MY OWN STEP-FATHER   

(published 'Peeping Tom 1992) 

       But let me tell you, the backyard was a real eyesore. There were rusty tin baths stacked up against the disused outside jacksy, a moulderlng ladder with most crossbars completely stepped through, a long corroded apparently purposeless iron girder sticking through the lopsided gate into the public ginnel behind and, finally, the washing wringer, its heavy-duty roller-barrels grimed up with green fungus, its brown crank-handle pathetically poking out for use, its iron gridstand previously used on a treadle sewing-machine, by the look of it…

       It all brought back memories of my mother. I don’t know why exactly, except perhaps because she often used to be found in the steamy kitchen, a large apron hiding the huge shapelessness of her body, as she stirred a copper and wrung soggy clothes through a similar beast to that mangle which now stood in this particular backyard. It was all she ever seemed to do! But a child, as I was then, frequently sees reality differently from grown-ups. Though thinking about it, if only in that respect, I am still very much the child of dreams.

       The house I had recently bought was a run down terraced house in the rump end of town — you know the area, down by the Sludgy River, not very far from the Farmers’ Arms. I had decided, in view of my then financial state, it would be a good investment (as long as I did it up myself) but above all, a roof over my head, albeit as leaky as my mother’s favourite colander.

       If I had known what I know now, I would have steered right round the whole M25 ringway as a short cut to avoid that dammed house.

       But first, I better say a little more about my mother. As well as wringing clothes, she had a similar treatment for her various husbands. My real father ended up a squeezed out wreck in a madhouse, thus easing the divorce proceedings. The trail of other men who had shared her bed, well, I cannot think of an exception, they all committed suicide “by putting their blackened fingernails down their throats and sicking their hearts out,” as my mother always put it in her customary telling way. It is true, she often confided in me and some of her stories would “make all your hair fall out,” another strange expression of hers which was only to make sense in later life.

       That new house of mine was to be haunted by my mother. She had been dead ten years, since when no sign of hide nor hair of her. I can recall her telling me once of ghosts, how she believed in them and, if I should see wispy forms of my various stepfathers trooping down the steep-as-a-ladder stairs, I was to turn away. They would soon scram, if ignored. So with a reasonable amount of equanimity, I accepted the appearance (albeit belated) of my dead mother in the new house, wandering up and down the dark landing, down the staircase past the dinner gong, mumbling inanities to herself. Well, I guessed they were inanities as I could not make them out from where I had stationed my truckle bed in the furthest back room.

       One night, and it is not long ago when this happened, maybe even last week, I thought I actually heard the groaning of the ancient wringer outside in the yard like an animal in grievous bodily pain. I tried to suffocate my ears with the pillow but the noise ground on relentlessly.

       Of course, I knew it was my mother enjoying herself, having just discovered the clapped-out mangle outside. I wondered how long it would be before a stepghost…

       I did not even bother to question how she as a ghost could muster the embodied strength to turn the grinding rollers of a disused wringer. After all, I knew my mother…

       It’s all happening again tonight.

       Since hearing the groaning and squealing of the mangle in the backyard, I had never been out there to investigate. But, for whatever reason, today at first light I did. Curiosity got the better of me.

       The decrepit ladder was leaning against the side of my house — or was it vice versa?

       The apparently purposeless iron girder had gone through the wringer rollers and stretched out down the public ginnel, moving along the council gutter like rusty slime.

       My real father, whom I had not seen for donkey’s years, lolled in the open jacksy, drooling down the lavatory pan from the waist like so much melting human flesh. He mouthed something or other and pointed. I looked to the top of the ladder where my dead mother was attempting to mend the leaky roof with red glue ... to keep her dear son dry.

       I sold the house, of course, and sought lodgings to get rid of the dreams. But wherever one goes, they can but follow.

       Ms Ample Clavinty’s hallway was gloomy, even when the lamp was lit. The seeping light from the dingy street hardly managed to struggle through the highly-coloured roundel window in the front door.

       As I gingerly negotiated the stairs to avoid tripping over the loose rods, I always took the opportunity to admire my visage in the hall mirror which leant at an angle from the blistering wallpaper. Unlike the rest of the household trappings, it was a superior artefact; with equally spaced wooden human arms waving from around the circular frame, it looked like a Medusa’s head but, close up, the inner silver surface glowed so brightly, the intricate frame dissolved into the colour of darkness by comparison. I thought I looked more handsome in that mirror than in any other.

