Published 'Alternaties' 1994 “There’s nothing spooky about people who tell spooky stories.”
You could have fooled me, I nearly replied. The man, who was a little the worse for wear from drink, stared at me. In any event, we both leaned closer to the roaring fire—and even the man seemed to be listening to his own stories for the first time. There was something hypnotic about his intoning words which caused no further need of preamble—and, indeed, there had been next to no scene-setting at all, bar the fire, so his were effectively the only stories—ones that did not need speech to mark the tolerances of the listener’s belief nor vocal clues as to the suspension of routine reality.
He simply told about ghosts, or rather about one ghost, or possibly none, except there seemed to be at least two ghosts at the time. There were, of course, many ghosts around that roaring fire—situated in what at first gave the appearance of being a bar in a pub, somewhere in the city. There was the sound of heavy traffic in the distance together with the sporadic war-chants of newspaper-sellers. There were no customers, or none to speak of. The joint was shut, but just about to open, judging by the height of the fire. The spirit bottles gleamed darkly above their optics.
The noise of the bar-staff gathered off-stage. And the souls of dead regulars held forth with crazy pub taik, even crazier than when they were alive—except it was now less than silence (the only way to tell it).
But stories have to be about some¬thing, with plottable moments and degrees of suspense derived from character or situation. I feared them devoid of all such inter¬ests. The only possible interest was in won¬dering how a story could actually continue without any interest, except perhaps for the potential revelations which uneventfulness often bred: romance, mystery or conspiracy upon the brink of resolution.
The flames of the fire spoke spooks louder than thoughts, with irritated crack¬les and ambitious armies of sparks marching up the chimney like deaths in the making.
I had indeed been part of a romance that once set this pub alight, but I died during the long drawn-out kiss, wrapped in the arms of a drunk man whom I had loved before he became drunk. Perhaps it was me who made him get drunk. There was very little to differentiate guzzlers from ghosts. Both with too much spirit. Yes, spirit, since I had an emptiness in the heart and glinting dark tears of such spirit at the invisible eyes. Bottled out of spooking, so to speak.
And so slowly spake the stories, those dreams without a dreamer.
He went in one end, knowing it was not going to be an easy ride on the ghost train, but at the other, as he came out into the daylight, blinking like mad, it had been worse than his worst fears. Even worse though was when he came out the other side with no mind left to recognise the horror for what it had been. But what he did realise was it had not been a ghost train at all.
He had entered his own pet metaphor of a tunnel during one of his mid-life crises. He was going out with a woman who said she liked nothing better than taking someone of his nature in hand. She thought he had the makings of a successful man, but he failed to channel his efforts correctly. She had him spruced up, made him change his underwear, told him to shave almost to the bone, preened and quiffed his hair and set him walking in the right direction, straight for what he would have earlier considered to be the cliff-edge of success. And, indeed, it took a lot of guts to draw back at the last moment, for when he saw the sea creaming on the crags way below, his instinct told him things were not quite right.
He turned round to see her waving at him (as she often did in his dreams too), motioning him to proceed. He shook his head, causing his eyeballs to rattle around like squidgy dice inside the skull. The taste of fear was tantamount to eating his own corpse.
But he was more upset than scared. He trusted the woman, since she had turned him out of her bed a new man. He even felt desire again. In fact, he would go as far as to say that she was the first woman really to turn him on. Generally, breasts were two a penny. But here, they were larger than life. And the way she moved under him, it was a sense of riding horseback in a circus where a ring-master kept his best whips for the man rather than the mount.
Now, it needed all his will-power to dredge some small particle of a real personality from the macho meaninglessness and humdrum heroism that his mind had become. He needed to re-establish himself as the wimp which she had originally found in him. To stand up to her, he needed to slop around once more in that miasma of lost chances that underlied everybody’s destiny. That was the greatest courage: to reconcile such absurdity with life. It would be like holding up a crucifix to her face of gritted teeth and double-edged eyes. And such self-negation effectively made him feel the resurgence of power. He sensed his muscles moving into place like cartridges into the barrel of a hair-trigger gun. The brain-cells became light and airy places.
In sum, his confidence fed off the lack of confidence that once threatened to swamp it. Thus, she had made him into a child of her times, moulded him from the soggy clay of a human being and fired him in the belly of her kiln.
