Freighted By Frights

         

         

          FREIGHTED BY FRIGHTS ....

by Gordon Lewis and D.F.Lewis.

         

          There was something about the cut of the man that struck a chord of memory, harkening back to a brotherhood that some called warfare. Even the back of the man’s head looked familiar. Walking some 25 yards behind the man in question, Kevin reasoned it couldn’t be who he thought it was. Not only did they originate from different parts of the British Isles, Kevin had heard Sam Morrison had emigrated to Canada soon after his discharge from the army.

          Over twenty years had passed since he had seen the back of Sam’s head on the parade ground of an Aldershot barracks at the beginning of National Service. Not a complete waste of time for Kevin, since gaining experience in the Royal Corps of Signals, had been instrumental in placing him in a very good job with a major telecommunications company.

          Kevin was sure his memory wasn’t playing tricks as he increased his pace so to catch up with man, who he was sure was his old mate Sam. Reaching his side he tapped him on the shoulder to say:

          “Hello Sam you old devil, where have you sprung from?”

          It was indeed Sam Morrison that turned to see Kevin — but had he only seen his face from a distance, he would have passed him by as a stranger. But at close range it was the eyes, there was something about the eyes that told Kevin he hadn’t been wrong. But the face had altered. It was weather­beaten, etched with worry lines as well those of premature aging.

          For a suspended moment of time they stared at each other until Kevin spoke again:

          “It is me, Sam...Kevin... Kevin Courtland, surely you remember Aldershot twenty years ago, we were in the same squad... Infantry training… you remember...”

          Sudden recognition dawned on Sam’s face... “Kevin... Ginger Courtland that ever was. Is it really you?” The worry lines disappeared as his face lit up at the sight of an old mate from his past life.

          “If I had one wish Sam, it would be to meet you at this precise moment. I am a stranger here and in desperate need to speak to someone like you. My father died recently — they say he took his own life, something I am convinced he would never do, there has to be some other reason for his death… again I say he would not have committed suicide, never in a million years.” Kevin spoke these words quietly in measured tones. Amost like an automaton.

          The death of Kevin’s father was in fact the reason for his presence in this strange town — off the beaten track in a part of the country sparsely populated by smallholders. The connection was tenuous but Kevin felt drawn here...

          “Hey! ‘Kevin’ seems more natural than ‘Ginger’.” Sam laughed, the lines on his face returning, but this time as laughter ones. “Well, your hair’s more grey than ginger. One should not fight Middle Age, but embrace it...”

          Kevin laughed in tune with the rather insulting comment as soon as he realised his old National Service pal was still the same carefree bloke, albeit scarred by time’s passing.

          Shoulder to shoulder, they headed for the nearest pub. Then esconced in the chimney corner of a rather old-fashioned pub, with two bottles of lager being rather youthfully drunk from the necks, Sam asked:

          “You say your father killed himself, Ginger?”

          “So they say. That was the Coroner’s verdict, But I have my doubts.”

          “It’s obviously draining you, because it’s the first thing you actually mentioned to me after meeting up after all these years!”

          “Yes, I suppose it is strange, Sam, me blurting that out, even before we had chance to exchange pleasantries.”

          “It was almost as if you expected to meet me here and you had your statement prepared...”

          “Blimey! You’ve hit the nail on the head. I’m not even sure what I’m doing in this part of the country. Dad had a cousin a few miles from here who ran a vegetable farm and a retail outlet. I think my father spent some of his school holidays there.”

          “You’re not sure?”

          “No. But that’s enough about my tale of woe, Sam. What’s been happening to you since we last met? I thought you’d left the country.”

          Kevin studied Sam’s eyes. They told a thousand stories. But only one of them would turn out to be important.

          “It doesn’t seem like twenty years since we parted company, Kevin — though when I think of my experiences since our days in the army, I suppose quite a lot has happened. There’s not a lot to tell that is exciting enough. I did leave the country, I tried my luck in Canada for a number of years, it was too bloody cold for my liking, especially after our tour in the Middle East. I stuck it out though, there was nothing much I could do about it really. Then fate took a hand, I had to return to England for family reasons. My father died, but not in circumstances such as yours. He had made me his sole heir, and I have to say his legacy surprised me somewhat. But there was a proviso — I had to carry on the business he left and take responsibility for my mother’s well being. He had had some luck with investments, sank his money in a business venture which flourished somewhat. It runs itself — more or less. I leave it all to an excellent manager and a small staff of good workers — though I keep a watchful eye on the business, the reins are in my hands, so to speak... Agricultural supplies is our main source of business, though I personally dabble in stocks and shares — successfully I might add, following in my Dad’s footsteps I suppose. Apart from that I live a quiet life, I never married, though I’ve had my moments — seems most of the women I met didn’t quite come up to my expectations. But that’s enough about me too, it seems the pressing business is the suspicions you have about your father’s death... Do you think somebody had a hand in his death? Anything I can do to help? Time and money mean nothing. I know this locality like the back of my hand. What exactly do you intend to do whilst you are here?”

          “Thanks Sam,” said Kevin. “Perhaps you know my Dad’s cousin. His name is Courtland too — Tom Courtland, as far as I know he used to grow horticultural items… sold the results of his labour in a farm shop adjoining his land.”

