Chip had made a mental note of the car’s registration number, which was not too difficult, seeing that he possessed a photographic memory. He had seen it mow down a zebra-crossing full of schoolkids and imagined the carnage, if it had actually hit. Later, as the cinema reduced in noise, the credits of the main feature slowly scrolled. Chip was cramped behind a tall misshapen head which bobbed about to gain a clear view between further obstructions further beyond. Even the long-beamed torch that sporadically dodged its path of light towards the emptier seats at the front failed to pry into the nature of various obstructions. Chip wondered why the flapdown seats were not more tiered than they were. He returned his attention to his steady who was beginning to wipe off her lipstick. He was not self-conscious about snogging, since they had their backs to the usherette’s partition, so no patrons could complain of Chip and his steady coming together in front of the screen. People were arriving all the time, others leaving. Many had already departed amid the throes of this B film - maybe the point in the film when they had first come in. Chip failed to understand how they were able to enjoy a film back to front, as it were. He yearned for the Single Performance days of an intangible future, beyond the Sixties, when everyday colour would be more common. But why should it matter? Especially when one wasn’t here for the films in the first place. Chip felt a hand upon his knee, sending a tingle to every extremity. Puckering his lips, he took one last longing look at the black-and-white screenful of images - noticing that the patrons immediately in front were now much lower in their seats, eyes in the backs of their heads, or so he thought in a moment of misplaced paranoia. Yet he could not be sure, since the main feature film was light-faded. He vaguely remembered (as far as a photographic memory can remember vaguely) a poster outside - and some framed stills of dark shots. Wondering why such things were put outside (for they could only serve to deter), he shut his own eyes and waited for the hand to travel from his knee, before he gave himself over to a heavy session of petting... A sudden screech and bloodcurdling squeals sounded from outside, during the quiet romantic moments of the film with the actors half-asleep. Chip quickly untangled himself from the tentacles of snogging and dashed, via the foyer, into the street. His eyeballs were seared by the as ever unexpected daylight. This was where he remembered having come in. But now in colour - and more than real. Hit and run.

(published 'Atsatrohn' 1993)

 

Rhona felt the chill of the rilling moonbeams as she pushed the sash-window with a painful grind. She closed the floral curtains. She should never have left the bed, should she? Yet she could not get her teeth low enough for the food otherwise. Matron was sure to scold her. She felt tainted by the moon, as if she were a vixen who had just eaten its young. She managed to retrieve her note-book from under the remains of her meal and sucked the business end of a red biro...

A typical seaside town, one slightly posher than the run-of-the-mill versions further along the coast. My only visit was on the occasion of a carnival, an evening of lighted candles in the park and a fancy-dress parade on the pier. The sea attracted me most, however, where the orange and turquoise dusks were a sight to behold, with merely a hint of breeze - and, once upon the cliff, looking down at the strollers on the prom, I thought that the whole world's history had led to this one point in time. The past and, indeed, the future only existed to frame this single moment: and, closing my eyes with a sigh of lashes, I sucked deep of the sea air. My troubles gradually dissipated with each breath.

But all good things have their ending built in.

I have always considered myself to be part animal, part angel - the combination that made Rhona. I wore clothes that did no justice to the shape within, sported heavy cosmetics which my face did not need and concealed my lights under such spectacles which would not have been fashionable even ten years before.

Imagine my surprise when I sensed a stranger within my body's territory, just as I was finishing my clumsy nirvana. I looked up at met the eyes of a woman scarcely out of girlhood. She smiled and then lowered her head slightly as if expecting me to strike up a conversation after her first move. She was dressed in a grey corduroy skirt, ending just below her knees, a half-length cagoule - which surprised me as there had been no sign of rain for days - and high heels that must have meant a difficult climb to this point on the cliff.

She spoke, evidently having surrendered any hope of me taking the initiative: "There are not too many evenings like this..."

I nodded but still could not bring myself to speak, since this intriguing encounter had been too sudden by half, too soon in the scheme of things. Rhona was not ready for such attentions from one of her own sex.