Emerging from the tunnel of edge-to-edge blinkers, he leaped from the cliff-edge into the rocking weed-choked oceans of mindless ambition. But even that release was denied him, since he eventually became conscious of being more macho and heroic than it was possible for anyone to be. He actually enjoyed mastering the woman who had created his new persona and, so, by overcoming her power over him, by becoming more powerful than her, he knew with anguish that he had given her the ultimate irresistible power she had wanted all the time: the power to change the unchangeable.
He always had to be given a drink from a cup with a baby’s spout, to prevent the dribbling down, the dribbling down his pinafore dress. Even when he was 42.
It’s awonder I can bring myself to tell you all this, for I was his mother for most of his life. But let me start at the end, because that will give you some perspective to what really went on. I had lived, as you know, through several of the war years, dodging the forking of the blitzkrieg over old London Town, to such an extent that the tube platforms still bear the pattern of my bum.
Many years later, he died under a train, as it entered Angel station.
He was born about a year after the end of the war in Walton-on-the-Naze. In any event, I know it was near the sea because, during my confinement, I grew used to hearing the waves beating the rocks. So, it may not have been precisely Walton-on-the-Naze, but that will do.
As soon as he emerged, a number of minutes following the original afterbirth, he crawled across the parquet floor, caterwauling in, what they later told me, was Ancient Egyptian. And all his first few weeks were spent doodling on waste paper—a calligraphy (if that was the word) of a two-dimensional universe which seemed sufficient to house the reality of his early years: stylised pecking birds, opposing arrows, beckoning hand-prayers, bewhiskered eyes, erect members...
I walloped him hard to bring him back to his senses, but I really knew that it was he who should have walloped me for my ignorance. He grew too big for the play-pen. Used his cot as a second toilet. Threw the nappies, that I offered him, straight back into my face.
The house contracted worms. Instead of the intestines of a child whose mother had not yet been taught that cleanliness is tantamount to godliness, the worms escaped their berth in his lower abdomen and treated the kitchen as if it were a fish-bait tin. I tried scalding them to death—I had seen my own mother pouring water from her bed-bottle directly on ant-heaps—but, being hard-up, we tried eating their still writhing bodies, post cooking, and they used this opportunity to set up home again, since they evidently thrived on stomach acid. And my son, he smiled, for he would only eat fish fresh from the sea.
Then he told me of another like him who lived in nearby Southend-on-Sea: one whose worms were more manifold, who was a reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian who had not believed in reincarnation. So, there was some sorting out to be done— there was an angry throwback, thus thrashing about in the county of Essex, before the Dartford Tunnel outlet had been conceived, let alone constructed.
We boarded a green Eastern National bus from Colchester. How we arrived there in the first place, I cannot even remember—perhaps we walked the 18 miles from the Naze, via Weeley, or was it Kirby Cross, but, looking back on it, from the distance of old age if not hindsight, it may be that we hitched a lift in an old Ford Popular whose driver had stayed at home, for fear of the traffic on modern roads.
My son, as ever, was travel-sick. By the time we reached Rayleigh (or it may have been Jaywick Sands), the side of the bus was streaked with how’s-yer-father and red custard. It reminded me of the Nazi (or was it Nazey) planes over St Paul’s during the war for, as they were going so fast, the pilots had exploded and shitlered us oe’r...
Jaywick is a funny place. It has a special Council department who distributes broken bottles over the beaches, to attract the right calibre of tourists. Grape-picking in France, during the endless student days of post-war Europe, had nothing on the laying waste of the shantytowns of the East coast of England in the 50’s and 60’s.
We never reached Southend, as you have probably guessed, from all my procrastination (if that’s the right word). We stayed in Jaywick for, it seemed, a lifetime. My son grew up into an existence that had been destined for him—and that other one in Southend whom we had been seeking went off to University with a pal from Bexhill, and that University was near an even more downtrod seaside place up North.
They say (don’t you?) that if there is another war, it will be us on the East coast who will bear the brunt. We have already sown the groynes and piers with barbed wire and, late at night, you can hear the groaning growth of rust.
My son? He spends all his time fishing, using bait from my stomach. I’m good as dead to him.
It was not he then at the age of 42 who dropped acid and fell in front of a train entering Angel tube station. A case of mistaken identity since, being dead, he had to be force-fed with a baby’s spout. And, while the body was being picked up by a task force of striking ambulance men, the dossing refugees on the platform mouthed obscenities in a language so ancient it was dead—a ceaseless mumbling and mewling along those tunnels which sheltered them from a war that must have ended years before.
