Baffle (4)
I smell differently when faced with fathoming a crime.  If on the forage for food, then I switch noses.  And eat the discarded one.

DUST TO DUST

 

 

Mrs. Barge peered into the bath. There was an ingrained tide-mark looping about six inches from the rim. Almost gouged into the enamel: the strongest astringent would have no possible purchase upon it.

 

Mrs. Barge’s first-born baby, now grown-up, barged around the house in a lonesome game of blind bluff. Her husband, even at this moment, was grunting in a far-away closet. The other babies were braying in the empty scullery, eager for something to eat. Even the kitten looked old.

 

Returning from a holiday was always like this.

 

Mrs. Barge did not question the ugly bath-mark, despite nobody having been in their house for a whole fortnight. Probably burglars, one of whom had taken a bath, instead of their more usual stigmata.

 

Nothing appeared missing except a large chunk of her memory. The house was far too shiny for a fortnight’s dust-filled emptiness.

 

“Mummy, Mummy!” A baby had run into the bathroom.

 

“Yes, Dear.” Second nature to respond.

 

“Daddy says the house smells of clean things - like wax polish - and air-wick - and pine disinfectant - and suds - and coal-tar – and…

 ...“

“Yes, Dear.” The same reply but said differently.

 

Something was in the air, amid the warmth rising from the radiators. It was in the churning pipes that fed the benighted house and emptied its deepest slurries. It was in the shadow-beams of dust. It was in the bath.

 

Mrs. Barge vowed never to go on holiday again, because it always made coming back worse than ever. Holidays were hell.

 

She ignored the wave of dirty darkness as it swept from room to room, seeking the sluice trough of its own spent dreams. Each dust particle a baby one.

 

 

 (Whispers From The Dark 1995)

A NEEDLESS PALLIATIVE

 

 

 

 

Far too many ghosts believe that they actually exist, whereas, self-evidently, they are fallacious forgeries, iniquitous imitators, malicious mimics, cheap cheeky charlatans and other choice names that I can easily find to describe them, if the need ever arises. Simply because they are dead and have assumed a wispy watery whitish garb, they should not take it upon themselves to act like phenomena which, needless to say, cannot bear sane, sensible nor scientific scrutiny without shrivelling up into a yet more untenable gossamer of mumbo-jumbo, more akin to spiritual panaceas than delicious frissons of terror. You can be sure of believing me, because it goes without saying that I am the only genuine ghost in existence and, thus, very much in the know about such matters. So, rest easy and don’t ever, ever invest belief in ghosts, because, of course, I’ve retired. I gave up haunting even before so-called Mankind emerged from the primeval slime.

(The Third Half 1994)

ANGLING

 

 

By the weed pool, the fat man sat.

 

The heat of the day had made it seem natural to be bare...but, of course, with the beer belly between, he could never seem nude to himself...except, on reflection, by other means.

 

He stared into the pool, watching colourful fish amid his own mountainous geography. By some quirk of light and meniscus, he suddenly envisioned a winsome woman draped in fine greenery and darting jewelery, fantail eyebrows above sparkling nipplestones.

 

He shook free of the daydream, before the flattering image could take purchase.

 

He was not fishing for compliments.

 

His flyrod cranked like a crane, in full view from each and every angle.

 

 

(published ‘Small Press Scrappings’ 1991)

ZONE FEVER

 

(It goes without saying      that this tale is about some folk who live in a different universe...)

 

The demonster hopped from zone to zone, casting the more unsavoury parts of its body into the sidelines but as soon as one part went the way of its predecessor, another grew for ungrafting.

 

The citizens by this time had become accustomed to these busy, busy, busy critters riddling their streets with lumps of their skin cancer as well as the more dick-dory appendages. . .and almost welcomed this offure for their gardens. For once planted. these discards grew.quite quickly.into trees of interlocking tumours bearing. within days, great big dollops of putrid fruit.

 

“Nuff to keep us goin’ in these hardening times...” would say Ol’ Ma Manning.as she harvested the over-rich ruptures and melonheads from the meshed vines of her own particular zone

 

Only the demonsters could straddle the zones. For one zone was as distant from any other by time rather than space - and it was time of wnich the citizens had very little.

