All So Real
Published 'Atsatrohn' 1992

Maisie and Esme did not mourn their third sister for long, since children have short memories. For a time, though, in their touching innocence, they pitied God having to look after such a mischievous imp.

In their really young days, all three had shared a double bed which was - now that their bodies were filling out - only fitting for two. Their mother scolded them if they ate too much, for she took reckon of the mattress springs, and money was spent all too easily on such creature comforts.

It was not surprising, therefore, to learn that the lights were kept dim which - with the grime building up on the nursery window - meant that the two remaining sisters had to pour over their improvement books with reddening eyes. As compensation, their mother allowed a tiny light to flicker at the depth of night. Esme preferred it that way. Maisie thought it made it more frightening, for the shadows moved piecemeal across the cracked ceiling, the rocking horse travelled from child to child across the generations of its past, and she even imagined the ghosts of wings entangled in her butterfly net leaning against the wall.

In those days, hunger could act as soporific so, before long, even Maisie was snoring, with only dreams to fear.

As time waxed, the girls grew older, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the meagreness of their condition. Esme eventually caught a cold from the years of suffering Maisie's nightly nervous tugging the bedcovers off her. It would be hard-hearted to blame Maisie, but there was no doubt that her actions resulted in Esme travelling the full distance from a sniffle to influenza through fevers building upon fevers to those body-wrenching nights when Maisie was moved from her heaving side to the mother's room. She recalled listening to Esme's rhythmic screeching lungs even a corridor away ...

Then Esme dies, as the previous sister had done.

The family doctor pronounced her gone, the faint heart having given up the ghost after finally fluttering for just a few breathtaking seconds beyond death itself.
Mother shed a few tears, but then took her business-like control of affairs. She allowed Maisie a short while with her dead sister, to say goodbye. That was the way things were done since even soft-heartedness must be recognised, if but briefly.

The nursery had the usual night lamp beside the bed, making ripples down the rhyming walls. Esme, if one can call a dead girl by her name, was resting in carved repose, no longer concerned about the scarcity of covers on her side of the bed. Her hands had been positioned in prayer, as she used to do as a child at the end of the school day, like a closed fleshy moth. Her near womanly face was composed, peaceful, forgiving.

Maisie was scared. She had been too young to appreciate the significance of death, when the other sister had departed. Now, it was the shock of stillness.

Abruptly, the corpse that had been Esme sat bolt upright in the bed, hands still poised, its shadow shuddering in the shape-shifting gloom. Even the rocking horse ceased its light prance of pretence.

The corpse's words hissed out: "I can't go away, since God for some reason won't let me come to Him. And I am SO tired. Help me, Maisie, please help me. Your dear little Esme must go where she can truly rest."

Maisie replied as if to herself: "This must be a dream. I will wake up in a moment, as I always do from dreams ..."

Esme's voice answered, bristling with aggravation: "It may only be a dream to you, dearest Maisie, but it's oh so horribly real to me. Think on that."


And, thus, the curtains close on yet another episode in that shadowy timeless world between birth and death. It will never be known how it ends, for another more pressing cycle of existence is starting in a different quarter of misspent reality.

But it seemed all so real at the time

The Miser

 

 (published 'The Edge' 1989 )

He sat counting his money, placing the coins of each denomination in a neat pile. Their minting was so recent they gleamed in the meagre candlelight. A bead of body fluid dangled at each nostril and at the corners of his mouth as if frozen in time, hinting that he was but a corpse in unseasonable motion.



A sudden knocking at the door, fit to wake the whole house, increased the waxflame's flicker. His eyes, startled wide, were like two stoking holes freshly opened upon the fires of Hell. He swept the coins into the artfully hidden drawer under the tabletop as hastily as silence would permit.



]'Who is it?' His voice was more in the nature of tree bark than sound.



'It's me, Father.'



'Go away!' The look of scorn would have been too much for even a corpse's face to bear, the reputation of which for cold-heartedness is well known.



'No, listen, Father. Please let me in. Mother's come back - she's here with me.'



The head turned, but the wrinkled stack of his neck remained unmoved. Bones, somewhere deep inside his skull, cracked, as thoughts took unbidden shapes.



'But, your mother's dead.'



These words were spoken with an awed hush, each syllable spelled out in spittle. New glistening beads formed at the corners of his eyes - whether these were overflows from the rush-hour in his nasal ducts or genuine signs of remorse nobody, even he, could tell.



Somewhere at the back of his mind he feared he would have to give all of the money back to the insurance company. Nevertheless, he let the ghosts in....