A son is always a son to a loving mother, whatever he does or becomes. And a mother is always a mother even when way way beyond the barbed margins of an enemy country called Death.
As I lay awake, brimming over with baby. I listen to the waves, not beating the rocks, but dribbling down dribbling down.
The lawn is crawling with large batches of shuttling wings, each a squirming mass of flying ants, moving as if with one mind.
Why they have decided to emerge from the ground nests (or have they just landed from layers of sky?) on this particular day in August is a mystery to one as simple-minded as I. Have other lawns in this area a similar infestation? Am I sitting upon one vast dynamic ant bank, the ill-manicured green sward being merely a thin veneer over the black-seamed pulsings of a creature which, at one moment, is constituted of swarms of self-sufficient insects, but, at another, is a single entity waiting to break free from Earth’s chains and feed off human corpses?
That finishes the story, in many ways, if a story it can be called. That’s because it takes place in the finite present moment, when questions can never be answered. The only way to answer the call of the plot is to inform any likely reader of what the future holds. It takes a very special cross-breed of story teller to attempt such a sticky feat. OK, OK, I know some authors have tried to predict what they see as the future and spun catherine-wheels of yarn from such tenta¬tive projections of plot, for the benefit of those foundling generations of wide-eyed readers who have a taste for structured fantasising. However, what I am trying to get at, is an ability to tell the future as it REALLY is.
The web of cobbled alleyways radiates from the domed Cathedral which was once called St Pauls. Between the alleyways, the tall wedge-sectioned buildings lean like the ancient warehouses which they were constructed to mirror in a miscegena¬tion of nostalgia and history. Trundle-rattlers weave routes along the byways, toting cargoes of insects tended by other insects.
If I am not too much mistaken, I am the only human being alive (the word “being” used as a doing rather than a naming word). I wonder how the Cathedral has withstood the domino-rally entropies to which everything else human-bred has long since succumbed.
My name is Carapace (I was told that was how the White Spider baptised me when I was extruded from my latest mother) and I really believe I am the last creature able to walk on its hindlegs without over-balancing. They keep me in this zoo-trap, to remind them of pre- and para-history, in case they forget. It spurs them to curtail the cycles.
The insects are larger than life now, with clicking nodules. You are only aware of their existence within the dome’s spinning darkness because their mandibles scrape together and the segments ratchet along their wagging probosces: as well as, I suppose, the light of the sporadic lonely moon glinting off their steely hardbacks.
And so the future finishes too: fizzles out: worse than the ending provided by the present. Without a good finale, the story itself is wasted, however true and/or interesting its web of plot-threads. It’s a pity the story has to end with a full stop at all.
Beyond future’s end, there lies the real fantasy.
I live among real men again: men who fight each other tooth and claw as a kind of past-time or hobby or role-playing game, much as children used to play ‘dares’.
The lawns stretch into the distance and, on the horizon. I can discern the tiny hive-like dome of St Pauls sparkling in the light of the re-born sun. I dream, at night, of this sun’s final re-enactment of its rhythmic deaths, for one last show on the stage of reality, and I can see the innards of the Cathedral being clogged with undulating whiplash feelers, all emanating from a bulging sac of white pus lodged upon the ancient altar ... which could be Earth’s brain, but is more than likely just an inexplicable Jungian symbol created by a story teller with more ability (or pretentiousness) than my-self.
The days grow longer and less ten¬able. Humans have passed away into their own past-times. The seasons have become changeling generations of cross-pollination. The seemingly endless lazy hot days of August stretch and yearn into Carapace’s long memory of forgotten dreams, awaken¬ing the maggot-riddled cadaver that he must have once become: and the hazes of flying insects fill the golden air, turning the whole tableau into an impressionist’s beautiful marginless painting -
The tower was full of gobbling sounds. Even back of the outhouses, beyond the moat systems, one could hear them.
The day I arrived I had expected to see what they had led me to believe: a fine imposing structure, standing tall between the headland and the tor. But, if you fail to imagine my surprise when I caught sight of a simple crofter’s cottage backing on to what looked like an airport hangar which then grew out of the half-finished monolithic tower itself, I in my turn would not be surprised.
I had been brought up to believe the mediaeval realities which the history books would reflect for centuries to come. And, if not for my discovery of such an outlandish edifice, I would have lived and died in such ignorance - and, after all, death is indeed just another form of ignorance.