 

“Gif me jus’ one hour extra before I do die, and I will use it to do good for others.But fings being like they are, I’ve got no time but for meself,” Ol’ Ma Manning repeated to her neighbour as they leant across the zone fence.

 

“Times is ‘ard ‘ere too,” came back the usual response.

 

The demonsters took such conversations between the two zones, toting message pads like there were no tomorrows.

 

But,one day,the demonster of which we speak.entered burn-up on a particularly energetic gambol between two tight interfaces.

 

In transit, it jettisoned its beer belly, that had been particularly scorched, into a field that was near unto where O1’ Ma Manning was pegging up her late husband’s trews on the washing-line.

 

“Gor blimey, enuffer bleedin’ oo-fo,” she told the ghost of her husband who was evidently just the wind ballooning out the trews.

 

The zones nudge each other in the night, like an audience at a saucy film.

 

And from the tightening ancient furrow between two eroding historie, .there bloomed a swollen bagging of blood atop a mighty tree-stalk of mottled, knotted flesh that threatened to encroach on another universe.

 

The demonsters clamber it like an infant school of spiders, apparently zoned out and looking for Earth itself.

 

(Divine Rights 1988)

WHEN DUSK MET DAWN
  

 

 

The blue blanket, in its role of makeshift curtain, clung to the surface condensation of the window. It bore an archipelago of stains, imaginary worlds where the non-sleeper was able to cruise ... during those endless hours at dawn and dusk, when his thoughts would otherwise have slipped back into the viler self-made geography of his mind.

 

Only yesterday, he had met the one person who would ever mean anything to him, if indeed people CAN have a meaning. He still heard her voice in this very room:

 

“It’s time to say bye bye, Tom.”

 

There was no reply he could summon.

 

He had found her in the small supermarket down the road, where the few cans left over from the last rush looked lost amid the empty spaces among the shelves. He was after tomatoes which, in cans, were so different from those of a fresh variety ... in their blood soup looking for all the world like bodily innards. He told her that he was making lunch for himself and that he already had more than enough to go round two mouths.

 

As they left, the checkout man said, “It’s a rum old world innit? Nobody can eat nothing, these days, with all the scares.”

 

Tom smiled knowingly. “People’d rather starve than risk an unknown disease that can eat away at their bodies...” he suggested, after an embarrassing silence.

 

“Yes, I’ve had to put Government stickers on everything ... It cuts into the profits so.”

 

They left together, hand in hand ... for what had people in common but companionship in such times? They carried on a fitful conversation until they reached his flat. Realising that the key had been left unintentionally inside, he forced entry, at the same time trying to conceal the ease with which he did this. He did not want her to know that his occupation was tantamount to squatting. These days, nobody did anything to earn a living, for even money could not buy what one really needed in life.

 

Lunch was to be from a casserole he’d had simmering for months. She turned up her nose as he revealed the churning brown gruel with nrecognisable lumps floating. He took the ladle from the wall, stirred it noisily and then returned it to the oven.

 

Even sex was out of the question, because she’d watched the news, the same as everybody. Nothing was safe, he agreed. They did take a few nibbles at each other in the kitchen, which was almost erotic.

 

“Dad’s told me that Mum died from him you know?” she said, as she walked over to inspect the blanket. Towards the bottom, it was fraying, each teased-out fibre ending in a slowly forming bubble of damp.

 

“Have a go, if you want. I don’t need any till tonight,” he suggested gratuitously. The water authorities had long since been privatised and it was said in some quarters that they had pumped undiluted acid rain to the taps, in the hope that nobody would end up noticing.

 

Tom then understood that falling in love was not a lost art. How could he have offered her a suck of the blanket, otherwise?

 

“Come in ...” He lifted aside the grubby lip of sheet, demonstrating how dark and warm it must be within. “We don’t need to do anything dangerous, just cuddle and comfort ...”

 

“No, it’s too late. How do I know I can trust myself?” Her voice shook with emotion. She recalled the exploratory nibbles in the kitchen, still sucking on the bit of spare ear-lobe which she pressed against her bare cheek-lining with the tongue.

