggy saucy postcards scrawled over with undelivered wish-you-were-heres picturing enormous bums, even bigger boobs, triple entendres, bulging pouches and tiny aprons.  Gwenda’s craft of life had often hit reefs since leaving school and had been sunk to the bottom, where other eye-putrid fish-heads, such as she was fast becoming, drifted and dangled where the tides took them, in and out of the darkest sea-caves of desolation and dissolution.  She rubbed hard with the edge of the iron to remove a particularly stubborn crease her fingers felt, but her mind was elsewhere.  If she actually thought about what she was doing, she would no doubt not do it at all: probably true of all women who end up ironing heavy-duty aprons only so that they can wear them.

 

           

 

Blocks of breeze took the wind from Arthur's sails.  Yet allow Arthur to start from the beginning, as opposed to the end or even to an undistributed middle.  He ate his heart out over Gwenda from the day he first met her.  She swayed into his life, a pirate brig flying a skull and crossbones, dressed to murder, a warpainted figure from all his déjà-vu dreams.  As thin as a rake, her hard edges were indeed plain to see, yet revealing a heart of beaten gold along with all the sheer-nylon bravado and false economies of self-confidence.  Yet none of it made sense at the end of the day.  Why would someone like Gwenda take even the slightest notice of Arthur?  He supposes the answer did lie in the unanswerable realms beyond death's hymen.  In other words (for surely these can't be the only ones), she anchored herself in his soul's seabed—having an intimation that he was immortal ... and, thus blended in bliss, her faith was grounded in his.  She was a virgin and he was not man enough to dismantle her.  Their affair was so Platonic, they conducted Socratic dialogues with others of like mind.  There was, of course, many in the current world who eschewed the physical sides of themselves—a sign of the times stemming from anxiety rather than spirituality.  They formed circles, merely hand-in-hand at metaphor's diktat, oscillating without osculation, simply celebrating the cerebral passions, screwing minds without bodies.  Arthur and Gwenda were pure thought, an ecstasy of self, onanism made manifold. 

 

 

 

The men in Gwenda's life had been many and various, Arthur included.  One had led her to a city (far from the seaside she was born), a city she previously didn’t know existed, where fire escapes were bent and twisted into painful sculptures around living ghosts of those that once had failed to climb down them in time.  Another took her back to the seaside—and on the pier she played bingo and, come winter, when it was all boarded up, she took herself along the prom, seeking out those men of whom her headmaster had once warned her. 

   

Outside Misanthropy’s Hotel Despond, there stands two men, once, no doubt, holiday-makers, but now deserters from overdue homecomings and from the inevitable return to the treadmill that keeps their families in Sunday dinners and the annual visit to the seaside.  Towards the top of the hotel, the electric sign still flashes on and off, certain of its letters missing.  It fills the street with an intermittent red haze, illuminating the men’s faces, revealing their stone expressions and surly resignation.  One of them curls his lips as he takes another drag from his last cigarette of the season, and says:

 

            “They’ll be battening down in Misericordia, by now...”

 

            A third man called Mr Urquhart has now approached them and, in the weaving lights from either the hotel sign or from the sweep cart or from neither, he can be recognised as one of those accessories to the End-Of-The-Pier-Show which every night during the summer, entertained the pre-bingo audience ... with clattering joanna or punch-drunk puppets or cheap talent competition or all three.  This man was the ventriloquist, a semi-professional, who spends the rest of the year working for the council on the sweep carts.  His mouth does not move as he speaks:

 

            “It gets me through the endless winter here in Misanthropy-On-The-Naze, dreaming of all the hot summer fun we had, you know.  Do you remember Ol’ Ma Manning?  She showed her knickers twice a week, for a free go on the bingo.  There were numbers all over them, all the sixes, clickety-click, seventy-six, sunset strip, hangman’s noose, Blind Nine...”

 

            The other men nod, but do not listen, for they are preoccupied with the dirty weather that is now threatening to come in off the sea.  They wish they were back in Misericordia or Parsimony, further inland, where their children, even now, stare into the night, wondering when their daddies will come home; their mummies have told them that their daddies are still on holiday; perhaps the silly buggers have one more End-Of-The-Pier-Show to enjoy, the last of the season and, then, will creep home, heads bent, to the duties to which all men must face up. 