 

Jackson's Pollock

(published 'The Tome' 1990)

 

Self-exorcise would be tantamount to suicide, but I really have no choice. I am unable to forget the sounds: they ring inside my head, the echoes garbed in bone. The sounds mean more than what is actually heard: each blown-up ratchet of noise a relentless ritual I cannot shake off: like a child castigated for not forgetting the poem which had once been learnt so painstakingly.

The garden shed leans towards the house. The weekend guests have departed, leaving me nothing but time... and a large rambling edifice of a home that I cannot ever hope to fill with merely my own meagre existence. The newspapers are still delivered, each one too much to read. One organ boasts a headline too tasteless for belief: 'FOOTBALL FANS RECALL THEIR DEAD.' I have crazy, unforgiveable visions of corpses between those still alive, hanging like filled washing from the bannered scarves... pitiful jerking puppets amid the swaying chants.

In disgust, I throw the paper into the fireplace, wishing it were not such a sticky spring.

There had been a girl staying with us at the weekend. I'm sure she must have left her spirit behind, to test me with taunts. I had criticized her enjoyment of modern paintings. In fact, I must have fancied her, because I felt the uncontrollable need to monopolise her company, even if it were to argue the toss about Mondrian and Klee.

Her face was blotched with too much sun - the garden here gets it the whole day round, as if on some shuttling equator. Perhaps, at night, I dream the vertical sun...

I told her that a blown-up colour photograph of her face would not look out of place on one of the Tate Gallery walls, between a Bacon and a Braque.

Needless to say, she did not relish my chat-up line. Now that Sunday's gone, along with all the guests, I move from room to room, only to find her spirit has gone to the next one along.

The sounds live on . . . in the cellars . . . in the attic... even in the boarded-up rooms. It's as if I'm my own past. I can't shake it off. And sounds mean more than words.

I speak to her now, in the same voice as she spoke to me: the timbre raised one notch: the meaning down: the passions dulled.

'You're a pillock, Tom Jackson...'

The cutting edge was only to be expected, following my ill-considered remarks about her face. I meant them kindly, however. But the words came out in cruel order. I thought she liked modern art. Why was she so upset, then, about her face being compared with it?

Reaching the top of the house (or the nearest to the top, without removing shutters), I gaze down into the garden where she once sat... amongst all those others whose names I now forget. The garden shed's shadow moves. The sun stays still, like the moment.

My smalls I've hung on the line twitch sporadically, as if gathering themselves for some form of life as separates.

I speak in her voice the words I can never forget other than by speaking them:


'I loved you once, I loved you never,
We are ghosts of endless weather.
But as our love was squeezed between,
It became a ball above, a ball unseen.'


Hearing another's fumble at the shutter, I leave for yet another room. The sounds are joy, the sounds are pain, and who can hope interpret them? Like all modern art, the meaning is lost and so, thankfully, purged.

Beyond The Street

 

 (published 'Eastern Rainbow' 1994)

Orlando Blueman dreamt that he was walking lost around an unknown Northern town, searching for the car he had parked hereabouts before he fell asleep.

He could have sworn it was down this street. No. Or that...

He then cane across a cobbled wayfare which reminded him of somewhere he could not quite put his dreaming finger on. The pub on the corner. The supermart. A thin woman in curlers peering quizzically at him from the doorway of one of the shabby two-up-two-downs. The dark entrance to a railway bridge...

It all came back to him in a rush, as he saw an ex-serviceman type staring his eyes out, from the community centre. But what’s this? The Graffiti Club. He could not remember that bit. But dreams could never get everything right, could they? If they did, they would be real life, wouldn’t they.

A factory. Baldwin’s Fashions. Yes, a loud-mouthed harridan was arguing the toss of the day with a toff in a smart overcoat. That all seemed to fit in.

Better pay a visit to the pub. Ask the way to his car. That sort of thing. The Dreamer’s Return, it was called. It couldn’t be him, of course, but never mind.

It had a homely interior, snug and comforting. A rotund lady was politely smiling: “‘Ey up, a customer for a change, Bet.”

A blonde bint came in from the back, a bit long in the tooth and even deeper in the bosom, lightly manhandled her hairset and said: “Yes, sir? Ain’t see you in these parts often.”

“You must be mistaken, I’ve never been here before. My car is lost, you see.”

“Have a drink with me, while you’re here then. Though, I could have sworn I seen you somewhere.”

A rough and ready character had just appeared from the Gents toting a crate of beer bottles, sweating two to the dozen. It was surprising that a bloke like him was even allowed in a place called the Gents. “Blimey, Guv!” he said. The accent did not quite seem to jell. “You’re the geezer who’s in that there soap opera called ‘Foreigners’ on the telly, aint yer? You’ve just lost your missus in a road crash and is about to wed the woman in the corner shop called Mavis ‘Blind’ O’Riley. No, no, you had a nervous breakdown, didn’t yer? It is ‘im, aint it, Betty?”