       I once asked Ms Clavinty where she had obtained it. She had stared back at me coldly — a severe woman at the best of times, with sculptured hair-bun, sharp-edged skirts and starched bottle-green stockings. She seemed even more formidable than when she sounded the gong at the foot of the stair-well, come evenings. The only hint of humour I had ever discerned in her demeanour came once when she was lugubriously dishing out from the vast chipped tureen, her speciality stew made from the melts, grits and lights of a goat’s innards. She unbuttoned the top of her high-collared cardigan twin-set and said that the room was becoming as hot and sweaty as a Cardinal’s blessing hand.

       One day the unusual happened. The dinner gong failed. So I was late coming down the stairs, my belly having finally told me that I was hungry. Ms Clavinty was more like a fixture in the hall than a moveable feast, her slight bosom and curvy behind being faintly silhouetted against the roundel window. She held the gong hammer over the mirror, the surface of which I could see even at this distance was covered with tiny continous cracks like scribbling hairs,

       Unaccountably, this reminded me of another recurring dream. In it, I felt my beard in-growing back into my cheeks and jowls, and swabbing like dirty pubes down my throat, then feeding piecemeal into my belly, finally poking out the anus like an animal’s tail.

       Ms Ample Clavinty suddenly turned towards me ... and sweetly smiled, her hand fiddling with her top button. I pinched myself to see if it was the same dream. For better or worse, it wasn’t.

       Heaving bouts of nausea fought for exits. I realised I could not escape her grinding buttock rollers.

Posted by weirdtongue at 4:12 PM GMT

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WRITE A SHORT ARTICLE ABOUT THE PLEASURE OF DRINKING

By DF Lewis

When I was commissioned to write a popular article – and I’ll leave revealing the identity of the patron who thus commissioned me until the end – I wondered how I could sufficiently overcome my predisposition to wield long words and convoluted phrasing so that, in the end, the article would indeed be a snappy treatment upon the simple pleasures of drinking.

Let me say, then, that drinking actually gives me no pleasure at all.  The process indeed leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.  OK, I recognise the physical necessity for people to drink.  I hope you drink to live, though.  Not to live to drink.

Caffeinated, decaffeinated, fizzy, intoxicating, creamy, malty, icy cool, piping hot, even with a spiky umbrella stuck in it and all manner of colourful toppings of fruit and flower … whatever the types of drink and methods of imbibing them, I remain sternly oblivious to their charms.  On a hot, steamy day and I’d run a marathon beneath the red staring eye of the sky … even a frothing tankard of cold ale I cannot imagine scouring the froth and spume from the back of my throat nor penetrating my palate to the bone … yes, none of this can cut the mustard with me.

Well, then, to simply write of drinking’s pleasure is more difficult than just hitting the right tone.  I need to empathise with those of you who do enjoy drinking.  That wonderful nose, that bouquet, that aftertaste, that veritable explosion of flavours.  Not to speak of the light-headed dreaminess of long summer afternoons with church bells ringing and the clonk of leather on willow.  Hey, none of this touches my hot spot.  None of it does it for me.

I’ll have to come clean, then.  I’m writing this short article on a papyrus of dried leaves and the ink is now running out.  Not much time to reach the promised conclusion before the nib scratches as dry as my heart.  I must have written far too many long words.  Soon, all I’ll have left is my blood.

Quickly … Dracula is my patron and my commission is death.  Leaves a bad mouth in my taste…

Posted by weirdtongue at 2:08 PM GMT

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THE 3 LONG PIGGIES OF TRUNK CITY

(published 'Purple Patch' 1990) 

The place stank of rotten weeds: still growing in flourishing clumps but, nevertheless, rotting right down to their roots.  The whiplash throughway wound between variable wastelands, some proudly decorated with scrubby tussocks of rust-coloured plant life, others merely adventure playgrounds with the games removed.  In the distance, Matthew could see the blind groping fingers of an earthbound Satan – whose toes came out in the Antipodes, no doubt, within the tolerances of near-collapse, as the relentless winds continued to be panted across the weathered landscape.  The City’s other buildings had long since disappeared, by piecemeal dismantlement or simply heavy breathing … leaving only the substructures visible.  The skeleton of an ancient motorway system was barely discernible, now nothing but convoluted metal reinforcings.  Matthew feared the snorting beasts that were said to hunt for the likes of him hereabouts.  Wolves, too, named after a football team that once played in the vicinity, he did not exactly trust them as merely a legend from better days.  Werewolves were only one variation, which he could not fathom beyond the nature of their fangs.