 

As Tom picked his teeth with a fingernail he’d only cleaned out fully that very morning, he could hear the distant wail of sirens. Ambulances steered clear of starvation cases, because the drivers wanted to avoid both the temptation and danger inherent in near-dead bodies. Thus, irrhythmically, they could be heard on their endless course on the ring-road ... their fuel caps open to the streaming air ... for when the pandemic chemical stews filtered back through the ragged rainless clouds of black smoke, everything but everything buzzed and honked.

 

The terrible tragedy was that she kissed Tom goodbye, tongue to tongue. Tragic in more ways than one, since he then couldn’t say how much he loved her before they separated.

 

 

 

He slept soundly for once and dreamt of man-made disasters, himself on the point of becoming unmade man ... only to be woken by the blanket flopping to the floor, too heavy for its hooks.

 

And the light flooded back.

 

 

 

(Peeping Tom 1995) 

 

 

 

OWEN'S DAMASCUS ROAD

As he wended his way through the endemic mists that coiled about the mountainside, the warrior thanked God that he had been able to negotiate the morasses along the upward path. His thigh boots still showed the signs of the clinging weed, like the remains of a consumptive giant’s deep cough.

 

Owen the Curd sweated. The higher air seared the flesh remaindered by his outfit with the slow-moving funnels of its relative cold. He’d been told to leave the Lower Lands as a representative of the Curd race because, self-evidently, the God could hear prayers more easily further up the mountain. However, nobody had dreamt that, because of the mists, the God would not be able to be seen so readily as from the villages in the valley, during such two-way conversations which, in these parts, prayers had long since become. Nevertheless, being a race particularly hard of hearing, many misconceptions had grown up concerning the God’s own responses in those interchanges. Hence, Owen’s mission.

 

As he squatted on a tussock to catch a breather as it passed by on the turgid air flows, Owen visualised the God he had seen so often before: a moving face in the sky timelessly forming and unforming like clouds of flesh; the deep inarticulate thunder of the voice, much as a doctor’s must seem to patients in the local hospital; the forks of lightning jabbing across the cumulus eye-sockets; the groping fingers of roiling bone lovingly reaching out to those who prayed ... Once the image was fixed in his own flittering mind, Owen spoke:

 

‘O, God, I’ve been sent to pray for victory in the war against the Iron Men …Us Curds need your help ... Please answer our prayers ... This is the make or break of our race ... We’ve never before prayed so hard ... If you like, we’ll make it our very last prayer ... If only you would please, please answer this one prayer…’

 

Suddenly, out of the mist, there strode another warrior, towering above Owen, with muscles that rippled down the tightening cords of his neck and chest (bare, despite the nagging chill). The huge two-handed broadsword, actually scabbarded in the flesh and bone at the side of his body, sparkled by its own light as it was withdrawn.

 

‘Why should I answer you Curds, and not those prayers spoken with equal earnestness by the Iron Men?” came the roar, plucking syllables from the thunder like seeds from a pomegranate.

 

Owen was disturbed. This could not be the God of the Curds, for He did not resemble in any way the visualisation of the memory in the sky. Immediately suspecting it was a mortal representative of the Iron Men themselves, on a similar mission as himself, Owen stood up, his wet-weather gear cracking and crazing over with a strange geography of ice. He would have to undo all the toggles, before he could get to his own broadsword. So, he decided to play for time:

 

“…Because our cause is just.”

 

“The Iron Men’s cause is just too.”

 

It was a mystery to Owen how there could be two just causes in one war. This could not be a God in any shape or form. By now, he had disentangled his weapon, and slew the taller warrior with one fell swoop; his aim was true, slicing with consummate downward ease through the skull, the chest, and, finally, the swag of intestines hanging between the legs. There was no chronology of wounds, just the instantaneous act. The two halves split asunder, scattering a purple clotted brew in all directions. Owen thanked God that his wet-weather gear was still relatively intact, as the other warrior’s innards filled-in between the ice-limned countries on his sou’wester with the bays and gulfs of tropic spume. Owen’s face, however, was open-mouthed and, as a drowning swimmer would involuntarily gulp the bitter salt of the waves, he found himself sinking downwards with the outcome of his sword-stroke.

