The house was set back from the road and, although I enjoyed reading horror stories, there was no possible way I could conjure any weird or ghostly atmosphere from this place.  It was somebody’s idea of a joke.  And I knew who that someone was. You see, I had an email yesterday (from an old friend) with a photograph attached, a photograph of his parents’ house in the suburbs of the city half-hidden by trees but clear enough to reveal the most unprepossessing house it had been my misfortune to notice, to be made to notice, if you see what I mean, because my friend knew I dabbled in landscape painting on a (if I say so myself) talented but amateur basis – and he wanted me to paint his parents' house so that he could give the painting to them (framed) for Christmas.  Paint it from the photo, he said. He’d give me a good price for it. To buy time, I emailed my friend and said it was impossible to paint it from the photo he had provided, especially with the trees in the way.  Could he give me the address?  I’d visit it (I vowed to myself) so as to wreak some real atmosphere from it for my painting.  My friend didn’t really appreciate horror stories, as I did, but I’m sure my imagination when in full view of the house would compensate for any lack of imagination from the house itself!  Houses with genius loci were far and few between.  But an artist surely could create a spirit of place (albeit a creepy one) for any house-and-setting where, in reality, one did not exist.

Imagine my disappointment when – after making a difficult bus ride mixed in with office commuters on their way home – I approached the house down its leafy avenue.  A central position between like-minded houses.  I first had to ensure I got hold of the right house so I had to peer at the gates for the correct house-number before committing my artist’s gaze towards the potential subject.  You may have indeed imagined my imagination, but it was nothing compared to my real feelings. You may safely read between the lines.  You surely can imagine the house for yourself as easily as you imagined my initial feelings about it.  No need for me to describe it with words.  In any event, I actually needed to preserve all my artistic strength for (later) painting it for real, with paints and paintbrush.  I was not intending to erect an easel on the surburban pavement, mind you.  Commuters still tramped either side of my stationary figure towards their own houses along the avenue as the dusk thickened. They clasped brief-cases and cast sullen glances towards one they assumed to be an inexplicable loiterer.  No, I would weigh the house within the balance of my surveying, then remember it as I rode back on the bus so as to attach its residues of last impressions to further interpretations of the photo once back in my studio.  But I was disrupted from the image’s steady imprint upon the sensitive backdrop of my prospective memory by one of the commuters brushing past me more roughly than the others – only to disappear up the garden path towards the very house in question.

The shape did not look old enough to be one of my friend's parents. Perhaps, I had got hold of the wrong house after all.  Had my friend given me the wrong house-number?  Even the wrong avenue in the wrong area of the suburbs?  I took the photo (that I had earlier printed from the attachment my friend had sent by email) from my wallet.  I had not wanted, for artistic reasons, to compare it directly with my real-time view of the house but, now, I had little option.  I needed to cross-check the trees and gate colour and distant walls of the half-hidden house.  Perhaps the shape of the commuter I had seen disappear up the garden path was my friend’s younger brother (if he had a younger brother at all) who still lived there with his parents.  To my amazement, I was stirred from such unverifiable speculations by the photo itself showing a house that was quite different from the house I remembered being depicted in it when I first saw it on the computer screen and now showing a house that strongly resembled the very house up the garden path of which I was now being led by the commuter with the brief case who soon reached the front door – evidently locked and he had no key.  All this I assumed from the body language.

I heard the front door bell ring.  Meanwhile, I felt myself become more and more exposed in this embarrassing position, lurking in the front garden, uninvited and eventually misunderstood.  I tried to merge with the shrubbery.  If a meanwhile can have its own meanwhile, I did have the self-possession to maintain a critical gaze towards the house because – come what may – I still intended to paint the unpaintable, viz. a house so ordinary, even the windows sunk back into their frames with a sense of paranoia.  It would have seemed out of place in any picture-frame, out of place on any chocolate or jigsaw box.  I would go as far as to say it would find no window of opportunity in even the least self-respecting of any photo album.  In extremis, it would find no place anywhere – as house or house’s image.

Yet, despite all these factors, it did at least have the security of a locked door.  And a bell that rung but was never answered.  I heard heavy steps behind me – as if I was in turn being followed – but by somebody who did not have the same surreptitious grace as me to maintain a low profile within the shrubbery.  I had proceeded on tip-toe.  This person had heavy steps.  I had the human feelings of fear and obtrusiveness.  I was something that could not be avoided by power of sheer bodily existence.  The one with heavy steps was a ghost, no doubt – because, when I turned, there was nobody there behind me and, when I turned again, there was nobody at the front door.  In any event, thank goodness for that locked door.  It was something that made the house a house.  Impenetrable but truly there. I had begun to wonder, you see.  But still uncertain of my own position, I threw all caution to the wind and tore the photo into several pieces and then threw them after the caution. Imagine my dismay when I suddenly realised that the attachment was still attached to the email in electronic space.  And I returned with heavy step down the garden path led by the prospect of painting the unpaintable, having just failed to describe the indescribable.  There was a bus waiting for me.