The other woman continued: "When winter winds loudly howl in chimneys, I dream of evenings like this. The sky could not be more perfect, don't you think, makes you want to be in contact with anybody who is near..."

I found myself studying her face, believing that the dipping sun was hiding my stare by shining off my glasses. She was no doubt all angel: skin luminescent and features finely modelled beneath a coiling sprig of dark hair at which the sea breeze gently tugged. And such mild eyes, belying her outspoken manner to a complete stranger such as Rhona.

She wore her soul upon her pretty face.

I broke from my prison of silence at last: "I do not know his name, but that author who wrote 'only connect...' was right."

She shook her head violently: "The author was a fool, then!"

And she raised the cagoule, to reveal - not the pert girlish bosom I expected nor the lace-trimmed brassiere she ought to have worn. Where nipples should have been were the wriggling ends of blind but evidently malign cancers still germinating from within the body's incubator and striving to close the circle of their disease like a snake in search of its own venomous tail.

I closed my eyes - in one moment of horror and grief and compassion and, even, guilt.

I opened them. She was gone of course. A damp grey mist encroached upon the sea and, eventually, upon Rhona. A solitary war plane droned and juddered in the distance. I set off to return to my hotel, in the desperate hope I would pass a chapel where I could light a candle in her memory. Not a carnival candle, but a holy one. The fact that she never existed did not seem to matter. But, by the time I reached the prom and walked amongst those late strollers with dogs and spouses, I had forgotten her.

Rhona stared at the red biro, shaking her head at the careless way it had been manufactured. It blotched ink everywhere.

The parlour was frankly too full of my knick-knacks. Too chintzy by half. But I enjoyed my parlour more than I enjoyed anything. Merely the plain sitting in the wing armchair with knitting-needles clacking among my fingers. Or embroidering fresh antimacassars for my still dark hair to rest upon. Or simply listening to the Home Service on the wireless, at such an ungenerous volume I could hardly make out the words of the bespoke announcers; only the chimes of Big Ben marking the top of important hours were sufficient to break the autonomy of the relentless clock's ticking from its carriage on the marble mantelpiece. Rhona, if past her prime, was at peace at last.

Noises in the road outside were far and few between. The heavy velvetine curtains, which I preferred drawn tantalisingly close, particularly on purling moonlit nights, muffled any extraneous outburst from the soap-cart kids who often used my pavement as their race track. A motor scooter or bubble car back-firing was bearable ... just. But when the dust-carts arrived, I sat in ear-muffs, staring blankly at the wireless. I rather resented these rough and ready men clattering uncouthly along the otherwise rather select road ... because I prided myself on never putting out any rubbish for them to collect. Rhona, you see, was not a rubbish sort of person.

There was one particular person I recalled, who permeated my day-dreams. Charlie whom I had almost loved. A person of the breed Mysterious Man: who wore made-to-measure suits, with trousers specially for a gent who "dressed to the right", as the tape-worm of a tailor had once sneered out loud whilst measuring Charlie ... in my presence!

You see, I was a lady who always wore high-fashion gloves whatever the occasion and, for me, Mysterious Man's attraction was the heady smell of after-shave, the jar of Brylcreem, even the cakey cylinder of Erasmic left suggestively at the edge of the wash basin. I did not want to delve deeper into other more dubious activities nor know more than was good for me about his private areas.

So, I pushed Charlie out of my life. All because of a chance remark made by a bespoke tailor about some intimacy of a crutch-panel lining. Life's too short not to have standards.

The parlour was an audible game of Pick-a-Stix, as my needles competed with the clock. A ready-laid fire in the grate asked for lighting, its ruffled tongues of yesterday's Daily Telegraph showing from below the meticulously arranged firewood. I was willing to shiver rather than start a flame just for their benefit. I feared it may remind me of what I had stuffed up the chimney...

