ODALISQUE by PF Jeffery (Chapter 4)

Chapter 4 - Departures 

 

Read by me today, Litnight 17th 2008 

 

We emerged on to the parade ground – packed with persons and slaves.  There was tumult of cheering and shouting – walking into which, from the quiet of the palace, felt like leaping into hot oil.  At first, I could see nothing but a confusing mass of bodies.  Neither slaves nor low born persons parted to make way for us. 

This is a bit like entering the novel itself!  Very cinematic in this chapter. Hitting all the senses. 

 

Two example snippets: 

It was now clear that several persons had been skewered by arrows – and a larger number trampled.  The slaughterhouse smell brought the taste of blood to my mouth, and then I was sick.  Vomit was added to the blood that already glued my blouse to the skin beneath.  In the increasingly rich blend of stinks, I now detected piss and shit. 

Slappa selected a large but unripe plum from a fruit bowl, tossing it above her head.  Her right arm and weapon became a blur of movement, the fruit landed neatly sliced in half, stone as well as flesh.  

 

Then the concept of canal pirates!!  

“How can there be a canal pirate?” Jenna asked.  She sounded irritated.  “Pirates at sea have plenty of room to escape the law, bandits on a road may take to the woods or hills, but where can a fugitive escape justice on a canal?”

  

 

Two possible typos I've noticed:

 

Nadine Next’s well discipline force

“Not basking our victory?”

 

   The author has kindly provided me these names for the months:  

Chillflurry (January)
Iceflake (February)
Windrush (March)
Drizzlemoon (April)
Cornsprout (May)
Litnight (June)
Glarehaze (July)
Thunderhead (August)
Swellbelly (September)
Mistream (October)
Dankfog (November)
Blinkday (December)

 

 

CHAPTER COMMENT LINKS: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

Wooden Box

 Published 'New Hope International' 1996

 

A death-rattle from behind him. The stumps had been ripped by the weird spin off the seam – and the batsman walked like a ghost with nothing left to haunt except the whites he wore. The thwacking thud of leathery grenade upon the thick edge of a willow paddle dug another run from the hard pitch a half an hour after the nex batsman’s stricken stride for strike. The turning pitch had, for once, failed to beath his guard, producing a fielder’s stifled squawk of leg before! The stump camera broadcast a magnified insect of back of bat’s wing, hinting at one more potential spectator of the next ball’s padding off. The leg-spinner had already taken the skin off his fingers as a result of his relentless bowl at the resistant forces of the opposition’s tail. He rubbed the stain off the dead ball to his inner thigh. The swing which the air wafted to and fro teased his blonde head-top as he prepared for yet one more incisive curling lob towards the crease. The stitched pod’s natural line diverted as it dizzied off the skimless rough – bruising straight past the dead bat into its wielder’s box – spoiling the lunch he was to have gnawed for eternity: the corpse with pads on.

The Forgotten Envelope

Collaboration with Anthea Holland

This is the last call for flight number …

Marcia tuned out the metallic voice. It wouldn't be her flight - she was going nowhere.

So what was she doing here at this metropolitan airport if she had nowhere to go?

It had seemed like a good idea when she had got up that morning - a trip to the airport where she could get caught up in the excitement of holiday-makers jetting off for places in the sun; could look on as friends and relatives greeted one another with hugs and smiles and tears; could have lunch in the restaurant where she could lap up the ambience - maybe some of the joy that those around her were feeling would rub off on her.

Instead, she had arrived bright and early to find people in evening dress milling round the bar. It was obviously the left-overs from a party the previous night and as she studied the dress-suited men and the women in peacock colours, she thought how seedy it all was. Hair-styles were awry; bow-ties lurched drunkenly; silks and satins were stained with food and red wine; and some of the stains down the men's trousers didn't bear thinking about.

In the corner one lone individual had given in to sleep, his head on his arms which were, in turn, on the beer-drenched table.

It must have been a good night, Marcia thought, if they wanted to carry it on into this morning. Haven't they got any homes to go to?

Then she wondered how long the bar had been closed. Facilities hereabouts were notoriously unpredictable: and--given the nature of time zones that often seemed to overlap at international Way Stations such as airports--one could sometimes catch a cocktail when most others were crunching through the fried bread of an early all-day breakfast.
Marcia knew, though, that these folk were several seasons past the binge. There was even mould growing on the dregs they hadn’t quite drained.