Abruptly, the swaddlings of cloud drew apart like sackcloth curtains to reveal the streaming red and gold of a forgotten sun.  Matthew bent his forelegs, not in prayer, but so that his proboscis could reach the sparkling sweat-gland under a clump of brown nettles, picked out in the unseasonable light.

The were people perched on the tangled motorway struts started to clamber down on spotting Matthew there.

Posted by weirdtongue at 2:01 PM GMT

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A Love Trove  

I loved him with all my heart's heart, but he promised only liking in return or, at the most, fondness.

I tried to turn off my love and divert its unused energy into exploring the city streets where nobody had ever been before. The prying terraced curtains tweaked of their own volition; loneliness gave me the courage to be myself. A comfort, too, were the shaggy shadows of distant high-rises where people had congregated for fear of these low-downs I roamed.

Indeed, I found myself seeking someone who was already with me, this causing my heart to play leap-frog: a found fondness deeper than love.

Posted by weirdtongue at 1:56 PM GMT

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BROWN STOKER 

You must build a wall.  The voice was so quiet, I wasn't sure I had heard it properly.  Build a wall?  Why a wall?  And why me?  And you must build it now.  I had evidently mistaken voices for thoughts.  That's what happens when a mind goes awol.  Either that or I was hearing voices, I supposed. 

            Susie soon pulled me together.  I had begun to depend on her more and more ever since the onset of the troubles.  Russian money wasn't legal tender any more.  And Chinese Walls no longer effective.  If Money was my car, Susie was my brakes.  Everything was cutting fast and loose.  Everybody knew everybody else.  And even cellars were not dark enough for cleaving meat.  Vegetarian hells.

            "Thinking can be dangerous," I thought she said.

            I nodded as she looked quizzically through my desk diary.  I had several appointments today, most of which must have appeared dubious, bearing in mind the various financial scandals currently involving most of those due to be met.

            "You can't see him," she scorned, without even the hint of a scowl.

            "Why not?"

            "He's been shipping T-bones from Samarkand."

            "Such lily-livered laws were meant to be broken, Susie.  Come off it, if everybody went around paying such lip service...." 

            She went back to touring my schedules—as if she were making personal appearances by virtual proxy.  I could see her eyes rolling back into her head.

            I put my hand under the desk and lifted a brick from the floor.  Once a gold ingot now simply a worthless foundation stone that landed on my desk with a vicious clunk, having slipped through my weakening fingers.  It even had a wedge-free zone in its top for the cement.  I stooped to fetch another.  The security authorities would once have had kittens, given the defaults of their erstwhile jobsworthness.  Now they merely connived with any form of laundering, even to be found regularly credit-card sharpening in the cellar.  Amid smoke and heady booze smells and shovelled shit.  One or two even honed bones.

            By the time Susie had polished off my laptop, I was hidden behind a veritable high-rise of low finance.  A virtual house of cards.

            Now you've built it, time for love.

            Susie was sprawled over showing her shameless stocking-tops.  The scowl had by now resumed its own natural territory, wrinkling up her cosmetics like crumbly aspirin.

            "Another day, another dollar."

            Her hen-bones stuck out through various orifices, crumbling too.  A particularly vicious T-junction was where the money mites swarmed from her bowels.  A dissheveled security guard eventually found her light enough to drag down to the cellar.

            I winked at him.  Give him his dues, he saluted back.  He'd once been my official chauffeur.  Now a brown stoker.

Posted by weirdtongue at 1:54 PM GMT

Updated: Wednesday, 5 November 2008 1:55 PM GMT

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THE IRREDUCIBLES OF NYGREMAUNCE 

published 'Black Moon' 1997

"Your dreams are disowned memories, connected only by the singular first and third persons within us all."