In any event, one of its inhabitants found me lurking beneath a large animal, when night was about.
“I suppose you’re there because its udder is your hot water bottle, upstart.”
“Sorry, my good sir, but I did not want to disturb your supper.”
His face flushed close to mine: “Give me a rest! You’re here to cause me grief, I’ll be bound. Muck and mayhem are the cargo of the likes of you, no fear. I don’t know who sent you, but nestling there under the breasts of my grazer, you were no doubt going to suckle the night away, draining her of a whole winter’s milk-letting!”
I was at a loss for a moment, but decided to give it to him straight: “They told me your tower was a mighty castellated wonder of the Mediaeval world. Instead of which, here I am, squeezing my eyes up against a sickly sight—buildings, snatched from various god-forbidden eras which, even where they should have belonged or would have done, do toss and tussle from roof to dungeon in belated attempts to better themselves!”
The man blanched, as if he were ashamed of something I’d said. Called away from the tower, along with his bluff, he was fast becoming what I should have recognised all along: a sack of flesh. riddled with doubts and evidently now tangled and tongue-tied.
I continued: “You’re no better than an outhouse beast yourself. You stink (as well as pray) to high heaven. And I bet the halls you’ve just left are crammed with others, even fouler than you...”
My monologue continued for as long as I could keep it up, until I became lost in my own non-sequiturs, paradoxes, dead-ends and ridiculous tangents upon tangents.
Given half the chance, he enjoyed conversing as much as me. He eventually told me that the tower was crawling with men and women who pursued an almost ever lasting roisterous roundelay of blind encounter, self-perpetuating coprophagy, safe cannibalism and other forms of creative love-play. Those naughtier than most (or sillier, or grown too senile even for death, or downright wicked) were expelled to the outhouses from where they could look back in awe, across the moated canals, towards what was called the Tower of Turdhelm ... knobbling all over, as it continued to be, with wayward annexes.
I forced him (and his grazer) to play pat-a-cake, ring o’ orchids, bone-loaning games, leaning-dances, elbow-fights and, finally, the-last-one-alive-is-a-dead’un, until there was a silence in which even the gobbling had ceased. It was then I realised, with a frozen smile, that true History could only be told by such primary sources as the illiterate dead.
The poet who couldn’t write—I first met him in a pub, down by Thames Side, and he was the first to admit that he was drunk. Though drunkards are rarely dependable.
“You want me to tell you about old Dell?” were the first words with which he opened the conversation. All I could do was nod but, even now, I’m unsure to whom he was referring.
“Well, I first met him in a University north of here. It was towards the end of that decade now called the Sixties...”
The pub was to shut in about half an hour (for licensing hours were still thankfully observed), and he continued, ignoring my pointed attempts at intervention: “He was a bit of a beardy-weirdy, that Dell—I suppose that’s the best way of describing him. He toted a shotgun to student union meetings and if it were not for the likes of me, I’m sure he’d now be a hunted man as well as a haunted one.”
I couldn’t resist raising my eyebrows a notch or three, but I put it down to the drunkenness which had pervaded his brain more than he was now able to admit. But he still continued: “Anyway, Dell, that was his name, though I bet you anything if he was tracked down today, he’d not own up to it. He’d pretend he’s somebody else, even if it meant laying claim to the opposite gender. He last wrote back in the early Seventies (when nobody had even heard of such a decade) and told me that he still held precariously to his self belief. But the world, now quite beyond his jurisdiction, was growing younger day by day, and thus in parallel he was fast becoming a buffer of the last water...
And he interrupted his own gossip, as he dug inside his flies to produce a sickly-looking toadstool: he sprayed cider towards the fruit machine in the corner—which shorted and hacked into circuits that set its own nudge against hold, by passing the gamble which reared its unlikely head be¬tween—a facsimile of life itself, I mused.
The lights flashed. Last orders were announced. And I knew that if it didn’t all come out now, the story would stay just that, another piece of pub talk for nobody to take seriously except perhaps on another night with another drink in our hands. I visited the bar to obtain his final drink. As I landed it in front of him with a pecker of pork scratchings (since, he’d told me, his tummy muscles were in overbite), I asked him what his last word was on the matter.