          “I never thought to connect you with that scallywag, wouldn’t trust him with anything, dropped him off our customer list years ago. He still has the place though, must get his supplies from somewhere I guess. His holdings are near here, a few miles to the West, near a village called Furness. I’ll give you a lift out there if you like, my car is in a nearby car-park — just around the corner. I’d better not have any more of this strong lager though, a bit of all right isn’t it? I hope we have time later to continue with our reunion. Come drink up, I’ll drive you out to old Courtland’s place, though I’m sure he won’t be very pleased to see me... or you perhaps...?”

          Both Sam and Kevin were silent for a while. The strangely stilted conversation had lasted for a long time but only certain aspects of it would be remembered, those sections which carried suspicions and freighted frights. These emotions, however, at that stage in the pub, were not even sown let alone reaped... when empty beer bottles were collected by a ginger-headed barmaid. She was called Moose — a pet name given to her by her grandfather because of the outlandish hair-style sticking up (he said) like antlers! Moose watched the two men leave and she shrugged. All she’d overheard were the pleasantries and small talk rather than a story about suspicious frights. Had she heard more, she may have interrupted with additional information of her own: legends in the town which had done the rounds in her infancy but later told to her by the same grandfather who had laughed at her hair-style.

         

         

          The sun was low as clouds drifted towards it from the sky’s zenith, creating a curdled egg yolk of dusk. The land was stubbled with meaningless hedgerows, meaningless because they seemed to divide nothing from nothing, except derelict hen-runs. Here and there were farmhouses, some dully lit where the shutters were not pulled sufficiently tight, others with yawning gaps where roof met gutters. The wind soughed, tugging at the flickering top-knots of two dark shapes as they strode southwards towards a destination which both seemed to hope would stay at its due distance… judging by their zig-zagging route. Mumbles could be heard, but nothing of any possible meaning could be gleaned from between the sounds of night creatures hooting and braying.

          Then, suddenly, given the best vantage point, one could glimpse, just above their shoulders, a more substantial outhouse, flanked by thatched stables, with light shafting out to carve a path for any who should dare approach it. They only half-noticed these buildings, since the lagers Sam and Kevin had imbibed had further loosened the tongues of these two recently united friends. Yet their conversation was even less memorable, less likely even to tease let alone scare.

          The drive from the small market town of Bluntstone had been taken leisurely, stopping on occasion to take in the scenery that really needed to be looked at, not simply as passing landscape. Sam stopped the car finally in a small lay-by some hundred yards or so from the large village of Furness for a more lengthy tete-a-tete. During this discourse Sam told Kevin that he was not really the biological son of the father he spoke about. It wasn’t until the death of the man who adopted him, giving him his name of Samuel Morrison, did the truth emerge about his true origin. Not that there was a lot to tell except that he was a foundling child left on the steps of the vicarage back in Bluntstone. Though Sam had tried to find his true biological parents, all his efforts had been doomed to failure. The scrap of humanity in a cardboard box was all there was, not a shred of evidence to go further back… in the end Sam had just accepted that his parents were the Morrisons.

          They left the car to walk the short distance to the village, by this time it was late afternoon, a gathering dusk was spreading over the land. What were they doing there? They felt as if they were walking in circles There was no real reason to suppose that Tom Courtland could shed light on the mysterious death of his cousin, Kevin’s father... Kevin was clutching at straws, this visit to a distant relation was to tidy up loose ends. He had to find out if his father had visited his cousin prior to his body being found dead at the foot of the cliffs some miles up the coast from Furness, his broken body identified by papers he carried, but nothing to give reason to his flinging himself to the rocks below the cliff.

          Kevin and Sam eventually arrived again at the track leading to Tom Courtland’s run down old farmhouse until they came to the side road where once stood a farm shop... now just blank windows met their gaze. The outhouse looked in a high state of disrepair with no sign of life. This time the thatched stables gave out bleating noises not unlike a cross between creatures of feather and fur.

          It seemed as if they were on a fool’s errand, and Kevin said to his friend, “I thought you implied that Tom Courtland was still trading, we are not going to find any thing out here. Even his stables have been taken over by wild animals and squawking chickens by the sound of it!”

          Sam stood there, immobile for a while, then he turned to the house, he muttered with a conspiratorial whisper:

          “I’ve got a feeling we are being watched, I’m sure I caught sight of someone up at the bedroom window of the house.”

          Inheritances and legacies were things that were in the blood as well as in solid objects of value. Both Sam and Kevin felt this — but not in so many words — as the face behind the crazed pane was younger than Tom Courtland could possibly be imagined to be — with a bestial cast that anyone should try and conceal if they wish to be considered of human stock. It was Tom, but equally, it was not Tom at all. The bright ginger hair should have turned grey by now. The eyes sparkled, the nose was a ploughshare. And all this was actually seen in deepening dusk and amid the distances of the flat scrubland! Sight was now so sharp-edged.

          No cliffs around here for an easy escape from life, thought Kevin.

          Except the sheer sides of the universal mind, echoed a thought Sam could not prevent himself from thinking.

          Sam put his arm round Kevin’s shoulder, as if to comfort him. And the vision of the windowface vanished. Tom Courtland must be dead himself, they both surmised. They did not even bother to explore further. The stables, too, would hide forever what they might have contained.

         

          Sam and Kevin indulged in crazy pub talk — so as to avoid concerns both felt. They stared eyeball to eyeball over two more bottlenecks. There was a resonance between them beyond friendship, even beyond kinship.