Rachel Mildeyes (UPON THE WORKS OF HP LOVECRAFT)

"I'll skin yer face for yer, if yer don' look out!" snarled the gringo who was laid back against the City bar. 

            I decided I didn't like him, mainly because he was someone so entirely different from anything I could possibly be.  But, not one to be unsociable, I trumped back at him:

            "Pardon me!  Pardon me!  Sorry I spoke!"

            "Yer didn't - I did.  And less of yer lip!" 

            His stubbled chin was a sight to behold, more desperate than I was dandy.  His nose hung on like grim death above the splitting snakehide around his mouth - but, his foot surprised me more than anything when, zippier-than-light, it kicked my fishing tackle.

            "Ooh!" 

            I'd never felt such pain, almost ecstatic, the exquisitest thing this side of godliness.  It sure did make me seethe and simmer.  I'd teach this bonzo a lesson he would never forget.

            "Nobody messes with Padgett Weggs and lives!" I forced out between my clenched teeth.

            "Oh yeh!" 

            Suddenly the joint was full of faces.  They had previously been just bar-flies upon the wall, flocking in for the kill and eager for the shit which was about to be laid across the carpet.  A split second can hold a whole range of possibilities, and I scanned the past as well as the future for a clue...

            Distant indeed were the days when I lived alone with my mother.  Dreaming childish fears.  Dredging monsters from the sewers of the world's collective unconscious, some of which monsters actually slept with me between the sheets.  Listening to other Irreducibles that came in from the roosting on our roof.  Bothering not a tittle about the ablutions of my body, since my creature comforts were in the hands of Elementals which crept beneath my bed, their jaws hanging open for any ripe bits of bodily produce that I could spare.  And, above all, moulding a mind-shape above our teetering house in mock of an Irreducible which my mother called God. 

            Even further away were the days I had yet to live, full of masquerades, mounting excitement and unwrapping myself like a parcel being passed at a children's party.  Yet this future became a full-blooded demon raising its snout above the ant-heaps which our civilisation was to become. 

            As I feared the trip-wire of repercussions my slightest free action would now spring, I was hidebound by the spluttering fuses inside my head.  There were all my old pals now gathered in the bar, faces that were little better than loud wallpaper.  The juke-box broke wind.  Other gossipping locals were spreadeagled across the ceiling, grinning like monkeys between the quickening fan-blades.  The split second eventually elapsed, as I turned my back on the grizzled lush at the bar and created the failure of Fate just with my own bare thoughts.

            The door burst asunder.  What was all this - a scene from some (God)forsaken Western movie?  The juke-box exploded into a thousand shards.  The ceiling fan choked on its own blades.  And my head felt fit to burst with the thoughts which became events sooner than blinks.  There were nails torn from their beds of flesh, splinters of bone, bifurcated teeth in a wild stinging snowstorm of gnashing, all seeking out the softest pin-cushion. 

            Yet I leaned back against the bar, a cool customer.  I turned a surly glance to the gap-toothed geezer whom Fate had seen fit to cross with my path and stroked my own by now spiky chin in deference to the next move that was as inevitable now as it ever was. 

            "I'll skin yer, as soon as look at yer!" I snorted.

            "Dosser!  Dosser!" taunted the little kids when they saw me licking my wounds in the gutter. 

            I looked up, a pain welling from behind my eyes, a pain that turned the street into a strew of lights.  I could hear their voices, but their bodies remained a mystery.

            "Please go away!" I piped. 

            Once upon a time, my imagination would have been able to fit out such entities as these kids with the garb of high legend and cosmic wonder, as was my youthful wont; but, now, with brain deadened by the mind that fed it and a skull quickly filling with increasingly malign tumour tissue, the world had become, to me, what it always should have been: a straight place with no strange angles and very few unexplored corners, a reality that housed only standard people, animals, concrete, sky, metal monsters, fizzy pills snorted at every turn and, above all, gap-toothed geezers who took sudden dislikes.  And this real world in which I now took my wrongful place was particularly incommodious.  Nobody gave a toss.  Nor did they give me money, because I had nothing to exchange for it.  I could no longer while away the hours in the pub, earning a crust by telling tales of the universe within my head.  That universe had ceased to exist. 