(written today and first published here)

first published in this form here today.

“There’s nothing spooky about people who tell spooky stories.”

You could have fooled me, I nearly replied. The man, who was a little the worse for wear from drink, stared at me. In any event, we both leaned closer to the roaring fire—and even the man seemed to be listening to his own stories for the first time. There was something hypnotic about his intoning words which caused no further need of preamble—and, indeed, there had been next to no scene-setting at all, bar the fire, so his were effectively the only stories—ones that did not need speech to mark the tolerances of the listener’s belief nor vocal clues as to the suspension of routine reality.

He simply told about ghosts, or rather about one ghost, or possibly none, except there seemed to be at least two ghosts at the time. There were, of course, many ghosts around that roaring fire—situated in what at first gave the appearance of being a bar in a pub, somewhere in the city. There was the sound of heavy traffic in the distance together with the sporadic war-chants of newspaper-sellers. There were no customers, or none to speak of. The joint was shut, but just about to open, judging by the height of the fire. The spirit bottles gleamed darkly above their optics.

The noise of the bar-staff gathered off-stage. And the souls of dead regulars held forth with crazy pub taik, even crazier than when they were alive—except it was now less than silence (the only way to tell it).

But stories have to be about some¬thing, with plottable moments and degrees of suspense derived from character or situation. I feared them devoid of all such inter¬ests. The only possible interest was in won¬dering how a story could actually continue without any interest, except perhaps for the potential revelations which uneventfulness often bred: romance, mystery or conspiracy upon the brink of resolution.

The flames of the fire spoke spooks louder than thoughts, with irritated crack¬les and ambitious armies of sparks marching up the chimney like deaths in the making.

I had indeed been part of a romance that once set this pub alight, but I died during the long drawn-out kiss, wrapped in the arms of a drunk man whom I had loved before he became drunk. Perhaps it was me who made him get drunk. There was very little to differentiate guzzlers from ghosts. Both with too much spirit. Yes, spirit, since I had an emptiness in the heart and glinting dark tears of such spirit at the invisible eyes. Bottled out of spooking, so to speak.

And so slowly spake the stories, those dreams without a dreamer.

He went in one end, knowing it was not going to be an easy ride on the ghost train, but at the other, as he came out into the daylight, blinking like mad, it had been worse than his worst fears. Even worse though was when he came out the other side with no mind left to recognise the horror for what it had been. But what he did realise was it had not been a ghost train at all.

He had entered his own pet metaphor of a tunnel during one of his mid-life crises. He was going out with a woman who said she liked nothing better than taking someone of his nature in hand. She thought he had the makings of a successful man, but he failed to channel his efforts correctly. She had him spruced up, made him change his underwear, told him to shave almost to the bone, preened and quiffed his hair and set him walking in the right direction, straight for what he would have earlier considered to be the cliff-edge of success. And, indeed, it took a lot of guts to draw back at the last moment, for when he saw the sea creaming on the crags way below, his instinct told him things were not quite right.

He turned round to see her waving at him (as she often did in his dreams too), motioning him to proceed. He shook his head, causing his eyeballs to rattle around like squidgy dice inside the skull. The taste of fear was tantamount to eating his own corpse.

But he was more upset than scared. He trusted the woman, since she had turned him out of her bed a new man. He even felt desire again. In fact, he would go as far as to say that she was the first woman really to turn him on. Generally, breasts were two a penny. But here, they were larger than life. And the way she moved under him, it was a sense of riding horseback in a circus where a ring-master kept his best whips for the man rather than the mount.

Now, it needed all his will-power to dredge some small particle of a real personality from the macho meaninglessness and humdrum heroism that his mind had become. He needed to re-establish himself as the wimp which she had originally found in him. To stand up to her, he needed to slop around once more in that miasma of lost chances that underlied everybody’s destiny. That was the greatest courage: to reconcile such absurdity with life. It would be like holding up a crucifix to her face of gritted teeth and double-edged eyes. And such self-negation effectively made him feel the resurgence of power. He sensed his muscles moving into place like cartridges into the barrel of a hair-trigger gun. The brain-cells became light and airy places.

In sum, his confidence fed off the lack of confidence that once threatened to swamp it. Thus, she had made him into a child of her times, moulded him from the soggy clay of a human being and fired him in the belly of her kiln.

Emerging from the tunnel of edge-to-edge blinkers, he leaped from the cliff-edge into the rocking weed-choked oceans of mindless ambition. But even that release was denied him, since he eventually became conscious of being more macho and heroic than it was possible for anyone to be. He actually enjoyed mastering the woman who had created his new persona and, so, by overcoming her power over him, by becoming more powerful than her, he knew with anguish that he had given her the ultimate irresistible power she had wanted all the time: the power to change the unchangeable.

He always had to be given a drink from a cup with a baby’s spout, to prevent the dribbling down, the dribbling down his pinafore dress. Even when he was 42.