          Moose shuffled over and smiled cutely, then a wicked smile beneath her outlandish ginger thatch of hair. And both men did not need to wonder whether she was a Courtland, too… dyed though her hair was now seemed to be.

          Inheritances and legacies were evidently mysteries beyond even procreation. Any permutations of a thousand, nay, a million stories, making one.

          Foundlings, changelings and other hybrids of paternity eventually crystallised into mutual brotherhoods that were more than just fighting shoulder to shoulder in those wars humanity managed, in its wisdom, to populate with a mock common enemy. Moose’s departing smile was mistaken for a wince; the two men, now nameless, smiled, too, their eyes glistening...

          Arm in arm, they left the pub, singing:-

                  “Frights and feathers and fathers and fur,

                    Nights that brothers’ bloods do blur...

         

          Their songs echoed off into the distance as Moose slipped the latch, ready for bed, to dream of Red Indians and other non-sequiturs. She knew, however, that the Universal Father was a changeling Himself. Or at least a supicion.

         

         

         

         

          THE END.

         

Foxflesh

I must tell you of the time that I first came to the Clockhouse Mount - a year last Spring, I think it was, friend. Do you know the place? Yes, it's in the outer South London suberbs, in Surrey really, but you have to climb along a very long hill out of Cullesdon and when you get there, you see the Green, fronting a run-down parade of shops and, further over, the "Pail of Water". Mrs. Dobb, the landlady of the Pail, she knows all the gossip of the Mount. About the Sawdusts of Number 4 Rich Land: Jackie Sawdust once blew his nose, you know, in public view, he blew it so hard that he just stared into his handkerchief not knowing it was his brain wriggling there, he stared just a few moments, yep, before he dropped down dead. About the Clerkes of Long Land: their younger son was levanted by the Surrey press gangs for labour in far off spice fields. About the losers and the winners of the terrible family feuds. About this and about that...

There is a golf-course on one side, some other cul-de-sacs leading to small-holdings and desolate fields of staring horses, tangled woods and deadfalls, overgrown bomb-holes and the rusty discards of shortly forgotten squabbles. You know, they say that the clouds swag and belly heavier over the council roofs of Clockhouse Mount... and, as I plodded up, that day, in the hope of my first homely tankard at the Pail, large drops spattered from a previously clear sky. Even at noon, dusk was gathering itself and some laggard golfers were standing along the side of the road holding their clubs like spears, making funny faces beneath their tartan berets and wriggling their chequered trousers as if in some crazy fashion show. They would soon be off, no doubt, before the light had finally disappeared.

I looked across at the downbeat parade and saw that the shops had shut, not for lunch as I had thought, but because I, a stranger, had loomed up from Cullesdon and they feared what they considered to be my unwholesome custom. I shivered for had the Pail, too, locked its lounge and saloon doors? The locals were inside, apparently persuading Mrs. Dobb to let them have further illicit flagons of the home-made brew, as I forced an entry through an unoiled latch-door. The bobbled heads looked up, scowls muttering across their faces, and one signalled for me to sheer off.

"Dear Sackalive!" cried Mrs. Dobb, from behind the bar, a friendlier aspect indeed appearing to fleet across her countenance. "I didn't think you'd make it".

"By Cock!" I replied, banging my feet on the floor, "That was a long walk up from the town."

Meantime the locals gathered closer to me and one even fingered my turn-ups in some strange rite of inspection. I looked at the posters and the customary wall-scrawl, to see if this was indeed the day of the darts match that I had been promised. But, no - imagine my despondency, when I saw incomprehensible messages pertaining to a Wicca Meet, destined for that very night ... and further bills bearing such things I cannot now spell - Cuthloo, Shib-Shubbing in the snug, Yogger-Nogging in the saloon and, what was it, an outing at the weekend to the Goat of a Thousand Young for a turdle-eating competition.

I skipped pretty niftily from the pub, for, as they say, you shouldn't turn a heavy stone if something's moving it from underneath.

I ran ... but it was difficult, for what I had thought originally to be rain was in fact now great bulbs of bursting liquid cascading from, not clouds, but shifting, floating monsters in the sky. They extended and retracted, in turn, long arms of blackness, from several interlocked central bodies and, if I were religious, the nearest I could get to describing them would be a hell's brood, an overnourished confluxion of sky and foxflesh betokening the fall of old disgraced gods ... and several smaller versions were creeping over the brims of council roofs...

I ran ... but golfers and pub locals surrounded me. One, of the name Tokkmaster Clerke, as he later told me, wielded a massive rutted file, its frightful crenellations glinting in the flashing of the wings in the sky. I was held fast by one whose nose dripped as Tokkmaster moved the file across my skull. At first, my hair fell away in lumps and dropped to the ground, followed by my skin. He grated it up and down, scratched, sawed, and ground. I could feel the hideous vibrations, reverberations stunning and splitting my head. My skull scrunched. My teeth were on edge, as the grating continued, as he honed my bone. The file stropped and serrated my pure white skull. It ground and rasped. Against the grain. Gashed and scored. Etched and furrowed. Rutted. Fretted and chafed. Scrubbed and gnawed. Eroded and Kneaded.......

* * * *

I ill recall must of that but I live now with the Sawdusts of Clockhouse Mount, and they call me Jackie... They make me worship the great old gods of the Surrey Badlands and the Southern Mysteries... The top of my head is like the skin of cold stew, so I now always have to wear a hat: Mrs. Dobb made it, kindly, out of vinegar & brown paper... and the filing Clerke, he says he's my pal now.