            The edges of the pavement were sharper whilst my back into which they poked was softer.  And time travel was now off the agenda, quite beyond the capabilities that I once believed I possessed.  I cursed the age which had forced me to live in it.  But it was a sign of the times.  Only a few were not dossers now - and those kids who had taunted me were indeed dossers' kids, only to become dossers themselves.  And they screamed blue murder at the TV camera which was documenting their way of life.  But, it didn't really seem to matter, as nobody watched television any more.

            Dawn came but once a day, with time now more or less in forward gear.  And, then, I, Padgett Weggs, would dream of the past - and it's the past that for most people comes but once in a lifetime. 

            My mother had believed in a God that, at the best of times, was difficult for anyone to believe in.  And she had tried to impose this belief on myself, but Mystery being now in short supply, I could not even countenance the means, let alone the ends.  In fact, once dead, all people cease to have ever existed. 

            That's the way of the world Padgett Weggs ended up knowing when he ceased to be eligible for calling himself "I".  Memories always were hopes past their sell-by date and sex came from Kate Hood-of-Bed like the stench off a bad corpse.  She was often in the company of Padgett Weggs before that occasion, of which she still speaks, when he died in her arms, in the backroom of a bar.  To tell her side of the story, she always denied the rumour that Padgett Weggs had died a dosser, for that would have branded her a heartless hussy.  Loved him when he was a hit, but lost him to the clawback of the streets when his mind became not all it was...  Never that!  She insisted to the point of boredom, as a new customer lay like a babe against her bald breasts, that Padgett Weggs was undeniably dignified towards the end - that end of his when night donned the garb of death and sucked the dreamlight dry. 

            With a busy career to maintain as the first ever woman breeder of werewolves, Kate Hood-of-Bed really had no option, she said, but to leave him alone to sleep it off beneath the blanket.  At the very end of his human life, she had been the last to hold his yet unstiff tool between her slender nail-painted fingers, and then she took it into her mouth as if she were some backstreet dosser's kid sucking at a playground water-fountain.  And she blew and blew - the only way to help make his spiky innards sprout out through the pores like fur hair.  With the last blast of her lungs into his spinning balls, Padgett's mouth would pump open with the direst roars of beast hunger.

            His life became a forgotten subtitle to an otherwise famous book.  And on this new night beyond even memory's belated trawl, the glowing dome of St Paul's Cathedral, the hub of all dossers' haunts, suddenly reared from behind another building,  It was strange how such nights as this one created new perspectives as well as new turnings into olden City squares that office workers could never even hope to find.

            Padgett Weggs, having reached an age by which most dossers had given up their ghosts,  wondered if he were as mad as he felt.  Why had even his likes fallen into the trap called Love?  Hate had always been so liberating. 

            That crone Kate Hood-of-Bed was the soulfullest mate and nicest sleeping bag he'd ever possessed during countless nights under the dripping stars.  Her tongue, the sharpest this side of Shoreditch, but the warmest eyes.  Her teeth were missing, but some had returned, in their wisdom, as wolffangs.  Her clothes were more like strips torn from her own flesh that had previously hardened from sleeping rough with Padgett.

            Now, she'd gone.  Melted away into the last night's unseasonable fog.  And as Padgett Weggs staggered into yet another misremembered square, any perceptive fellow dosser would have spotted diamonds in his eyes.  Sadness was a fine emotion, mainly because it indicated wealth of soul: the actual capability of happiness, by comparison.  Unbelievably, he found a free bench beside a broken water-fountain.  The square's lamp posts were shorn at the top but still filtered a dim light as if from their cores. 

            The statue of a nymph (the daughter he never had, he wondered) was just another shadow, if more substantial than a ghost.  A bench of cradled bones was a luxury compared to common or garden pavements.  He wrapped himself in his own arms and legs (a feat of physical prestidgitation invented and jealously guarded by the brothership of freedossers) and dreamed of Kate - and of the anniversaries they would never now celebrate.

            In the morning, a Confessional Priest wandered, apparently in an aimless frame of mind, with a large gold-clasped book in blackskin boards.  He had it under his arm.  He began to look from side to side like a one-eyed bird. 