He turned to the rotund lady, who just kept on saying “Luv” between hiccupping laughter. Evidently this was her way of talking.

Orlando Blueman was only a dream name, he decided, with a frisson. He ran from the pub, now desperate to find his car so that he could escape the dream. If indeed that was what it was. Perhaps he’d better find his bed instead, which may be parked on double yellow lines, for all he knew.

As he turned the corner, he came upon a recent road accident in Rosamund Street. A lady had been badly mutilated. Despite that, her face looked almost familiar in the relentless lights of pulsing blue.

 

DFL

 

( published 'Agog' 1988 )  

Nial Hopper loved just being alive. However, if he but realised the nature of the tenuous existence he underwent, as a character in a story by DFL, he would have cherished this precious consciousness, this shallow-seated awareness even more than he normally did. But believe it or not, he thought he was an ordinary human being, albeit one more famous than most from his several appearances on a thing called television; but if you opened up his arteries, then blood of the deepest, darkest red would flow as freely as does water from the spout of my can on to the richest, strangest orchids of my imaginary garden.

* *

Nial: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you, without fear or favour, to yet another edition of the favourite TV show of the century. And, as you watch, remember our one dictum, the incontrovertible truth: ONCE CEASE TO BELIEVE IN YOURSELF, THEN YOU'RE LOST TO THE NOTHINGNESS THAT LURKS AT YOUR EVERY CORNER. We have a caller: We have our first caller of the night: Who have we at the other end of the line seeing fit call the Nial Hopper Show?

DFL: Who do you think you are!?

Nial: (eyes shifting from side to side) Can I have your name sir?

DFL: Never you mind, I've got your measure Hopper, and don't give me any lip?

Nial: (motioning to the studio staff to cut me off) We evidently have someone who thinks he can beat me at my own game - but he's been cut short (laughing knowingly into the camera) I fear, by the peccadilloes of the telephone - no doubt wrapped up in flex like an electronic mummy. Next caller, please.

DFL: I'm still here, Hoppo. There's no pair of scissors in the world that can snip my line through to you .

Nial: (now aghast and signalling violently like he'd seen floor staff do before) Keep your head on sir, this is a family show with good living its by-word. I fear for the language you're about to break into?

DFL: Don't you worry Hoppo, once you've got rid of me, you'll be without your better half. It's your language I fear will take us off the air - words spoken with too much ease and puckishness can sound naughtier than most.

Nial: (finding himself perhaps for the last time) If you;re who I think you are, then please. dear sir, stareinto the mirror and question whether it can be right?

DFL: (interrupting and getting a stage direction for the first time) I challenge the world to turn off this rubbish - nothing can be done for him people, as Nial so-called Hopper is an alien from the back bowels of God?

* *

The mirror reflected nothing. I replaced the hand-set in its cradle. I'd given him enough air time, enough of his own medicine and my ear was still ringing with the sound of millions listening. I took the scissors and jabbed them into my wrists, one by one and watched the brave new freedom of the bloods. I had had enough of believing that I could muster myself beyond the margins of those who were larger than life.

God: What a pillock! He'll be good for no more then manure. (God turns on a video for a re-run of Genesis to watch His favourite bit in the Garden of Eden.)

White Slacks

 

 (published 'Psychopoetica' 1991)

The beautiful girl stood upon the sea's roof as it sloped from horizon to beach ... and sloped back again.

Her hair forked in the gusty wind, legs straddling in sharp-creased slacks.

The rafters of the sky were a striped storm, the sun's rays twirling down like spotlights.

The land separated out into barges, manned by some she had loved ... others hated. Their horse-drawn faces were mooning.

Tilting to and fro, she aimed to dive into the space between ... where her heart had been lost.

Written in Dust

(Published 'Psychopoetica' 1992)

Gradually, the room filled with sobbing sound, as if the muffled ignition of a reluctant motor boat was being fitfully stirred.

But there was nobody there. Nobody in fact to vouch for there being nobody there.

Hence: the lonely sadness that came in waves of growing realisation upon sunbeams of disturbed dust.

Love's When Every Day's A Sunday
(Published 'The White Rose' 1989)

Felix Arthur Crewe was neither rich nor poor, just comfortable enough for a couple of bottles of wine each week and, with a little stretching of his housekeeping, a nice piece of steak gracing his Sunday plate amid a garland of green vegetables.