Published 'Dagon' 1987

Ogthrod Ai'f Geb'l

(Dedicated to Rachel Mildeyes who stayed in the ladies only carriage forever.)



Each morning, Michael had to change at Clapham Junction for Victoria.

It was well known that Victoria had been the last station to welcome steam trains into their platforms, when all the other terminals worth their salt had banned them, following the influx of diesel and electric. But Michael knew that there was still a station at least somewhere which allowed in steam trains at the dead of night, so that they could shunt quietly to their heart's content . . . as long as they kept their funnel-smoke to a minimum, gagged their hissing, deepened their whistles and coupled on tiptoes.

Day-dreaming can be a disease. Michael tried to shake it off as he crossed from platform to platform. But, then, the tannoys would take up their cries, in a language far beyond the comprehension of the common-or-garden commuter.

It often sounded like:

"OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L - EE'H YOG SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!"

Or worse.

Michael seemed to be the only one to understand the messages; the others, clasping their cases and umbrellas for grim life, followed him across the foot-bridge so that they could catch the correct train. And it always came in disguise: bearing the strange Network South logo and, of all things, sliding doors, as if it were an underground train! Where were the leather tongues on the windows? The corridors? The third class carriages? The green sticker denoting the ladies only carriage? And where was the steam billowing into his face like curdling mists of coal-dust becoming forgotten fulsome night?

Day-dreaming again? He shrugged, stepped off the platform and settled into the smoking section. Except the train was only just arriving, and his bones would soon crunch upon the long teeth of the silver runners and upon the brown gums of the sleepers, his flesh to bed red between.

He heard the tannoy:

"This is Clapham Junction, This is Clapham Junction, Gateway to the North, This train is for Victoria own-le..." And so on, interminably, becoming shriller and shriller.

Pity none of the words made sense to him. So, having abandoned day-dreaming for good (or ill), he shrugged with a shudder and travelled on to his office job further north.



Published 'Crypt of Cthulhu' 1992

Cathedrals in the Clouds

I suddenly felt an illness creeping up on me unawares. When I noticed the first jolt, a question went through my head as to the nature of the illness. One from within or out? The next thing that went through my head, a split second later, was an exocet missile of a brain tumour.

"You don't look at all well, ducks," said a little old lady who sat knitting near me in the pub. I was a local and, being in my usual seat underneath the moose-head trophy on the wall, everybody knew who I was.

"God, whatever's the matter with Mick?" said one.

'Too much of the bent arm, I dare say," said another.

"Blimey, Mick's gone all peculiar, and, look, the top of his head has blown off," said yet another, with a degree of surprise in his voice.

The pub landlord had by now left his favourite spot behind the bar where the optics gleamed and most of the money changed hands. He scowled at the mess on the carpet. Apparently it was quite all right to litter his precious carpet with beer-swill and dog-ends, but my headful of slime was unacceptable.

"Clear that up, Mick!" he snorted.

I could not budge an inch and stared sightlessly straight through the landlord as if he were dead. The pub was pulled down not long afterwards, to make room for St Paul's Cathedral - the one which they describe in the history books. My son's examination course left an opening for its construction sometime between 1650 and 1712, in case it later became a catalyst in the onrush of reality. But as it didn't, my son, like everyone else, was unaware of the Cathedral's existence until at least another window of opportunity presented itself on the night of the Millennial Lottery. I told him that St Paul's Cathedral was an epitaph to my book, a book that died even before I wrote it - as if one existence could salute another non-existence across the intervening realities.

"Why didn't you write your book, Dad?" he asked me.

"Because I had my head blown off in the First World War."

The landlord returned behind the bar, smirking as he pulled pints watered down with the produce of his own benders. The dear little old lady was gathering up what looked like a curdled cat's cradle of an exploded mind and she forthwith proceeded to stir it into a dome shape with her needles. My son sat grinning in the customary place under the moose-head. So, everybody thought it must be me. Meanwhile, Mick was building clouds.

(Published 'End of the Millennium' 1997)

Kickstart A Kid

Published 'End Of The Millenium' 1997                    

 

  

 

 

 

 

                It was intended to be the bash to end all bashes.

 

 

 

                Every school had at least one bully, some a lot more  -  nasty pieces of work in the main.  Their only pleasure in life was dealing out physical and mental torment to those younger or smaller or prettier than themselves, taking the minor authority granted to them by teachers (who should have known better) and magnifying it beyond all recognition  -  until they thought they could tweak even the big red drinker's nose of the headmaster himself.  They stood in a row upon the stage, during morning assembly, arms folded, long canes angled outwards, ensuring the lessons were read ... and then damn well learned!

 

 

 

                Every bully worth his salt and pepper had arrived at their Convention which was being held in a four star hotel near Kidderminster.  They didn't want to cause a shortage of ordeals during school time, so they had arranged the event for half-term and this must have been the only time they did anything by half measures.

 

 

 

                The Convention was not going to be a doddle.  There were seminars and tutorials to be attended on such topics as THE TENDEREST SPOT AND HOW TO FIND IT and SIX OF THE BEST, ARE THEY GOOD ENOUGH?  The latter was sparsely attended, because bullies couldn't count more than the fingers on one hand, in any event.  There were also sessions of INTER-BULLYING where macho masochism was even more the flavour of the week than the school canteen's left-over banana splodge.