Despite the whining of winter winds, the soap-carts trundled outside, kept in queue by the gutters. Those kids should soon be off for their high tea. Meantime, their otherwise shrill voices were deadened by the curtains - as I hoped would be the incessant peep-peep of the dust-cart's reversing.

Rhona stared at the blots on the paper and wondered if there would be enough ink to complete the story. It would be a shame to waste omniscience. After all, there were few leaks in certainty. And even fewer floods in moonstreams.

The Old People's Home was set back a little from the road, up a winding path between some bushes that had evidently been scorched by an out-of-control bonfire in the recent past. I took him around the grounds and even laughed when he said it looked as if they must have had a pretty wild fireworks party that November. Now being December, the undertent of the sky hung browny grey: soon, all would be blunted by snow.

I was not exactly ancient. However, senility was now particularly prevalent in those of my sex. Scientists said it was a disease; others, less tactful, said it must be as a result of women leaving the shelter of the family home and trying to go out to work like their menfolk.

My visitor was in fact older than myself. He was rather gratified to see how well I looked, compared to what he had imagined. It was not as if I had lost all my faculties but he must have felt the saddest part was when I called him by my late father's name.

We strolled, arm in arm, towards the large double-doors of the Home's entrance. He felt the spattering upon the back of his neck and, unaccountably, he began to dwell upon a memory of one of those rare white Christmases as a younger man. I was then a mere slip of a girl, with pigtails which I often tied together across my flat chest. I became excited about the Christmas Tree and its topmost angel. He used to give me rides upon his knee.

This memory made him cry, but he concealed it from me as best he could. He guessed I could see it in his eyes. In fact, he wondered whether I recalled those old days, when he used to be invited along to all major family occasions as a vestigial uncle figure. I smiled, as we walked into the relative warmth of the Home.

He tried to keep his eyes on me, so as to avoid seeing the other inmates nodding silently to each other from their armchair rafts. The large television in the corner had a flickering image but no sound, and many of the residents stared back at it, glassily. They thought it was the Light Programme.

I still maintained my figure and a certain dress sense: although this may be the credit of the Home's service. Whatever the cause, I was still a woman at whom people could not help looking twice if they saw me walking the streets - which, of course, I never did. The skirt-length hung in tantalising pleats and folds, with a tuck-ribbon fastened at bottom-back, just above the closely-carved ankles. My bosom and hips were graciously shapeful, if I may say so, the neck revealing the positions of the slender bones, the cheekbones high. Despite Rhona's dimming eyes, the onsetting weather had not blunted her figure.

I looked round at him once and then joined the ranks of the armchair brigade, to nod away the rest of the evening before going to bed. In that one short glance, he must have read a sort of farewell which, despite its vagueness, plumbed to his tormented depths of self-delusion ... hinting in my own half-wit fashion that I still recognised the obsession in his soul ... for me. I suppose I blamed him for my present troubles. Something in the past hung in the air between us, something mostly forgotten. It was as if I felt his hands on my budding breasts, even now. He knew it would be pointless to try to convince me of his innocence.

Having come to the conclusion that my mild eyes had not said anything at all in that last moment in the Home, he left without even giving his regards to the Matron in charge.

Outside, the tears no doubt turned to snow upon his cheeks, as, increasingly desperate, he looked for his car. You see, Rhona narrated parts of the story she didn't even know. Women have more instinct, which even senility cannot change - or which senility actually engendered. In fact, there was a wondrous wisdom about women like Rhona.

When she had finished writing, there was ink upon her mouth like smudged lipstick. There were rodent ulcers travelling from the roof of her mouth to the bottom of the throat. She glided to the bedroom window and selflessly drew back the floral curtains. It was a turquoise summer evening, between dusk and darkness. She felt drained by the gurgling moon but happy that death was to rid her of all the pains at last. She looked down at her lap. She must have eaten her own breasts. Only puddingy tatters remained and one scabby nipple...

Strangely, despite the change to calm weather, the wind in the chimney howled in agony.

(published 'Ah Pook Was Here' 1994)