 

Eventually, in a state of utter exhaustion and choking upon the phlegmy knot of his own body’s anti-viral defences in overdrive, he staggered down the mountain, the mists left behind stained pink. Alas, he found all the Curds and Iron Men had killed each other off in even nastier ways than he could have dreamt after a lifetime of warriorhood.

 

As a brave man, Owen would have committed suicide, if his own body had not already done the job for him: he realised, in his garbled way of thinking, that there need not have been a war at all if both causes were indeed just. Or even unjust, for that matter.

 

The thunder rumbled above the unpopulated valley, as if God were moving his furniture.

 

 

(Mystique 1990)

THE LOAN

 

 

‘What do you want the money for?’

 

 

 

He stared across the large leather-topped desk, empty except for a blotter. His eyes were sporadically hidden behind glasses that reflected the window with the rhythm of his head movements, much like a pair of erratic lighthouses. So, the power of the stare was magnified by my inability to follow his look...

 

‘To ease cash flow problems.’ It was a pretentious way of saying I was stony broke. Better than showing him the holes in my pockets.

 

I eased out into day-dreaming: the bank manager was laid out in an open-topped coffin, one with curlicue knobs on. Sovereigns rested upon his eyes, glinting in the communal flame of many closely-stemmed candles. His hands, embossed with ring-studs of onyx and old gold, were poised in tranquil prayer upon the imperceptible rising and falling of his chest. The cuff-links were designed in the shape of black horses...

 

I unravelled myself from reverie, only to find it was my turn to say something. Conversations tend to be like that: duties on both aides (except, of course, my late mother, who’d only required someone’s silent face to bounce off a continuous flow of gossip and counter-gossip).

 

‘Sorry, could you please repeat the question?’

 

“What security can you offer on a loan, Mr White?”

 

I found myself idly looking out of the bank’s high rise window, where light was quickly dying from the sky. It was as if blueblack ink was seeping from one quarter of the universe to the other. A herd of dark clouds stampeded over the horizon. A union jack upon the flagpole of another building attempted to flee its perch, and join the pair of long johns that had escaped from some old dear’s washing-line; no doubt to create together some act of carnal patriotism in the night sky, in memory of the world wars that have grown out of fashion...

 

I was again stirred from my dusk-dreaming, only to find that my friendly bank manager was searching through his waste paper bin. He had it upon his desk, one of its jagged corners scoring the flesh of the work surface. He seemed desperate to find something or other. A scrunched up ball of paper. Evidently, I’d been let off the hook, at least for a while, so I returned to the back of my mind, where I felt safest...

 

I returned to the front parlour of candleflame and corpse. This time, I could see the faint ringworm blotches of moulder. The patches were randomly situated, one faintly outlined in bottle green upon the cheek, others in close fester around the knuckle joints of the left hand and a particularly large one on the sole of his bare right foot, made up of inflamed pores and overnourished goose pimples, threatening to turn all the colours that a rainbow disowned. The chest still rose and fell with the rhythm of the flickering waxlight, but I suspected it was that sluggish pulse inherent in body decay which caused this mockery of life...

 

“Ah, I’ve found it, Mr White. I thought I’d filed it there.”

 

He replaced the bin under his desk with a flourish, and started unscrewing the paper he’d retrieved. I guessed it must be some computerised rubbish confirming that I was uncreditworthy, because I’d once defaulted with a company that sent me assorted stamps through the post, as a result of answering an advert in the Beano comic. Who wanted ten identical editions of a Spanish stamp hearing the moustachioed features of an old geezer who looked more like my late Dad than was good for him, anyway?

 

Out of the window, I could see a whole fleet of ladies’ frilly underwear sailing into the dark blow of the night.

 

I decided: Why the hell do I need money in a dream anyway? I stormed from the interview room, leaving a bemused pile of bespectacled chunky green slime trying to slither from the chair into the gaping confines of the wastepaper bin carefully placed to receive him.

 

Only the jewelry retained any sort of integrity...