 

 

 

                The actual lectures were given by some bullies who were pretty long in the tooth, having continued in the school Remove under the guise of needing remedial attention to their scholarly activities, but, in truth, retained for their "leadership" qualities ... with a payment of a fee from the tuck-shop profits, of course, plus a free sherbet dip every third Thursday.

 

 

 

                One particularly hard-nosed Cabal had been in session for most of the night, laying down seed-beds of potential fag bashing ... such as toasting their boy-slaves' bums on roaring study fires and then debating the pro's and con's of spreading butter over them.

 

 

 

                "Butter'll only serve to ease the pain."

 

 

 

                "Yes, but salted butter makes them smart."

 

 

 

                "Blimey, that's the teachers' job to make them smart."

 

 

 

                "Well, we need to give those kids a kickstart in life..."

 

 

 

                "Yes, I get my slave to ride in front on my tandem bike  -  each jackboot jab on his tender arse makes him pedal a good deal harder."

 

 

 

                The bullies all ended up speaking at once, as ideas fell over each other in the rush to evacuate the nasty minds that housed them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                At the official Convention dinner, the head prefect at the top table was the finest example of Bullyship that made even the other bullies quake in their hob-nailed hush-puppies.  This was the aged Flashman himself, still thriving on the excesses of the original Tom Brown's Schooldays japes.  He left scorch-marks on you by simply staring.  Even in the late tewentieth century, he cut such a fine figure, some thought he must keep an oil painting of a shrivelled-up monster in his loft.

 

 

 

                The toast-master banged a sledge-hammer on the voodoo doll of a snotty-nosed fresher and prayed silence for Grace.

 

 

 

                Flashman's voice then boomed across the mock refectory, as the other bullies rattled their tin plates on the special wooden trestle-tables which the hotel management had seen fit to import as a mishumoured gimmick.  Suddenly, he stopped short amid a deathly hush, since one of the lesser bullies had approached him, platter and ladle in hand.  There was hardened treacle and yellow-manker custard around his mouth like impetigo scabs.  The others oohed and aahed at his cheek  -  they, too, had not particularly relished the bogies in batter starter but, even so, they wouldn't've dared cross a Billy Bunter with an Oliver Twist...

 

 

 

                "I want posh hotel grub, Flashman", the yob whined.

 

 

 

                Flashman passed through various stages of rage, not chronologically, but all in one go, ranging from minor irritation of a flea-bite to the mindless fury of a bloated Hitler faltering at the last hurdle of world domination.  He sprouted long black springy hairs from his eyebrows and false teeth from his nostrils  -  the feet flattened out, became plates of seething butcher's rubble  -  his arms swung like huge timeless pendula and then flailed wildly as the temper reached the parts ordinary anger couldn't reach  -  and the painting in the loft turned back to the handsome epitome of history's heroism.  The horrendous mind that had lived like a white-nippled slug inside the fine golden shell of manly skin poked out its scummy head, mouthing the vilest obscenities made incarnate.

 

 

 

                The other bullies didn't finish their annual dinner (the lumpy custard had turned a violent shade of snot green, in any event) and went back to their aristocratic parents on their sad wobbling tandems, each with one narrow saddle prizing open the bullies' buttocks and the other in front empty of anything but unrequited love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in the darkened school, the headmaster wept into his gin, losing his nose in the process amid the clunking ice cubes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fanblade Eight

This fable truly does not exist at all. Each wing tangles on the next wing like a round bird crashing to the ground without the help of gravity. Hiver Jawn dreams of a long bird - a millipede with its legs broken in the back-grinding of teeth thinking each was a juicy chicken wing. Cooking is the only means to make something become what it should be. Over-cook this fable and you get something that's underground.

The Widower
THE WIDOWER


Published ‘Among The Ruins’ 1997


I was convinced she would one day marry a brutish good-for-nothing if she didn’t become my wife. So, for her sake, in a moment of selflessness, I asked for her hand. Indeed, I began to love her more than I could love any other, but could it be the true love that many said to have experienced? Yesterday not only did everybody in the street have their thumb and index finger as far apart as possible, but even domes seemed to be pyramids and the tops of chimneys were sunk to the waist in brick bubbles. But last night she returned to haunt me. I should never have started thinking about her again, because such thoughts made me guilty of resurrecting her.

For months I slept alone in the double bed we had once shared, recalling the way she had slid the sheet’s lip up and down, playing peeky-boo with me and rubbing my feet with hers. Even in the pitch darkness which we both had cherished during many a sleepless hour together, I had managed to discern her half of the bed rising up in even pitchier, sootier darkness. I had never allowed her to untwirl my pyjama cord and the fly had already been sewn up. Love for me then was simple cuddling. She had never complained, only rubbed harder with her feet.

Ona was her name. She told me of a father who never said anything, only grunted, having once interfered with her. The psychology was beyond me, but it confirmed my belief that marriage to anybody else but me would have been her ultimate nightmare, worse than any possible father with doubtful leanings, but, on the other hand, wasn’t a spouse merely an idealized reflection of the respective parent?

