Boot Heels
When Bob Dylan sang about the tambourine man, I felt older than I do now. That’s probably because I thought I knew everything then and, of course, I knew nothing at all. And, other than this realisation in retrospect, I’ve learnt very little since. Or maybe the encroaching effect of premature senility is giving birth to my second childhood without my knowledge ...who knows?
Listening to the jingle-jangle of life these days is like waking up gradually into a nightmare. The sleep in between is the bonfire smoke of death becoming whiter and whiter with the bones on which it feeds. Or something like that. The words flow in. My mind accepts thoughts too easily. That must signify the first dosage of dotage. And, again, the words flow in before I can stop them. Or am I giving birth to a different mind without my knowledge ... who knows?
Somebody else’s mind? That’d account for the madness. In fact, it rather absolves me from all responsibility with regard to the flow of words
- convenient, to say the least. But whose mind? Yours? I doubt it. Anybody with the sanity you boast, surely, surely, wouldn’t have reached this far in my ramblings. So, I suppose, logically, it COULD be yours, then. But, pray, do NOT proceed any further. That way lies more madness than even you would credit. It can only get worse.
Planet Firehearth gave off no heat, when you approached it, seemingly heading, as you were, from all points of the known compass. The planet was invisible to the naked eye other than its disguise as a blotchy white moon. And you had been out of Earth’s gambit for some time, unsure whether you were still the subject of betting in the Circles of Jove. You had tried, so far successfully, to avoid the enticements of crafty time-slots, knowing that the dark wheel still turned above, like Fate - making you think you had now fallen in a Black Well rather than a Black Hole; in any event, those in the real know probably deemed you little more than a speck of dust.
You had Welsh parentage with a hint of London Cockney. Your hands, having lost the use of their arms during a particularly violent elbow fight in some alien’s cock-pit, grew straight from the shoulders like stunted wings. Your face was as round as the old Earth moon, a moon you hardly remembered, towards a replica of which moon you were now gliding, moons reflecting each other like ingredients in an ancient computer game which only lunatics could play.
You sighed, for you felt Fate was still out of your hands. Pumping on the pedals, your crate widened its trajectory for Planet Firehearth, which was now indeed giving off a faint white heat. But, in accordance, you thought, with quasi-Einsteinian physics, the heat was coming in the opposite direction to its source. A real Johari’s Window through which even Schrodinger’ s Cat wouldn’t dive, albeit chased by Pavlov’s Dog.
You felt hungry: no one had thought to feed you, mainly because the lights in the years had flickered past, out of control, like the cranking pictures of an end-of-the-pier peep-show. But, now, the years were slowing, crystallising ... and making you think about your belly kept in a jug of pickling plankton by your side.
A belly like that was all very well, but not very satisfying; you would like to feed it a tranche of beef, before long, followed by your latest obsession, pickled onion and cheesecake. But then the Mad Cow in the moon would make your innards erupt like meat comets.
They often seem to play pop records at funerals these days. Suppose it’s a sign of the times - that people are dying younger or should I say being killed younger. Ought to make me feel sick, but it doesn’t. Almost as if I’ve been desensitised, overdosed on violence and expendability. Everybody’s tainted by international conflicts and civil wars, some of which have created situations which I once believed could never happen.
OK, OK, Hitler did his damnedest to be damned. But when you get three-cornered disputes so bitter that each side fights tooth and nail to defeat the other two, whatever the cost in human suffering, uniquely without the apparent need for treaties or side-agreements between any two against the other (which would have been more in tune with hunan nature), well, I’m speechless with despair. Gives me nightmares. Yet again, I shrug it off, shocked only by my ability to shrug it off.
In many ways, I’m the greatest villain of all, by the very act of not caring. Or do I care? If I didn’t care, would I be chewing my nails like this? Wouldn’t I just let sleeping dogs lie or, rather, let them spit and scratch each other to a death worse than Hell itself.
All this talk of the way things are today leads me naturally to my reason for writing to you. I know we’ve not met since those heady days at University all those years ago, but I remember you as someone with a real heart. You cared deeply - not for a feeling of self-satisfaction nor for any hope of deferred divine reward - you cared selflessly, straightforwardly, even gratuitously.
I learned a lot of lessons from you, watching from a distance as I did. You may not even remember me. I was that girl, usually in a green frock and rather childish hair-ribbon, who more often than not sat at the front of English Literature lectures. Weren’t they boring? In retrospect, that business of intentional fallacy, verbal icons, and evaluating a poem as if it were a sculpture rather than putting it in historical/biographical context - all hogwash! Poems are written by people. People live, breathe, think about their environment. They don’t write words, as if they’re insulated by the bizarre theories of semantics. Words are not pure artefacts. They are steeped in our heritage and, dare I say, the Collective Unconscious. When words are used, then all of us use them.