   

One of Gwenda’s past lovers (if ‘lovers’ is not too kind to describe those to whom Arthur later referred) had a way about him that distinguished him from the others.  With eyes like dark pools, he caught her on his hook, line and sinker and showed her what else lurked along the sea-bed of his soul.  The next lover had no soul at all, but what he had instead was nothing of which Our Saviour Lord could have knowledge, she thought, for he had sucking sides and utter emptiness.  And many other lovers, each different from the next, but each hating her to the same extent as loving her.

 

            Then, one day (exactly when I’m not certain), there came Mr Urquhart, whose soul was even emptier than the one with sucking sides.  But, first: she left the seaside town because she could no longer stand the stench of blind fish.  She bid farewell to the men she’d known one by one and, naturally, there were a few words of recrimination and a thousand if-onlys.  She played her last game of bingo, which turned out to be her first win.  A cuddly teddy bear, one which she immediately named after her late headmaster, was passed over to her with a few souvenir beer bottletops (that were used to cover the bingo numbers called).  Thrusting it into her bosom, she fled with ne’er a backward dim glance at the coming of winter’s sweeping. 

   

Urquhart, Winter's ex-ventriloquist, has taken out his dummy and the rain drips down its yellow plastic face.  A gottle of geer, who wants a gottle of geer.  The two other men, bemused, disappear into the public convenience nearby which, by tomorrow, will be the last facility to be barred up for the off-season.  One more night of relative comfort in the cubicles, one more night before decisions need to be made.  The council cart is returning on the opposite side of the street, a lightship floating across the shimmering, swelling puddles; it will pick up the ex-ventriloquist at the corner of Litany Street.  He listens to the rumpus coming from the end of the pier.  The fat woman is playing a Russ Conway medley, the gap-toothed sit-down comedian is telling third generation ma-in-law jokes, Ol’ Ma Manning is getting all eager in her seat waiting for her big moment, the audience is clapping half-heartedly, for they’re only there for the bingo. 

   

Gwenda, one day, told Arthur she needed to fall and rise in love with another—and would he, could he possibly unsnag her ankh from his angst?  He looked as askance as someone without a face was able.  Would, could any potential lover possibly offer the same degree of immortality as oneself?  She shrugged without shoulders, laughed with tears in her blind sockets, scowling out rips in her face.  Love was evidently to outweigh life for Gwenda.  She was now of an age when her various sightless instincts wanted a child of their own, embodied by her body, crafted in her humous halls.  Such consummation elsewhere implied Arthur’s abandonment, a pluckless pizzicato upon staccato seas, tacking the empty waves of chance, voyaging the vasculature, cresting the cruciform crescents and breasting the breeze blocks to find his mooring and his berth.  Yet an end entails its own endlessness, whilst middles and meanings are nothing if not metaphors.  The only hope is that the Child is Father of the Man and can ease ankylosis in angel-fish.

   

Gwenda tramps to the edge of the seaside town where she hitches a lift back to the city ... and he who picks her up on that fateful night is none other than Urquhart (dramatic inicidental music)...

 

            Urquhart is not going to any particular city but he takes her the whole way, writes a farewell letter to whom he calls a tiny girl friend somewhere on the south coast and sets up home with Gwenda soon-to-be-Urquhart.  But, today, Urquhart has a secret: a secret of which even now his wife is unaware and he himself does not fully comprehend it.  Like all ventriloquists, he does not exist.  He never existed.  And he never will.  She did not guess for he acted quite normally, bringing in a goodly wage by selling policies to the dying, filling her bed with fishy farts, teasing her up with his timely foreplay, widening out her defences (which were still spinsterish despite her many seaside lovers), entering her mouth with his searching tongues, splicing the mainbrace of her innards, dreaming of her, making her blind eyes dream of him, and all manner of such devices to make her believe that he was as real as the next man.  The seas are becoming heavier now like an army commissioned as an impatient vanguard of winter.  The ex-ventriloquist speaks quietly, but the storm is growing steadily so noisy that he can hardly hear himself:

 

            “There’s nothing special about the sea.  That’s where we all originally came from, after all.”