She heard the roar of the latest take-off as its undercarriage brushed the rooftop. More skyquake than thunderstorm. She cringed. After all, she had a phobia about flying (no wings, you see) and an almost equal phobia about the danger of those who did manage to fly crashing down upon her miraculously pinpointed position below. Why she came to airports then was a mystery. Someone once said, perhaps, that fears needed to be faced. And if not faced, scrambled.

Her brainstorming was interrupted by recognising one of the new-born down-and-outs in the bar as her ex the one before last.
He looked as though he had taken root in this God-forsaken place, had actually headed here straight after reaching "ex" status. Seeing him meant she could kill two birds with one stone - facing her fear of flying and of seeing Jake again.
She watched as his unfocussed eyes travelled around the waiting area. Saw how they passed over her then swivelled back as if not quite believing what he had seen. Probably, if some flicker of a brain-cell remained in his skull it was making some weird connection between her presence in the airport and the fact that her refusal to accompany him to far-off climes was the cause of their split.

He shook his head, befuddled, then, the remaining cell obviously deciding the connection was too wacky to consider further his gaze passed on, until his eyeballs rolled in his head and he passed out.

Well, she thought, she hadn't lost much there!

The man in the corner who had been sleeping off the drink suddenly woke up with a shout. None of the other left-overs took any notice of him, indeed, such was the roaring from the winged creatures overhead that it was only the fact that Marcia's attention was focussed on him that she realised he was shouting at all.

Suddenly one of the swollen birds flapped its wings and swooped down. A feeling inside the head rather than a tangible vision of reality. She watched one of the airport officials approaching her, clasping a narrow green envelope; seemingly so intent, he must be delivering (she believed) a summons or an injunction or notification of the lottery jackpot she’d always imagined she was in the process of winning. But how did whoever had instigated the delivery known she was to put in a random appearance at the airport? It wasn’t as if she had booked a ticket. She had told no one. She hadn’t herself decided to abide by the morning’s plans till the last minute’s alighting from the underground train.

The disarranged man in the corner was no longer in the corner. Still shouting, he intercepted the deliveryman, snatched the green envelope as if it were a baton in a relay race and skipped the rest of the way towards Marcia wielding it like a cross between a deadly disease and a religious icon. She then realised that he was yet another ex. One from trillions of years ago; almost her first date; now grown as old as the hills in her blouse.

“Derek, what you doing here?” she asked. It seemed the obvious line to play. Fitted the context. Sheer terror at being faced with all her exes at once, in a hung-over state, would have been the more obvious natural reaction. But she decided to stand and face whatever was panning out. Implausible and far-fetched as the long-haul repercussions were bound to become, she wanted to stone-wall till the bitter end.

“Marcia, may I say how beautiful you’ve remained,” said the uncornered man

Derek had been a bad start, at the best of times. Now she was convinced he had been a loser even before there had been nothing to win. Full of smarmy shit? Well, each corner of his eyeballs almost oozed earwigs of it.

"I'd rather you didn't," she said.

"Oh," he hung his head, abashed. Then he brightened. "This is for you." He thrust the green envelope in her hand.
She glanced at the name on the envelope.

"No it isn't. Look, it's completely the wrong name." She held the envelope and Derek peered myopically at it. Any brain cells he had left struggled to make sense of the beautiful copperplate writing.

"O-oh," he said finally. "That's not your name."

Marcia tutted exasperatedly. "Of course it's not, you fool."

"But … but …," he stammered, looking backwards and forwards between her and the delivery man who was still standing with his mouth open.

Marcia helped Derek out, some vestige remaining, perhaps of the affection he had once instilled in her.
"You thought it was for me," she said, because that guy over there seemed to be heading this way with it." She glanced behind her but there was nobody near her, nobody, at any rate, who looked as if they were expecting delivery of an artistically addressed envelope.

"The best thing you can do," Marcia said, pushing the letter back into Derek's limp hands, "Is to take the letter back where it came from."

They looked up together, but the delivery man had gone. Derek somehow knew that postboxes had their mouths open not through surprise or exasperation but a rictus of yearning desire for someone to make a collection down below. All those billets doux from sexy exes crammed to the mail’s rafters – and, on top of which, the Christmas rush had somehow started with every child in the land sending something to Satan and his reindeers via this one postbox.