So, last night, Ona returned. In the darkness, I saw the tossing shape beside me, making tears come to my eyes - real tears, not the ones I used to wet my face with in the en suite bathroom. The deepest agony was finding no night smile. Yet, how could any credence be placed in ghosts, especially those that pretended to exist by kicking up bedcovers at the dead of night? They were the worst kind of ghost, because existence was a foul crime if such existence was impossible. My only weapon against ghosts was the disbelief in ghosts. Giving them the sense of satisfaction in your belief in their existence would make them into monsters far worse than ghosts could ever become. With this logical response, I ignored Ona’s pleas for my acknowledgment of her presence. I simply turned over in the bed as I often did following marital squabbles in the early days. My wrenching sobs soon petered out and, upon turning back, I discovered there was nothing in which to disbelieve, in any case.

Today, I reconciled for the first time the exact circumstances of Ona’s death. I must have always known that I would eventually reach such a crunch point. After all, a crunch was what it was. An amazing coincidence of converging misfortunes, her being in the street, slipping the Yale key into our front door, when the chimneystack collapsed upon her with no prior warning. There wasn’t even any wind. Paradoxically, those sort of accidents made belief in God’s existence easier, which in itself was a farfetched idea at the best of times. Indeed the act of existence itself implied He must be a bad God.

I heard Ona’s single scream, cut off in half blast. I was in the front room, channel-hopping on the T.V. and I literally felt the place shudder, followed by the scream less than a split second later. I know the feeling will stay with me forever, that loathsome cataclysmic sickness, because I must have loved her after all. So, hindsight get thee hence! My earlier presumption of it being for her sake that I took her from the emotional catchment area of other men was all very well, but fundamentally I loved her madly. To hear her stifled scream and then be faced with the red-tinged splinters poking through the low denier tights, henbones that the rubble had pushed down from the ribcage via the belly, made me love her even more - if that were possible. I knelt in prayer and kissed the feet that had once rubbed so tenderly against mine, ignoring pointblank all the moon-eyed bastard bystanders, none of whom had thought of calling the ambulance men.

In my heart, I knew she was dead. I blamed the Building Society surveyor. Madness often struck at times like that. I felt like going round to his high faluting house in the suburbs (if I’d known the correct address) and doing him the direst mischief imaginable. If not him, the people who palmed the house off on us. Or the Estate Agent himself, who was a greasy spiv. The way he showed us the photograph of the house back in his office - yuk! He had it at an angle, holding it between thumb and index finger. Pointing to the chimney stacks. Ona said he probably tricked his wife out of the housekeeping he allowed her. Yet, reliving that day did some good. The thing masquerading as my dead wife failed to return for ages - and soon my thoughts petered out - much as they petered in.

I must have needed to admit to myself the cruel details of the accident. Accident? I still believed someone pushed the chimney off the roof. Perhaps the husband she would have married if it had not been for me pre-empting. Whereas she had never told me if her father was still alive, I had always assumed he was dead and I did not push her into giving me any gory details of her past with him as a father. The word “interfere” seemed to cover a multitude of sins.

So, yes, she returned last night. Ona for real this time, complete with night smile. The guise of ghost was not even viable for someone as dead as she. I untwirled the cord voluntarily, even before she had the chance to ask me. Much easier with her dead. She my widow, because I was the widowing one, a widower being one who widowed, like a winnower was one who winnowed. And so much better to believe in the dead being able to return than having wet dreams on one’s own. Ona’d come again, given half the chance, dressed as a chimneysweep, so I wouldn’t see her, bar the spiky darkness. And my Ona would become more than a mere faith called Onanism.

Remote controls could channel-hop solo, its pure remoteness tantamount to autonomy. I even had thoughts that the damn thing could take clawhold on the TV aerials, perched so haphazardly on the chimneys. The central heating began to hum all night now with the onset of cold weather. I couldn’t bear too many bedcovers - gave me a case of Russian-doll claustrophobia. Petering in and out could never be complete. Not even death was dreamless. A corpse tossing.

Cartwheel Crazy

 

He liked to be called Cartwheel Crazy for personal as well as obvious reasons: a budding clown who combined fast clockwise somersaults with a cheeky chappy wit, subtle as well as slapstick.  He often wore a garish wartime yellow suit that had frayed at the cuffs and turn-ups, hanging on his slender frame with a bagginess that his father had passed down to him without the body to fit it.  

Being, as he thought, quite a character, Cartwheel Crazy had an ambition to enter the Big Brother House and become one of those jugglers of antics and outbursts who depended on the huge audience being unable to differentiate between truth and fiction.  Not that he went as far as that in his thoughts. Or in so many words. He simply wanted to big himself up and he thought he had the capacity for gimmick and for furthering his chances in the roulette of modern life.  He knew, at least, he had the ghost of a chance.

"If you’re crazy, why not make craziness an asset rather than a drawback?" he asked himself, in the hearing of his Mum who merely continued reading her celebrity magazine as she humoured her son with an unknowing smile.  Yet, his chosen nickname as a whole was a bit of a mouthful: crazy in itself.  You couldn’t imagine strangers and potential viewers to ‘Big Brother’ and fellow contestants on the programme using ‘Cartwheel Crazy’ as  a name in their day-to-day speech either to his face or behind his back.  They would need to shorten it somehow.  Carty? Weelzy? Carzy?  None of the shortenings seemed right.  Indeed, most of his friends and associates in his home town had managed to articulate the whole nickname for many years in their conversation, so why not strangers?  Not strangers, for long.  Being on ‘Big Brother’ would soon bring many friends or enemies from the midst of strangers.  They would have to lump his name.

So, Cartwheel Crazy he remained.