            Padgett Weggs, who had been dreaming, yawned.  Somebody must have moved him in the night to the Cathedral's steps, he surmised - at a time when even storytellers are fast asleep.  The Priest handed him the imposing book in one surreptitious curtsy of his cassock.  And darted off, no doubt, to clear away his own night's doings before the toffee-nosed tourists arrived.

            Padgett was too bleary-eyed to appreciate the gift, if gift it were.  But, eventually, turning to the first page, he managed to make out, through his chronic dyslexia, the title:  COCOON MENNIR.  But he could not quite make out the smaller print of the subtitle, even if there were one at all.  But he decided it must say KATE HOOD-OF-BED, and he put a anagrammatic smile upon the newly risen sun.

            Once dead, one ceases to have ever existed.  That's the way of the world Padgett ended up knowing.  And suddenly I know instinctively that I never ever existed, except perhaps as a fevered fiction of another - someone who, with tears in the eyes, has also now disappeared from all realities past present and future.

"If 'Necronomicon' is simply a conundrum of mixed-up letters and 'Book-of-the-Dead' another, 'Padgett Weggs' is yet another to fathom till we are all Great Old Ones."

Rachel Mildeyes (UPON THE WORKS OF DF LEWIS)

Posted by weirdtongue at 11:56 AM GMT

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THE DAY I DID

“The day I did, I did it properly.”

“I didn’t exactly ask you that, Giles.”

“You asked me how many times I had done it, didn’t you?” responded Giles. “And my answer is simply once, because before that I hadn’t done it properly, and then having done it once, it was unnecessary to then have done it more than once.  Once is enough.”

“Once is enough, you say?  But was it \i{possible} to do it more than once if you had wished to do so?”

The questioner stared at the one she had addressed as Giles: a middle-aged man with a face over-coloured by embarrassment; a T-shirt bearing on its chest a transferred photograph of himself not dissimilar to how he looked today; cheap grey slacks ironed into knife-creases; and a posture that indicated he was about to depart the ribs of a park bench that had created an uncomfortable impression upon his spine.  The voice of the woman was strident, creating its own unwelcome impression upon him.  Her face, body and dress were far better suited towards a more general impression of beauty completely out of keeping with her ugly voice. Giles certainly felt under-dressed and under-toned by comparison.  Nobody had warned him of any necessary formalities.

Replaced exactly where he had tried to leave – upon the bench – Giles stared up at the imposing woman, wondering if she really knew what she was asking.  He found it difficult to talk to women at the best of times, and today was not the best of times.  He was being accused of something, but as yet he had failed to understand that the accusation was of not understanding anything.  To misunderstand something several times became irrelevant once it was understood and once it was understood it could never be understood again; there were no levels of understanding, simply an understanding via various levels of misunderstanding until it was understood for the first and only time; understanding something was merely that and once done, never to be done again, unless the thing that was understood itself changed in some way and, then, the process of misunderstanding and understanding would start again from scratch until the new thing was understood via a whole new set of misunderstandings leading to understanding.

An alchemy of understanding. You wander on leaving Giles and the woman still talking. Today was not the day for you to understand this, I suspect.  Perhaps you should try again another day.

=========

"You've failed several times, and as far as I can see you have always failed.  Including that day."

"The day I did, I did it properly," you answered.

"Are there degrees of failure, then?"

Today, you've brought someone else to help you understand.  The question hung in the air as you both watched Giles and the woman talking on the park bench, unable to hear your conversation, while, paradoxically, you could hear theirs.

Identical conversations.

“No, if you fail, you fail.  You can never partly succeed.  It’s a bit like understanding.  You either understand or fail completely to understand.  There are no near misses.”

The woman laughed, having apparently understood Giles’ unintended joke.  She eyed back at his T-shirt.

“Why do you wear such a ridiculous T-shirt?”

“Ridiculous?”  He looked down at himself.  “Why so ridiculous?”

“There are no degrees of ridiculousness.  It is ridiculous plain and simple: not partly ridiculous, nor very ridiculous, just ridiculous.”