The blistering sound of a jumped-up jet dispersed Marcia’s machinations of self-doubt--just another whining berserker coming closer and closer with each attempt at fresh disaster.

Jake and Derek were waddling across the concourse, arm in arm, aspiring to a fuller monty than they had managed the previous night, before the drink kicked in. No doubt, they were due to take off for some Spanish resort where they’d prove that the British could sport hairy buttocks, whatever the jungle.

Marcia cringed. Why had all her exes been such uncouth bastards. Many more exes were, by now, emerging from the airport drinks lounge, wide-eyed and legless. Some lacked arms. Discrete elbows like stick-insects. Some bodies were glued to the stools over which they’d found themselves lolling. Plum-voiced lushes lurching between bar and bog. Joe and George. Cecil and Grot. Puke and Podsmith. How many more would she remember? All venturing abroad to seek the sun and sangria she’d once shared with them in headier days. The bane of air stewardess and courier. Blousy and brass-necked. Here was come-uppance, as the tannoy respoke:

This is the last call for flight number 666.

It was like an x-rated movie, Marcia thought, with all these exes coming out of the woodwork. Then she remembered that it couldn't be - she wasn't an actress. Although she had to admit that her current profession did involve some acting but at least she wasn't required to have a lot of talent.

No, this was reality. The best she could hope was that no more of her exes would actually remember her; it could be embarrassing to have every Tom, Dick, Harry, Jake and Derek greeting her as one of their exes! They had recalled her face, certainly, but she had been through several incarnations during the years they had been apart and, strangely enough, at this very time was looking very much like the Marcia that had existed 10 years ago - save for the extra pleats in her skin.
She tried to stay low profile while watching the group of exes gather themselves together for the onslaught to whatever booze-and-bronze destination they had planned.

She peered myopically and searched through her memory banks. Ah, among them, yes, there was Pierre - she remembered him well - how could she forget? Still slim and neatly bummed, after all the intervening years. How could she have forgotten his nut brown eyes and the oak-knotted richness of his voice? He waved at her with a cheery smile, as if to say how could you have possibly relegated the likes of me to the ranks of your exes? He was the last to vanish and she thought she caught a tea-leaf sparkling at his eye, but no last message. She’d been a wilful lady in those far-off days of concertina liaisons. Too picky for her own good, even at half pace.

She watched the plane take-off. Off towards a raucous reunion of souls who’d never realised they’d enough in common ever to be able thus to reunite. A wing clipped an obstacle at the edge of the runway and the resultant ball of fire was too frightful to recall. In all the newspapers with literally countless dead. Many recriminations as to safety concerns. Even the pilot had taken an early binge, they’d say. Yet, Marcia, that fateful day, smiled as she saw a shadow shrug off the conflagration and soar, in the winged shape of death, heavenward: an echo from the past fixing the future good. A ghostly aeroplane that would fly the skies forever.

It was not her flight. She’d be going nowhere. For ever and ever, ah men.