In spirit, he was down on odd days and up on the even, starting the count from Monday, of course, as one does in the part of the country where Felix grew up. Sunday didn?t count at all, naturally, being the Sabbath: in the sight of God, one must neither be sad nor happy, for any degree of richness is as nothing compared to the trappings of Heaven.

Then he met Margaret, a girl from a family who expected a lot from her, having foisted good breeding upon the narrow shoulders of the child.

'Walking out with Felix Crewe!' The shock was pandemic, stretching back into decades of Margaret's ancestors and even forward into the unborn posterity of her own children.

Felix and Margaret decided to ignore the wagging tongues, especially on Sundays, when it was easier to miss out on the local scandal by merely not going to church. Felix wore his best bib and tucker the whole week round in any event, and Margaret did a good line in maidenly dresses fitting for the most becoming Wednesday afternoon tea dances. Hand in hand, they did the tour of the watering places, the being-seen vantage points, the promenades, the top-of-the-hill sighting-holes...

The community, however, could only remain snubbed. They had not condoned the relationship before it started. So it was impossible to rubber stamp it now. 'What a carry on!' some said. Felix, himself, had no defenders at all. So when the liaison finally expired on the spurt of a late afternoon caprice, he was hounded from town upon a tide of gossip that had no good words, even for his careful housekeeping nor for the swinging pendulum of his soul that counted the days, for ever and ever, amen.

The Moon Pool

A collaboration with with M.F. Korn

Published "THE LESS FASHIONABLE SIDE OF THE GALAXY" by eraserhead press 2001

P>EVENTUALLY TO BE PUBLISHED IN A COLLECTION OF DFL COLLABORATIONS: <A href="http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/long-term-project-to-find-an-independent-publisher-for-a-selection-of-my-collaborations-from-yesteryear/" data-mce-href="http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/long-term-project-to-find-an-independent-publisher-for-a-selection-of-my-collaborations-from-yesteryear/">http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/long-term-project-to-find-an-independent-publisher-for-a-selection-of-my-collaborations-from-yesteryear/</A> (26 Sep 12)</P></FONT></o:p></SPAN>

BAD REASON

Published 'Not One Of Us' 1995

   

I was a stranger.  The street I walked was lit only by the windows of terraced houses stretching interminably either side of me.  All were curtained across, some with swish, home-tailored fabrics, printed with every combination of colourful abstracts, flowers and stripes.  Others were dowdy and tawdry, no doubt hanging in textures of dust.  A few showed straggly hems, threadbare patches, frays, tears, nicks and, yes, sickening stains.  One passing window, much to my bewilderment, was completely uncurtained.  I could see a single bare bulb flexing from a crumbling rose in the ceiling and shining out with glowing quilts of yellow light across the glistening pavement.

 

            I pulled the coat collar tighter over the adam's apple, since the wind had taken a renewed tug upon me, mixed with sleety rain and gnawing bonechills.  I stopped, walked back, peered over the squat garden wall into the empty window.  I had often wondered what really went on in this town after dark.  If curtains are drawn together, there must be a good reason for so doing.  If undrawn, there may be a reason, too.

 

            Within my over-large wellington boots, I stood on tiptoes, but still could not see much beyond the bulb, the peeling blistered wallpaper and a tallboy chest with what looked like rags  hanging out of the ill-fitting drawers.  There were some miniatures on the wall, which were too far away to make out.  The large carriage clock below them on the chipped baroque mantelpiece told a time which seemed to have stopped for more years than it had stood there.

 

            The longer I loitered and stared, the more details of the interior emerged.  There was actually someone standing by the mantelpiece, leaning upon it, cigarette smoke disfiguring his face.  He was evidently sounding off to a person sitting under the window inside the room. 

 

            Then the words themselves could be heard, as the man by the fireplace pitched his voice further into the street.

 

            "You slut!  A daughter or mine dressed ... like that!  I can very nearly see every bit of your body which God gave you to hide.  I'll tell you again, you're not going out, till you've changed into your something decent."

 

            I crawled over the sodden front garden and cowered under the window-sill to hear the girl's response:

 

            "All my friends dress like this to go to the dance band... And... And...  You only say what you do because you're jealous - your eyes are always all over me.  No wonder Mum has taken to her bed..."

 

            There was a crunch and, then, silence.

 

            Desperately trying to scurry back on hands and knees to the pavement, I must have missed the most significant part for, eventually, I saw that the carriage clock had disappeared and worms of smoke crawled along the mantelpiece.

 

            And a girl's face gradually slid like a red sunrise over the glass of the window, with all the clockwork of her head hanging out with springs of blood...

 

            I shrugged since I was nothing but a stranger.