 

 

 

(Mind’s Eye 1990)

 

 

INCHWARE

 

 

 

I hardly recognised the lady. In her finery, she looked nicer than she did when I first saw her in the lounge bar of the Bell and Steelyard. On that occasion, the hastily thrown on clothes that she had automatically found at the forefront of her wardrobe had done her no justice at all. Tonight, however, she was obviously putting on an effort for me.

 

‘This is a much better place, isn’t it?’ I said, even before sitting down. My insistence on our first official date being at a venue different from that for the original off-chance encounter was based on a gut feeling that relationships could take no chances.

 

In retrospect, I should have been surprised at her willingness to wait for me in a pub, whilst still alone. Most women of my acquaintance would ensure they were later than the man, so as to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. Something I took for granted.

 

‘Never tried this one before.’ The lady’s reply was instantaneous. She nervously weighed the back of her bouffon.

 

‘I see you’ve already got yourself a drink.’ I nodded towards the half drunk remains of a fluid that looked like undiluted bleach at the bottom of a tumbler. ‘I’m not late, am I?’ I added during a pause for afterthought.

 

‘No ... no. It’s just that it’s raining outside.’

 

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ My face was large and I wore whiskers to cut down on the bare frontage. My old best grey suit cut into my behind proving, if nothing else did, that I was not in the same shape as when I was younger. I’d tried to liven up the ensemble with a floral tie. The white ankle socks you couldn’t see: my legs must have grown shorter over the years, too; whilst the flairs had grown wider, by the look of them. I felt self-conscious of my spectacles, like peering through a porthole in a ship. Without another word, I turned to the bar where I intended to obtain a drink for myself. I was not in the mood for one, but even I understood that you wouldn’t be welcome to sit down in a pub without one. I should have brought a thermos of tea and some plastic cups. It cost more than a bomb to buy even a soft drink in a place like that. A number of pubs have now started to sell cups of coffee but, even so, you felt a wally asking for one from a blousy girl whose only skill in life was pulling pints. I had chosen this pub because the clientele was customarily well dressed. You could tell a lot from a person’s garb. However, I was perturbed to discover that I had forgotten that the staff were definitely more than one cut below the average punter. A surly individual, whom I understood to be the manager, scowled, as I approached the bar. His suit did not seem to have had even the lick of an iron for several wearings. The tie was ill-knotted, more a Y than a small Q. His face was only something you could write to doctors about (preferably skin specialists). The manner of his service made me wonder if I’d done something wrong. Instinctively, I looked round to see if I’d soiled the carpet, quickly realising it was already one huge horizontal wall-to-wall dog dirt. The drink he poured out for me was flat. When I complained, he said it was not meant to be fizzy and, even if it was, it’d probably give me wind. I scowled back - a bit late in the day, but I hope he got the point. My mother always told me that you can say more with the face than ever your tongue can get round. If I say so myself, I’ve a pretty rum selection of old-fashioned looks for all eventualities. Not waiting to witness him reeling back on the balls of his feet at the severity of my cutting expression, I turned my back on the little downsquirt and made for the table where I expected the lady, my date, still to be sitting.

 

She was.

 

But who was that with her? Didn’t look like me. At least I’ve got some dress sense.

 

‘Are you going to introduce me?’ I cannot recall exactly which of the three of us said that. Three of us? Three of me? Three of them? Three of you? Three of her? Three of him? All seemed to ring untrue. Whatever the case, one of the ladies (or both?) had an escort for the evening, so I left without causing any trouble. I don’t suppose, in the event, that ugly customer of a pub manager would have stood for any nonsense. Looking back, that word seemed to make sense of the whole affair.

 

 

(Odyssey 1991)

LONELY HEARTS

 

 

 

 

‘It would have been a pleasure to meet you, given the chance.’ I said it again to myself - and then over and over to see if it made any more sense the next time.

 

I was due to encounter her -... yes, quite accidentally the day after tomorrow. I already knew what her name was to be.

 

The sad problems remained, however. Forgetting you afterwards. Denying the pleasure.

 

 

(Dreams & Nightmares 1995)