Yorick
Chaos snatched me up and, before I could gather my bearings, dropped me amid a romance, a family row and, worst of all, a life I had been trying to avoid at all costs. I yearned for the return of that state of pre-embodiment with which many were satisfied for as long as eternity took. She welcomed me into the man’s body with a gentle squeeze of the hand, followed by a light kiss on the cheek. It was an instinctive reaction on her part, since she was unaware that I had not been possessor of her sweetheart’s body for as long as she had known it. Reluctant souls, like me, torn screaming from the substitute-bench of Fate are bound to provide a seamless transfer of responsibilities for those involved with the emotions of the receiving body. I thus returned the kiss. Surrogates of all shapes and sizes gathered around. These were, on a superficial level, relatives of the woman, who had arrived for our engagement party. However, I knew most of them as others of my kind. The individual, whose disguise as my future mother-in-law was wearing thin, winked an involuntary twitch of the cheek-muscles, perhaps, but one I took to be a romantic enticement to another actor such as me in a theatre called reality. Here, then, I had been landed with two romances: one dictated by the logic of a pair of human-beings ineluctably intended to be in love both mind and body - and the other romance generated in the shape of the foul old winking bird who was being surreptitiously spiritual behind the wrinkle-ringed eyes in her attempts to dupe Fate. I could not possibly reciprocate the latter, since the former was meant to be my whole preoccupation for the next few decades. Furthermore, the rest of the family members had begun arguing. They were picking at the carcass of a roast chicken, one that some had intended to save for tomorrow’s dinner, others to consume now at the party. It was a trivial row, yet with a high significance derived from the objective viewpoint of timescales far in excess of human comprehension — simply an extrapolation, a spoiling tactic, a diversion, a decoy, a wild goose chase of small talk since wild chickens were indeed rare. Ill-cooked, in any event - and I hoped that food-poisoning would rectify the few flinches from Fate now being rehearsed by such rogue spawndrift of Chaos. However, I suffered the abrupt realisation that I had not given my sweetheart an engagement ring. It was evidently expected of me, the climax of current proceedings, one that my predecessors had forgotten, either through the typical inefficiency of deputy souls who have no material or spiritual incentive to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s — or, more likely, sheer bloody-mindedness. More likely, of course, because, when minds bled, realignments inevitably ensued. And I ripped out the red-dripping wishbone and raised it like Yorick towards my smiling lips...

Published 'Weirdmonger's Tales' (Wyrd Press 1994)

Death Where Is Thy Sting?
It was a fat-barrelled fountain pen with a nib worth dying for. Not a Parker, not a Waterman, but a sweetly handleable embossed implement containing an ancient quill as its skeleton: a long core sprung against the nib’s base with its sharpened bony spindle reaching beyond the well of ink, while remaining clean by means of a filter or baffle towards the eye of the nib. The wielder of the pen aimed the cloven nib-end above his skin as if it were an antique tattooing device – soon to write an indelible phrase about an assumed indelible life. He had earlier fondled the cap as he unscrewed it from around the nib, unaware of the quill poised as a second fluted point to pounce out on a hair-trigger not only to enbed words into the skin but suck the same ink back in a gulp of self-syphoned poison. Poison letters from a poison pen. The double jab made him wince – one jab to inscribe, the other to proscribe. The words would remain for the rest of his days, so short-lived they must have been written with invisible ink: silently echoing the same words carved upon a hidden heart where the permanent ink was indistinguishable from its haemorrhaging message to nobody.



'A Work of Art' written the day after tomorrow HERE
'Seascape' HERE

Textbook of Green

 

 (published 'Arrows Of Desire' 1990)

 

I was murdered by my mummy and daddy.

The bars of the cot stretched up on either side of me and conjoined along the top like my own bones grown into a prison, shuddering in the candlef lame... a roofless prison, since the warders knew I could not fly or float.

I dream of a loose clutter of farm buildings where nobody seemed to work or live - or if they did, kept their curtains closed so that outsiders would pass through ignoring their presence. The trees and chimneystacks were picked out against a sky of mottled grey... the air’s sound peppered with birdsong and cockcrow. An orange volkswagen squats on splayed tyres in a pub car park. A red sign indicating Wem Ales are sold here - or were once sold when there existed real customers to buy and staff to cock the pumps.

If I were to live beyond childhood, I would one day visit such a place... and maybe understand the machinery of buildings and open space.

“He’s asleep.” I heard mummy’s voice, ever on the brink of hysteria.

“He sleeps too long. He never wakes us with squalls of hunger and pain. How can we obtain the fulfilment of parental duty and be disturbed from our beauty sleep to tend his cares... He is basically selfish.”

Daddy’s monotones were poised on an undercurrent of learned responses; he was hug-toeing a tightrope I had prepared for him by means of my listening mind.

Reincarnation reversed, I slept in the conscious coma of an intensive care ward. My future life flickered through me like the past, memories with no scaffolding of experience.

A ginger cat had scooted into the gravelly car park. It took one glance at me and disappeared with the flick of a tail. I merely saw it by the corner of my eye, but I thought it was probably the only real thing in the whole dream.

Dozing, undozing, I fleeted between the dream and the shimmering nursery. Two large faces rose above me, each with tears rilling their cheeks as if twin moons were oozing blood. I reached out with my tiny hand towards them in the guise of touching them back to health. But my fingernails, by their own volition, sharpened and jutted from their fleshy beds, a beast unsheathing its claws… wanting to leave its mark on reality.