Everybody should have the credit - or the blame. Likewise, the events and emotions that the words describe should be part and parcel of each human being’s karmic baggage.
Even the most instinctive native in a South American jungle has to bear his own particular share of the world’s collectivity. Don’t you think I’m right? Isn’t what I’m saying here the road to caring, to that form of caring which you knew was the only way to care, those very many years ago?
I’m sorry for being so verbose. I wouldn’t blame you if you screwed this up and filed it in some area of the past that has gone bad like an old meat. Yet, rest assured, my writing to you, Onion, like this has allowed me to see more clearly. I’ve removed a few misunderstandings. Clarified a complex or two. Removed my neck from the ultimate hang-up. Incidentally, I got your address from a mutual friend. Do be forgiving, should you ever discover who it was. What are friends for if not to betray other friends for each friendship? And so on forever, until we are all friends. The whole world a chain-letter of love and forgiveness. So, I hope you’ll write to someone else we knew at University in the same vein. So that he or she can do the same. Until the Ying, Yang and the universal You are fighting only for the right to be the first to forgive.
A little boy in a Victorian nursery sometimes stared into the spluttering hearth fire newly ignited this crisp winter morning by his Nanny. He watched the coal-sparks scale the back towards the gaping chasm of the chimney, as they marched in glorious sacrifice to their cause - some of which sparks, he guessed, would still be alive after they left the jurisdiction of the house and sprayed into the moonlit sky. Wars were often being conducted up the little boy’s chimney; he could hear them popping in the night, before the ashes crumbled into the hearth with several sighs, like a tooth fairy dying. That would be the token for sleepy-byes but, even then, there was no respite from dreams.
Meanwhile, you disembarked above Planet Firehearth. On waddling out of the hatch, you farted, a gentle, unimposing old maid’s breaking of wind, but one that nevertheless floated you towards Planet Firehearth at the bottom of the Black Well, as pale and round as your own face. You were in free-climb and nothing could now be done and, odds were even, you would reach Nirvana before breakfast time.
I heard from Onion that you’ve written a crazy letter to him. Now I’m really annoyed. How dare you? I should never have allowed you to convince me that you wanted his address to invite him to a University reunion do. And all those other addresses I gave you - have they all received a dose of your idiotic ramblings in a letter? I hope not. I shall be persona non grata, if so. Assuming your letter to Onion was similar to the one you sent me, I’m not surprised he was so upset. Yes, you put the fear of God in him. Me, too.
Don’t you realise it’s dangerous to play with people’s minds? Who knows what repercussions you’ve already put in motion. Sick, I call it. All that talk of funerals and pop records. Whatever was your purpose? It certainly wasn’ t world harmony, as you seemed to imply. Hitler thought he was doing right. But that didn’t make it right, did it? I suppose you’ll maintain that we’re merely bandying words and words simply mean what we want them to mean in the context. It’s like saying if I call a lion a fox, and then someone else does, and then someone else, and so forth, the meaning of the word will eventually become its use, and a lion will always
be known as a fox. Believe me, things don’t work like that. People are straightforward and don’t like their cherished logic being undermined. Quit while you can. Lay off.
Nanny lullabyed the little boy, while the moon cast one of its freak shafts through the nursery window (divided into varying silver bars of visionary effulgence) and spotlit his ludo board and purple shaker and mutilfaceted dice and counters ... all scattered carelessly by a tired boy before preparing for bed. As myriads of dust motes milled amid the heavenly beams, the boy felt disturbed by the idea of breathing them in, as he inevitably must. No fault of his own. Like markets, entropy could not be bucked. But, then, the moon must have suddenly gone behind a cloud for the motes had thankfully vanished.
And you uttered a polite swear word in a language not dissimilar to Welsh. Your hands flapped powerlessly at your shoulder blades, your chest was burning tight and you cursed as your blow-empty belly dropped like a stone towards what you now knew to be the real Fire-Earth at the bottom of a real Black Hole. You tried to guess how long the belly would take before it hit the moving orange waves below ... but, before it imploded like a divine burp and became just one more gunshot in an endless war between future and past, the last spark in your soul expired with a sigh of fading flame. And the little boy wiped a single shiny tiddly-wink of a tear from his eye. Nanny, with an induced twinkle in hers, lent him a lace-trimmed hankie. She dreaded it might be a foreign body in the boy’s eye, some sparklet of dust at this very moment inveigling a way towards his heart via the optic fuse, a mote that was probably the silver germ of a Victorian ghost intent on incubating in the boy’s spermbank of a belly. Perhaps, even dead aliens had volition.