 

            And, as if hypnotised by the mind-reading act that he always had to follow on to the stage, he strides along the boardwalk planks that creak in the wind.  Between their gaps, he can see black boiling pools revolving within each other.  Through the useless turnstile, towards the darkened theatre, he is counting backwards from the biggest number he can contemplate ... and his dummy leads the way, on short stumpy legs.  Either Gwenda was a fool or she cared not at all whether Urquhart existed or she cared even less whether she herself existed ... or tickling her teddy bear into fits of telling laughter or seeing her headmaster in bed with her tut-tutting between her breasts or Urquhart becoming, if nothing else, a short-arse vision of Her Saviour Lord. 

   

The landscape was ink-blotted with the shadow flocks as they migrated against the seasons: a shifting archipelago of silhouettes traversing the undulants of beach.  Yet it was a beach without a noticeable sea.  Gwenda flicked her sweat in all directions with a tattered face-cloth as if that action alone could create residues of loose slime tantamount to a pond if not such a sea.  She laughed at her own fantasies.  There were enough autonomous fantasies on this trek to keep a thousand writers going for a thousand winters, so no need for her faltering attempts at waywardness and daydream.  Indeed, the sun had burnt itself into one huge orange furnace—its only margin being the horizon.  Each clutch of shadow-casters was frazzled before finding impulse enough to find its own shade.  The migrations were simply another version of holocaust and diaspora.  She had left the park at Noon and left, too, those who played hide-and-seek between her ingrowing shadows—Noon being the worst possible time for transporting a human body.

   

Gwenda was indeed a fool to believe either things were or things weren’t.  Either that or she herself had gone, never-to-have-been—leaving the empty apron on some kitchen floor.  No strings attached. 

   

 She knew she died (for what else is blindness?) and if she didn't hurry she would miss the actual death.  So life was risked just for the sake of her death.  She shrugged.  Life was funny like that.  So having already laughed, she relaughed.   Better than shrugging.  Less muscles involved.  And minimal was best, at this time of day.  Last night there had been a real dream in which a monster had exercised its parasitic droit de seigneur: a dream so unlike the open-hearted dreams that beset dreamers in the plains: a dream so real it had borne the message which instigated today's ordeal.  Not that she died, perhaps, but was to give birth.  Or, at least, the message was a surrogate message, the ordeal itself being the true message.  Death or life.  Pain or ecstasy.  Whichever the message, her lot was confinement amid the sealess strands: beneath a sun that was merciless to everything including itself: a skyful of sun—all this to be followed, the message said, by a gnawful of vultures breaking their way out through her stomach-wall, sucking her gristle as they went, without recourse to an easier exit from the uterine underworld.  And once their appetite had been assuaged they might just peck out her useless eyes and become one more black island of wings revolving thirstily above the breaking waters of sand.  She shrugged.  The monster had Arthur Urquhart’s name. She reshrugged.  Such raising of the shoulders in a moment of resignation at least fended off any message of death.  Yet only if they came down again to finish the shrug.

   

In Misanthropy-on-the-Naze, someone or other threw the switch on the Hotel Despond’s sign and, punch drunk, went to bed for the winter.  The council workers locked up the supposedly empty public convenience, one night earlier than normal, got back on board the sweep cart and drove it further inland, its yellow pulse gradually withdrawing its reflections from the empty sea. 

   

The secretest secret of them all was that there had only been one man in her life and he had cared for her even more than blindness deserved, mimicking all the types of man (from kind to nasty) that any ventiloquist could encompass.  The most he ever managed was to feel the beginnings of her bosom through a starched apron.   The deepst reef of them all.

        

 

All positions rolling
All positions rolling, all positions filled:
Whether bones fit flesh or flesh dress bones,
Whether stars wear stones or stones be stars,
They said I wasn’t suited.
The bare effrontery of space!
Yet, as sadly said, ostensibly filled.

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.