Towards the end of the deserted car park, a swing jabbed with the freshening fitful wind, as if a ghost were mugging up on the art of childhood.

Mummy and daddy stirred me from the stupor of near birth, tickling my chest as they cooed in the nonsensical jargon of second childishness. I vowed to turn their tears to real blood, for not putting me to a final sleep.

And I wake cruelly into full middle acre in the foreign land of the future... where, somewhere, my own children await my return from a business trip, from a business I shall never in my own heart be able to master. My car, in which I sit, is parked alongside the Volkswagen and I prepare to drive towards a meeting which, according to my green diary in the glove compartment, I’d arranged. I wonder how I learned to drive... I badly need a refresher course. I riffle rapidly through the preprinted part of the diary... and finally reach the page of personal details where I find someone has written out my name, address and blood group.

On glimpsing up, two ribboned faces reflect in the windscreen and rearview mirror and curse me Orphan!

Simon Heman

 

(published 'Midnight in Hell' 1991)

The fire glowed amid the lizard-skinned ashes, as the youth with one earring knelt to warm his hands. It had been cold out and his mother had said it would yet be half an hour before tea was high enough to be served. This was an expression of Simon Heman’s mother, and he’d even stopped worrying that he never understood exactly what she meant.

His stonewashed jeans had such gaping designer rips at the knees, the lower half of the legs seemed to be hanging merely by a thread. He crouched in a half-kneeling position, to expose the parts where the heat would not normally have reached readily.

He’d left his motorbike leaning in the alleyway alongside the otherwise terraced house: not having it long, he was still worried that it was unsafe left out there in this less than desirable precinct of the city. The ‘L’ plate shone out luminously even after the street lighting flickered off in the late evening: red on white, like the jelly and cream his mother had served on his 18th birthday in just such a design, to celebrate his coming of age.

He put his hands closer to the fire: either because they were growing even colder at the extremities despite the heat or, as he really thought, the audibly crumbling firewood was losing all its ability to hold more than an ‘appethworth of warmth. There was a low, insidious grumbling within the chimney breast...which was a wind picking up at the back of the house, he assumed.

Then he suddenly thought the embers were glowing brighter: re-erupting worncasts of fire: his hands were floating like separate autonomous entities above the rising heat, so becomingly translucent, he could even have convinced himself that he was the angel his mother told her friends he really was.. .at heart.

With growing horror, he looked down at the knees shyly poking from the gaps in the jeans: like wedges of cut glass with a three-dimensional map of blood streams inside. He tried to persuade a hand to reach up to his face, but no amount of will-power could accomplish this amazing feat. Then, after he had given up all hope, the hand, of its own volition, swept to the top of his head...and a residue of feeling in the tips of his fingers told him that they were actually grasping a soft substance...and, as they squeezed it, his own mind seemed to flip and become madder by the second...

His mother came into the parlour where she’d laid the fire earlier in the afternoon. She dropped the tray of tea things which she had been carrying at shoulder height, extended in front of her like an offering at an altar. The clatter momentarily brought what used to be Simon Heman to just an ‘appethworth of consciousness...and he wondered fleetingly why his mother looked as if she’d just seen a ghost.

The motorbike haunted the alley, a red ‘D’, instead of an ‘L’, upon a white plate glowing at its bent mudguard. Mrs Hernan had always doubted the safety of such machines. Now, she knew for certain.

Fanblade Seven
Hiver Jawn cherished his father's bee-keeper's veil following the death of the child who was due to grow into Hiver Jawn's father.
A portrait kept by a ghost to commemorate another ghost straddles these potentialities of tangible existence destined to die prematurely before the portrait is painted. The likenesses were nevertheless perfect.
Parodices - the plural of paradox?
Too many things are singular.
Death, where are thy stings?
Is a fable that ends with a question honed purposively to its sharpest edge of fanblade, positively turned upon the lathe of didactic proverb, indeed finished?

All So Real
Published 'Atsatrohn' 1992

Maisie and Esme did not mourn their third sister for long, since children have short memories. For a time, though, in their touching innocence, they pitied God having to look after such a mischievous imp.