Having echoed their words word for word, you both shrug and decide to leave them to their ridiculous conversation.  You are thankful that you had not been heard in the same way as they had been heard.  Understanding would need to be left for another day.  Empathy was never possible.  A bit like alchemy.  Do come back.  I’m sure we shall defeat our lack of understanding together.

==========

Posted by weirdtongue at 1:00 PM GMT

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TORN APART

Memories dissected

When my two children were young, they had a doll for Christmas, one that had a thread spring-loaded into its spine which, when you tugged it out by its tag and then released it back, gave the illusion of the doll saying: “I’m torn apart, uh huh!” A squeaky friction of a voice, but made real because children’s imaginations in those days actually worked properly. They only needed the simplest prop for imagination to flourish. Not like children today…

Now that you’re old, the trick is to imagine each memory as real as it was when you first remembered it a few seconds after each instance it occurred. Imagination of a remembered imagination, strengthened by this doubling-up over time. It’s always best to think through old memories as they were, not as they are now … so as to sort truth from fiction.

You think so?

What else do you remember of your children’s childhood? There’s something I’m sure you need to remember.

This process is a bit late in the day, isn’t it? I am very old and here you are trying to get me to change the past…

Not change the past but rethink the past so that it is nothing but the past and not a glorified image of what you want the past to be. Take your children’s doll, as an example. Did you remember the words it spoke correctly? You shake your head.

Maybe it said: “I’m falling apart, uh huh!” Hmmm, that was it. I’m pretty sure.

Not ‘torn apart’? I suspected that you hadn’t got it quite right. I saw it in your eyes. You called it a ‘squeaky friction of a voice’ – you were always clever with words, I remember. Old age hasn’t changed that, I’m pleased to see. But why would a doll say either of those options of being fallen or torn … apart? Doesn’t make much sense … except, I suggest, to someone in the past listening to it within the context of life as it was lived then. I suspect your children didn’t even question the ability of the doll to speak at all let alone question its ability to speak words that made sense by making no sense even to children like them.

Thanks for your comments about my way with words. I may be near death but nearing death is just the time when you need as many words as you can muster but the tragedy is that lots of people lose their words at a time when they need words the most. Logical that the older you are the more words you would likely to have at your disposal. But death is never logical, I suppose. And the nearer you are to death the more danger there is of words slipping away to allow the nothingness of death eventually to slip in more easily - and fill the space the departed words have left.

Will you remember this conversation?

I hope so … for however long it takes to remember it properly.

Will you remember who spoke which words?

Did I just say that or was that you?

It was me.

It’s a thread through confusion, then, an audit trail from the past to the future.

Nothing is quite what it seems. A squeaky friction of a voice. A mispronounciation for fiction? Or a set of words as a simple prop for remembering the imagination that could only live in its own time, its own past.

I imagine a real memory: their faces that Christmas when we gave them the doll. They lit up with a joy. But we should have bought two dolls, one for each of them, as it turned out.

Posted by weirdtongue at 12:56 PM GMT

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Chapter 20 – Carting

I love the word ‘scallimandering’ (in the context of this chapter) – and I find its only google hit is the previous blog of the earlier version of this novel.

This chapter tells of further trials and tribulations of Tuerqui as Sam’s cart ‘’orsey’.  And Sam’s dysfunctional family!

The dangerous physics of cart pulling and the various surfaces it crosses as the slaves pull it are excellently handled.

Tuerqui’s forlorn attempts to glimpse her lost daughter Tuerquelle while a cart-horse are poignant.

The sense of the cycle of the seasons is artfully done.

They even return (unrecognised?) to the Laughing Phallus to deliver things there, which gives a sense of interconnecting unity to the plot.

Some choice snippets from many:

A dream from my first night as a cart slave remains with me.  Sam had taken a large spade and was shovelling brass door knockers from the cart.  Tuerquelle looking, perhaps, as she had in her second year, polished the knockers as they reached the ground.  Her fingers moved with lightning speed, but she could not shine every one of them.  Eventually, she vanished – as though drowning – under the mounting tide of brasswork.

I wonder if Tuerquelle was using a bunny-cloth to polish in the dream?

The carter liked to pretend that we were horses – costly beasts quite beyond his means.  He sometimes rewarded us with sugar when we produced realistic neighing sounds.  Anything that resembled human speech provoked furious applications of his whip.