He misunderstood the eligibility process, believing, as part of his craziness, that he needed votes of confidence, proposers and seconders, from his friends and neighbours, so as to get on to the programme.  He failed to realise that he needed to attend one of the many nationwide auditions along with the thousands of other budding contestants.  He sent out several letters requesting support from the people he knew personally, including neighbours, local shopkeepers, his relations, old schoolfriends and some of those likely lads he knew down the pub.  The man in an brown overall at the corner shop – who had never watched ‘Big Brother’ and knew very little about it – suggested Cartwheel Crazy put an advert in his shop window, so Cartwheel Crazy wrote out a card and pinned it up along with the adverts for secondhand prams, flats to let and services to be rendered.

BIG BROTHER HOPEFUL OFFERS SERVICES FOR SUPPORT.  PLEASE CONTACT CARTWHEEL CRAZY and there followed his address which, for security reasons, is not shown here.

However, he soon realised – after accosting other proposed supporters – that this was not really the way to do it.  He needed an act, a sense of the subtle differences between pride and humility, fame and infamy, reality and unreality and, above all, comedy and tragedy.  Not only their differences, but also the ways in which they blended each with each. 

And then he needed to take that ‘act’, hone it, perfect it, take it before others, hone it again, perfect it again, then parade it at the optimum in a carefully targeted moment in a line of serendipities affecting the individual destinies and sensibilities of each member of the selection panel as well as of himself.  He had only one throw of the dice.  Only one ghost of a chance.

Meanwhile, as the day of the all-blaring, all-shouting 'Big Brother' audition circus in Cartwheel Crazy’s town approached, he received an unexpected visitor at home. His Mum was out with her two cronies, Mrs Mummerset and Mrs Milledges.  The three Mums he called them.  And, in view of his aloneness in the house, Cartwheel Crazy was a bit unsure whether to invite the stranger in or not.  But as this was a nice-looking young man whose voice sounded like the commentator who did the voice-over for 'Big Brother' round-up programmes each evening, Cartwheel Crazy decided to let him in.  The man must have read his card in the corner shop window.

“Two eh em ... the housemates are all awake...”  The man spoke as if he were about to make a long speech, while inspecting the surfaces in the kitchen where Cartwheel Crazy had led him to make a cup of tea, for one thing, and to allow possible avenues of escape, for another, should this man be a stranger dangerous to know, such as his Mum had always warned him that many strangers were.

“I’m sorry, I should have taken the card out of the window.  It was a bit of a misunderstanding on my part.”

The man coughed to clear his throat and continued: “Cartwheel Crazy is in the kitchen entertaining a stranger...”

Suddenly, there was a loud voice, belonging neither to Cartwheel Crazy nor to the visitor, one that resonated lugubriously: “This is Big Brother.  Will Cartwheel Crazy come to the waking-room.”

“Will he go, or will he stay,” said the slowly fading man with the voice-over, “Only <i>you</i> can decide.”

The man’s fading had pre-empted the decision, as the voice became just the hissing of the tea-kettle.  And there was a slowly revolving vertical somersaulting of yellow air, that blurred with the matching shutter-speed of fast-strobing migraines.

If there is such a state as half dreaming and half not dreaming, Cartwheel Crazy thought he was in one.  A bit like having his sleeping body being watched over by other sleepers who could not see him because their eyes were shut whilst they dreamed of seeing something quite different but really thinking that they saw what they assumed to be him sleeping.  A bit like watching Big Brother live in the morning while the housemates merely twitched in grey outline in a deep slumber or dozing whilst maintaining the pretence of being in an old nineteen-fifties Andy Warhol film where he had someone sleeping for nine hours under the view of his camera.  The frightening prospect of a permanent ghost that hardly moved.

Cartwheel Crazy woke with a scream.  He was in bed and the hissing was rain on the blacked-out window of his bedroom.  Or the blacked-out screen of a derelict cinema in wartime London.  He called for his Mum.  But she was snoring in her bedroom – her latest scandal magazine having slipped off her bed as she entered her own blocked-off world with the light still on.

“Three eh em – and Cartwheel Crazy is the only housemate awake.  He comes to the diary-room.”

“Hello, Big Brother.”

“Hello, Cartwheel Crazy. How are you?”

“I’m dreaming that I’m on Big Brother.  Can you wake me up, please, Big Brother?”

“But you <i>are</i> on Big Brother.”

“Hello, Big Brother.”

And the craziness  went round and round, gnawing its way through a yellow suit with frayed cuffs and turn-ups.  A washing-cycle.  A ring-cycle.  A dream or ghost of a wooden wheel.  Hell is not other people, after all.  It’s you on your own, riding solitary shotgun on the back of an old black and white film that is spooling from wheel to wheel, an aging film that has flickering feelers creeping in from the sides of the screen turning into the fingers of those who think they are watching ghosts but are, in fact, the ghosts watching themselves: the ghosts of fame and infamy, truth and fiction, pride and humility, tragedy and comedy, and all the other things that balance life and death.

Ghosts, too, of past and future.

The shopkeeper took the card out of the window. Its display time had expired.  Tomorrow was Christmas Day, 1984.

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The above is a footnote to WEIRDTONGUE 32

DFL's comments on Big Brother: http://newdfl.bloghorn.com/136
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Symbol Cream

Terry enjoyed piping hot tea, the scalding type that scoured the roof of the mouth to the bone.  Terry was a fitness freak.  Enjoyed pumping dumb-bells (as many as possible)  to the silent music of his own bodily rhythms.  Toned his muscles to the optimum of rib and tissue.  Honed his manly curves towards the Golden Mean of Grecian perfection.