In their really young days, all three had shared a double bed which was - now that their bodies were filling out - only fitting for two. Their mother scolded them if they ate too much, for she took reckon of the mattress springs, and money was spent all too easily on such creature comforts.

It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that the lights were kept dim which - with the grime building up on the nursery window - meant that the two remaining sisters had to pour over their improvement books with reddening eyes. As compensation, their mother allowed a tiny light to flicker at the depth of night. Esme preferred it that way. Maisie thought it made it more frightening, for the shadows moved piecemeal across the cracked ceiling, the rocking horse travelled from child to child across the generations of its past, and she even imagined the ghosts of wings entangled in her butterfly net leaning against the wall.

In those days, hunger could act as soporific so, before long, even Maisie was snoring, with only dreams to fear.

As time waxed, the girls grew older, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the meagreness of their condition. Esme eventually caught a cold from the years of suffering Maisie's nightly nervous tugging the bedcovers off her. It would be hard-hearted to blame Maisie, but there was no doubt that her actions resulted in Esme travelling the full distance from a sniffle to influenza through fevers building upon fevers to those body-wrenching nights when Maisie was moved from her heaving side to the mother's room. She recalled listening to Esme's rhythmic screeching lungs even a corridor away ...

Then Esme dies, as the previous sister had done.

The family doctor pronounced her gone, the faint heart having given up the ghost after finally fluttering for just a few breathtaking seconds beyond death itself.
Mother shed a few tears, but then took her business-like control of affairs. She allowed Maisie a short while with her dead sister, to say goodbye. That was the way things were done since even soft-heartedness must be recognised, if but briefly.

The nursery had the usual night lamp beside the bed, making ripples down the rhyming walls. Esme, if one can call a dead girl by her name, was resting in carved repose, no longer concerned about the scarcity of covers on her side of the bed. Her hands had been positioned in prayer, as she used to do as a child at the end of the school day, like a closed fleshy moth. Her near womanly face was composed, peaceful, forgiving.

Maisie was scared. She had been too young to appreciate the significance of death, when the other sister had departed. Now, it was the shock of stillness.

Abruptly, the corpse that had been Esme sat bolt upright in the bed, hands still poised, its shadow shuddering in the shape-shifting gloom. Even the rocking horse ceased its light prance of pretence.

The corpse's words hissed out: "I can't go away, since God for some reason won't let me come to Him. And I am SO tired. Help me, Maisie, please help me. Your dear little Esme must go where she can truly rest."

Maisie replied as if to herself: "This must be a dream. I will wake up in a moment, as I always do from dreams ..."

Esme's voice answered, bristling with aggravation: "It may only be a dream to you, dearest Maisie, but it's oh so horribly real to me. Think on that."


And, thus, the curtains close on yet another episode in that shadowy timeless world between birth and death. It will never be known how it ends, for another more pressing cycle of existence is starting in a different quarter of misspent reality.

But it seemed all so real at the time

The Miser

 

 (published 'The Edge' 1989 )

He sat counting his money, placing the coins of each denomination in a neat pile. Their minting was so recent they gleamed in the meagre candlelight. A bead of body fluid dangled at each nostril and at the corners of his mouth as if frozen in time, hinting that he was but a corpse in unseasonable motion.



A sudden knocking at the door, fit to wake the whole house, increased the waxflame's flicker. His eyes, startled wide, were like two stoking holes freshly opened upon the fires of Hell. He swept the coins into the artfully hidden drawer under the tabletop as hastily as silence would permit.



]'Who is it?' His voice was more in the nature of tree bark than sound.



'It's me, Father.'



'Go away!' The look of scorn would have been too much for even a corpse's face to bear, the reputation of which for cold-heartedness is well known.



'No, listen, Father. Please let me in. Mother's come back - she's here with me.'



The head turned, but the wrinkled stack of his neck remained unmoved. Bones, somewhere deep inside his skull, cracked, as thoughts took unbidden shapes.



'But, your mother's dead.'



These words were spoken with an awed hush, each syllable spelled out in spittle. New glistening beads formed at the corners of his eyes - whether these were overflows from the rush-hour in his nasal ducts or genuine signs of remorse nobody, even he, could tell.



Somewhere at the back of his mind he feared he would have to give all of the money back to the insurance company. Nevertheless, he let the ghosts in....