I think Tuerqui hints she lost the use of speech because of the above.

The following passage is emblematic of the novel’s ethos:

We cart slaves were free to pleasure one another, should we feel so inclined.  Although I was usually too tired to respond properly to my fellows’ occasional advances, there was comfort in the closeness of a companion’s body – and luxury in a gentle touch.  As the nights grew colder, one another’s body warmth became increasingly necessary and – eventually – we snuggled together in groups of six, usually preserving the distinction between the right and left-hand shafts.  There was little sexual in this, in spite of intermittently straying fingers.

A scatalogical passage artfully followed by a striking vision of a more resplendent carriage than Sam’s Cart: leads eventually to reunion by Tuerqui with a past character (not to give  the plot away).  Please excuse the longer than normal quotation below but it is well worth quoting and savouring:

Sam was scarcely inside when the stink cart rumbled into the square.  The lavatory man connected his hoses to the inlet and outlet valves, before fixing the other end of the inlet hose to the cistern on the convenience roof.  We smiled knowingly and watched the entrance – the carter was about to be drenched and, forbidden to speak, we could utter no warning.  Sam soon emerged, dripping and furious, his breeches still about his upper thighs.

In the excitement, I almost missed seeing the carriage.  The well oiled axle made hardly a sound, there was no obvious reason for me to move my head.  Indeed, I was almost certainly the only slave to turn from Sam and the lavatory man.  Perhaps I was prompted by the goddess.

The carriage was worth more than a cursory glance.  Occasionally I had seen such vehicles, but not often.  It was lightly and gracefully built – royal blue and gleaming silver– rolling silently on its two well-oiled wheels.  The vehicle’s beauty brought a lump to my throat.

Lovely as the coach was, it couldn’t compare with the twelve perfectly matched slaves at the traces.  They were tall and slim, platinum blonde hair falling almost to the waist.  Stepping high, their knees rose to navel level on each precisely synchronised pace.  Their faces were masks of arrogance – proud of their slavery, they would surely have sneered at a princess.

The fittings were worthy of the slaves.  Their tall royal blue plumes were set in headpieces of what was certainly real silver.  The harnesses were fitted with the same metal.  The leatherwork matched the plumes – no detail was less than splendid.

.........................

Queries:

Looking at the right hand shaft to more closely gauge the other slaves’ mood

I don’t usually worry prescriptively about split infinitives, but I do think above would be better as ‘more closely to gauge’.

Not only don’t I know what cargoes we hauled, but feel that

Would ‘not only am I unaware of what cargoes...’ be better?

Sarah was more practical – when she saw duty neglected her inevitable answer was the whip.

This only made sense to me when I inserted a comma after ‘neglected’.

typo:

without having to wait for the world come.

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The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

Posted by: newdfl on 8/16/2008 9:17:12 AM , 1 comments

Submitted by Pet at 8/16/2008 10:43:25 AM

Thank you for that.

You may be surprised to hear that not only have I corrected the typo, but have implemented what you suggest on all of the queries (without quibble). I must have scurried over the text too quickly in all the re-writings and polishings of this chapter. (Perhaps too anxious to move on to Chapter 21?)

The strangest slip is the split infinitive. Generally, I am less tolerant of split infinitives than you are. Yet this one slipped through. Not any more, though! Thanks for pointing it out.

"Scallimandering" is a good word. One doesn't need a dictionary to know what it means.

I added a lot to this chapter in its final revision -- including delivering to the Laughing Phallus, Tuerqui's forlorn attempts to glimpse her daughter, and the door knocker dream that you quote.

Another addition at the final revision stage was passing by The Scree (and Rabbit Wood). This, like delivering to the Laughing Phallus, was intended to give a sense of interconnecting unity to the plot (as you remark). In the words of Goldfrapp's song "Monster Love":

Everything comes around
Bringing us back again
Here is where we start
And where we end

I, too, especially like the passage to which you devote a longer than usual quotation. It contains so much precise detail -- and juxtoposes the base and the sublime. It is, in some wise, the epitome of the book as a whole.

Posted by weirdtongue at 12:08 PM GMT

Updated: Sunday, 2 November 2008 12:08 PM GMT

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