He leaned forward with an imaginary discus in his hand and prepared to lob it, loft it, float it towards the heavenly heights of health.  His very heart, indeed, floated, too, in the silken tides of his own breathing.  He paused for a while to take another searing sip of Darjeeling tea, but it had somehow turned into a lukewarm consistency more akin to creamy curds than anything else.  But he had not put any milk in it.  That would have been against his religion. 

Tea was to be consumed strong and hot and untarnished.

 A bit like Terry.

 He wiped a bead of sweat from the enticing bulge of his left bicep.  Only to hear (or, rather, glimpse) an irritating attempt at attracting his attention from outside.

 “Terry! Terry!”

 He saw the face of his Ex.  She was mouthing her own garbled version of speech at him, accompanied by a highly visible rapping on the window.

 He shrugged.  Shrugged inside, if not out.

Ever since his latest binge of bodily exertions, he had avoided the Call of the Wild.  And, for Terry, sex was tantamount to losing self-control.  His discipline was threatened whenever he allowed his defences to be corrupted by the chance cavortings of female breast or bottom. 

His Ex continued to shout relentlessly through the pane.

“Didn’t you hear the doorbell?” she mimed.

He shook his head.

“Can’t hear you,” he mimed back, although he could have read her lips.  And probably did.

The church across the road from Terry’s place – which possessed the biggest looking bells in the whole wide world – failed to penetrate his concentration, especially as he usually sported ear-pads which carried several layers of white noise.  Even on Saint days or periods of marital ceremonial, these bells, for Terry, were as silent as the deepest grave.

“Are you bleeding deaf?” shrieked his Ex, as she tried, in vain, to pierce Terry’s studied otherworldliness.

He attempted to mount a dumb-show of innocence, mouthing nonsensical words as a diversionary tactic, as he played harder to get.

Perhaps, she’d go away of her own volition, given enough rope.

Soon, however … having grabbed an absentminded gulp of stonecold sludge from the tea-cup … he decided to open the front door to give her an unambiguous piece of his mind.

As soon as he had slipped all the bolts and trip-switched the various tumblers in a highly charged complex of locks, he allowed his draw-bridge slowly and dead-silently to lower itself.  His muscles strained at the harness of fleshless cantilevered bone … and the tepid outside air met his deeply carved manhood with a creamy touch.

“We won the lottery!” screeched his Ex.  “The ticket we shared has come up!”

Tears came to Terry’s eyes.  How sweet of her.  She needn’t have told him.

But something inside told him different.  That heart of stone of his.

And, impulsively, he cut her dead … with the sharp edge of a blood-bloated artery which he meticulously uncoiled from its wrapping of bone and flesh.

Her dying eyes spoke sad volumes as the church bells pealed deafeningly across the town’s gambrels.

Touching gingerly what remained of the roof of his mouth with his tongue, he found he could actually lick the lower edge of his brain.  It was soft and mushy, like cottage cheese, if not cream. 

He knew Mind and Body were inextricable.  His whole being evidently needed more tuning up with the dumb-bells and he returned inside, abandoning what remained of his ex Ex on the doorstep, steaming.

(published 1995?)

To The North

I love the intricate, semi-understandable fiction of those women writers who were either Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Bowen's contemporaries who wrote in her vein.  Dialogue was Ivy Compton-Burnettish to the nth degreee, often murkily fustian but, on clearer days, clear as clouded crystal.  Intervening prose of description and scene-stetting and mind-setting and passion-posing was dense at times but, at others, crepuscular with emerging meaningfulness.   Words which stretched you.  Thoughts that imbued you with thoughts you dared not earlier think you could even have the capacity to think.  It made me want to write further fictions their pens had not had time to write.  Days of the heart where plots bleat for escape.  Heat of the death in a night's hotel.  A house in a city called Eva Trout.  Eva she was the one I'd love.  A country where maps were made like her face.  Ley lines giving form and favour to a sweetheart's beauty. This was the fiction I needed.  A fiction that fabricated a real-life lover I would not otherwise meet.

 "And now you have made me, what next?" she asked, splitting from the page like a woodknot made proud.

 "Let's explore the place you live."

 I looked around at a city I knew was like Paris but was not Paris.  It had canals like Venice, museums like Vienna, statues like Florence, lakes like Maggiore. 

 "What here?"

 "It made itself as a sort of non-sequitur in admiration of your own gratuitous serendipity."

 "Your big words are too clumsy for real thoughts."  She looked even prettier as she mewed this plaint.

 "Real thoughts don't touch the sides ... least of all the sides of paper.  They flow along wordless channels like these mock gondolas."   As I spoke and as if she had not seen them, I indicated, with a slightest finger, the ghostly craft that threaded the ever-developing veins of my city.

 "Even if your words are plain and simple, being used in complicated structures of thought and meaning does not absolve you."  Eva, now thinking herself autonomous enough to stalk off into parts of the city I had not yet created, toppled into a canal I had only just deemed possible.  She sleeked off into the splintery rainbows of false tides, before I could catch her in my all-weather, all-fable net.

 Perhaps it was the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen herself.  But do ghosts have scales and eyes in the sides of their heads?  Human ones, surely, don't.

 The city faded around me to the north.  To the nth degree.

(Published ‘Oasis’ 2001)