He replied inaudibly: “My dreams are sweeter than most. And the dream I cherish most, the one that has yet even to be dreamt, is of that Dell who has probably forgotten about the University where we once met in an era that deserved to be called an era rather than the nondescript tranche of years called the present.”
I was truly ashamed that I could not grasp the importance of his pub talk. It evidently meant more than a thousand erudite books on philosophy.
I said a hearty night night to him and to his vision of that friend Dell he’d lost somewhere in a past that may not hopefully have yet begun. I helped him to the pub exit, where the autumn night was lighting up with stellar crusades. He sighed and I watched him strut home through the on¬coming shadows. “Goodnight, Dell,” I whispered.
If the truth were known, I’d probably just met a beautiful ghost that was haunting its former body.
He was watching her. She was to be his own personal girl companion, the one he had adopted from the whole human race as a fitting tribute to the work he had been undertaking for at least five eternities and which was now fast approaching its conclusion...
The sea was moving in the way her mother used to cast the silk table cloth into the warm mountain breezes, to be laid out for Sunday picnics.
One moment—sitting at the hemmed edge of the cloth, with a crystal glass of wine raised to her lips, with the shattered eye of the sun shining through it and revealing foreign bodies amid the sparkles; the next moment—far far away from those matriarchal mountains where the crustless sandwiches were eaten as soon as snatched from the creaking homely hamper ... to the sea that, even now, encroaches close to the girl’s sand-curling toes and is upon the brink of creating a new memory more fixed in time than those distant, indefinable picnics which, for all she knows, never happened, may never happen.
Her breasts are nude. The brushfire of hair below her flat belly is dashed with salt-white as the surf cascades nearer. It is peculiar that she should recall those childhood excursions to the mountain with her mother for, although every detail of the picnic is still coming back to her like paintings in a gallery, her mother she cannot picture at all.
The girl’s alone on the beach, but she would not worry if other tourists wandered onto the shingle to thwack a ball from tide’s edge to sea wall. It’s quite common to sunbathe bare these days, so she’d probably not get even a sidewise glance.
She feels as if she’s being watched anyway.
A black spider crawls like a phantom birth from the midst of her brushfire hair, as big as the palm of her hand, and waddles towards the sea. It must be blind for it does not flee the rattling pebbles of the strengthening tide.
Much to her surprise, several more spiders emerge and scuttle like crabs in all directions except back to her, until the whole beach is covered with their swarthiness. Even back in those picnic days, she recalled the irritating insects that often infiltrated the food, the ant-hill on which they had inadvertently pitched the tablecloth, the smoky clouds of hover-flies, the dead beetle floating inside the screwtop...
But today is something different...
When Reincarnations come to an end, all manner of peculiarities break out before the final death of one who has lived before through a thousand thousand deaths at least. Even the Reincarnators themselves reach their last eternity from time to time; the one of whom we speak celebrated his last throes by scattering all the black playing-cards in a tantrum across the gambling-table; he picked out one card from the table, to tempt fate, and found it to be the Queen of Spiders.
But was this the mother or the daughter? He knew the answer even before he posed the question. Through some unaccountable miscalculation of temper or tactic, he had indeed condemned himself to spending the real eternity of his retirement with the mother not the daughter, the mother whose only pleasure in her many lives had been to drop creepy-crawlies into the food she prepared and into other nice things...
The sea had covered the beach and all that was upon it, except the girl. She has returned to her hotel, feeling that a great weight had been lifted from her, as if she’d escaped a death worse than fate.
Those dreams without a dreamer were surely tangible at last, stories that I could actually remember or retell. Yet the roar of intoxicants pounding the pub door gave me final pause for thought, as I discovered that my efforts had been nought but wishful thinking—an array of dead-end nightmares: a dip-in duck-out of an odyssey. Moreover, there was no evidence I had narrated tales to myself, least of all to anyone else. After all, a bacteria’s ghost upon a suppurating dollop of residual scrag in an otherwise empty microwave had no mind, no thoughts, not even wishful ones, let alone a mouth with which to speak them.
The snug-room was empty, bar the accoutrements of booze and a grub-oven carelessly gaping in the spooky renewal of silence. Nevertheless, the real pub door would itself open wide shortly—and with the fire in the grate cheerily relit, the drunk man would again toast his makeshift fists, knowing I loved him for being me.
Although this one probably isn't as vivid as some of the other DFL pieces I've been reading (and re-reading) lately, the image of the dog in the sunbeam is quite memorable.