I’ve heard from that woman again. I think whatever you wrote to her has done a lot of good. She apologised for her earlier letter and said that we need not worry as we were the only ones who received such a letter from her. It looks as if she was trying to create some triangular trouble between us - and I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t been stewing over both of us all these years, wondering which of us she fancied most. Or she’s got a screw loose. I hardly knew her at University. How about you?
It’s rather like being haunted by the ghost of a nobody. Just a blur from the corner of my eyes in TS Eliot lectures, now forced into focus as a real person twenty years later. Incredible.
Thinking about it, perhaps I should write my next novel about her. In fact, she might have quite inadvertently done me a good turn with her idiotic epistle! My last blockbuster sort of flunked, didn’t it? Maybe, she will be the spur for me to get back into the swing of writing. I badly need a bestseller again. All this just might be the catalyst. An ill wind. Which brings me to suggesting that we two get together again for a bit, since we are in the mood of reprieves! I’m sorry we ended in tears last time. Maybe, it’s time I peeled off another layer, eh? My old nickname of Onion did signify something at University, but blowed if I can remember who at University coined it or why. Perhaps I made people cry. Who knows? Look forward to hearing from you.
The words have ceased flowing since a woman has entered the room, one who switched off the Bob Dylan record. She was my wife when I was her husband. I only know her name because she has it sewn on her overall lapel - she’s about to depart, you see, for her job at the fast food chain.
“Seen my handbag?”
Her voice is strange, but I don’t feel able to tell her HOW strange. It’s as if her lips have not been dubbed properly by some inefficient backstage technician. Or she’s using foreign words and the translation is ill-matched.
“No. You probably left it at work.”
“Don’t be silly, I had it last night. Remember? I turned it out on the table. Found your medical card in there. And my pay slip...”
Ah, that was how I knew she worked for a fast food chain. I’d been worrying about that.
“It must be somewhere, then.”
I bit my tongue. Somewhere is a big place. Could be anywhere. It was to late to UNsay. The handbag would have to remain lost in no man’s land, as it were. And I’d have to do some pretty nimble footwork to explain it away ... or, better still, explain it BACK.
Thanks for your letter. I ‘ye written again to Onion to apologise for my first letter. Later, I intend to write a third one to apologise for my second, thus neutralising the first apology. That way, I have the best of both worlds. And I have the exquisite pleasure of apologising twice to him. But to you, of course, no apologies at all. I merely acknowledge you have an equal right to be a character in Onion’s fifth novel as I do. “Ghost of nobody” was an expression he used in a letter to you. But, as such, we’re better than most people who are proper nobodies without the ghost of a chance of even becoming icons. So, I’ll see you in Chapter 4 where we were foreordained to meet for the first time and where we’ll collude in rivalry. My fingernails have been filed into claws, ready for the Pinteresque fray. Similes ought to be full-blooded metaphors, don’ t you think? Or perhaps you don’t have the same generous share of Onion’s omniscience as I do. Pity he’s always burnt everything he writes.
I wandered the circle of sands, digging fitfully with a child’s spade, to see if the handbag had been buried at a random spot. The sea’s tinnitus surged in my ears. There was a little boy with his Nanny playing pies and castles by the edge of the waves. In bathing trunks. Studious.
Upon the distant horizon, there was a three-funnelled steamship. Instinctively, I knew my wife was on board, canoodling with every sailor she could lay her hands on, blouse undone to the navel. I waved ... knowing that I was too far way to be seen, even if I could see the steamship. The boy waved too, although he didn’t know why. That’s the charm of childhood. You still know nothing, but believe there is something waiting in the wings to be known, something special, something for you to discover when your boot-heels are set to wander ... something somewere.
You munch quickly on the oniony beefburger so you don’t have to taste it. You wipe the ketchup that has fallen on your army uniform. You try to write a tear-stained letter on a serviette. There’s a familiar song on the jukebox which you try to mime (rather unsuccessfully). And a ghostly waitress who doesn’t seem able to stop smiling at you. Perhaps is a big word. But, perhaps, love is better than I remember it. You look through the salt-stained window and see that the boy has disappeared. His pies and castles, too. And, no doubt, the slots your heels made in the sand. The moon shines down a tunnel of ash motes. There’s a bonfire on the horizon.
(Chronicles of Disorder 1997)
Posted by weirdtongue
at 7:51 PM BST
Updated: Sunday, 22 October 2006 7:55 PM BST