It’s awonder I can bring myself to tell you all this, for I was his mother for most of his life. But let me start at the end, because that will give you some perspective to what really went on. I had lived, as you know, through several of the war years, dodging the forking of the blitzkrieg over old London Town, to such an extent that the tube platforms still bear the pattern of my bum.

Many years later, he died under a train, as it entered Angel station.

He was born about a year after the end of the war in Walton-on-the-Naze. In any event, I know it was near the sea because, during my confinement, I grew used to hearing the waves beating the rocks. So, it may not have been precisely Walton-on-the-Naze, but that will do.

As soon as he emerged, a number of minutes following the original afterbirth, he crawled across the parquet floor, caterwauling in, what they later told me, was Ancient Egyptian. And all his first few weeks were spent doodling on waste paper—a calligraphy (if that was the word) of a two-dimensional universe which seemed sufficient to house the reality of his early years: stylised pecking birds, opposing arrows, beckoning hand-prayers, bewhiskered eyes, erect members...

I walloped him hard to bring him back to his senses, but I really knew that it was he who should have walloped me for my ignorance. He grew too big for the play-pen. Used his cot as a second toilet. Threw the nappies, that I offered him, straight back into my face.

The house contracted worms. Instead of the intestines of a child whose mother had not yet been taught that cleanliness is tantamount to godliness, the worms escaped their berth in his lower abdomen and treated the kitchen as if it were a fish-bait tin. I tried scalding them to death—I had seen my own mother pouring water from her bed-bottle directly on ant-heaps—but, being hard-up, we tried eating their still writhing bodies, post cooking, and they used this opportunity to set up home again, since they evidently thrived on stomach acid. And my son, he smiled, for he would only eat fish fresh from the sea.

Then he told me of another like him who lived in nearby Southend-on-Sea: one whose worms were more manifold, who was a reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian who had not believed in reincarnation. So, there was some sorting out to be done— there was an angry throwback, thus thrashing about in the county of Essex, before the Dartford Tunnel outlet had been conceived, let alone constructed.

We boarded a green Eastern National bus from Colchester. How we arrived there in the first place, I cannot even remember—perhaps we walked the 18 miles from the Naze, via Weeley, or was it Kirby Cross, but, looking back on it, from the distance of old age if not hindsight, it may be that we hitched a lift in an old Ford Popular whose driver had stayed at home, for fear of the traffic on modern roads.

My son, as ever, was travel-sick. By the time we reached Rayleigh (or it may have been Jaywick Sands), the side of the bus was streaked with how’s-yer-father and red custard. It reminded me of the Nazi (or was it Nazey) planes over St Paul’s during the war for, as they were going so fast, the pilots had exploded and shitlered us oe’r...

Jaywick is a funny place. It has a special Council department who distributes broken bottles over the beaches, to attract the right calibre of tourists. Grape-picking in France, during the endless student days of post-war Europe, had nothing on the laying waste of the shantytowns of the East coast of England in the 50’s and 60’s.

We never reached Southend, as you have probably guessed, from all my procrastination (if that’s the right word). We stayed in Jaywick for, it seemed, a lifetime. My son grew up into an existence that had been destined for him—and that other one in Southend whom we had been seeking went off to University with a pal from Bexhill, and that University was near an even more downtrod seaside place up North.

They say (don’t you?) that if there is another war, it will be us on the East coast who will bear the brunt. We have already sown the groynes and piers with barbed wire and, late at night, you can hear the groaning growth of rust.

My son? He spends all his time fishing, using bait from my stomach. I’m good as dead to him.

It was not he then at the age of 42 who dropped acid and fell in front of a train entering Angel tube station. A case of mistaken identity since, being dead, he had to be force-fed with a baby’s spout. And, while the body was being picked up by a task force of striking ambulance men, the dossing refugees on the platform mouthed obscenities in a language so ancient it was dead—a ceaseless mumbling and mewling along those tunnels which sheltered them from a war that must have ended years before.

A son is always a son to a loving mother, whatever he does or becomes. And a mother is always a mother even when way way beyond the barbed margins of an enemy country called Death.

As I lay awake, brimming over with baby. I listen to the waves, not beating the rocks, but dribbling down dribbling down.

The lawn is crawling with large batches of shuttling wings, each a squirming mass of flying ants, moving as if with one mind.

Why they have decided to emerge from the ground nests (or have they just landed from layers of sky?) on this particular day in August is a mystery to one as simple-minded as I. Have other lawns in this area a similar infestation? Am I sitting upon one vast dynamic ant bank, the ill-manicured green sward being merely a thin veneer over the black-seamed pulsings of a creature which, at one moment, is constituted of swarms of self-sufficient insects, but, at another, is a single entity waiting to break free from Earth’s chains and feed off human corpses?

That finishes the story, in many ways, if a story it can be called. That’s because it takes place in the finite present moment, when questions can never be answered. The only way to answer the call of the plot is to inform any likely reader of what the future holds. It takes a very special cross-breed of story teller to attempt such a sticky feat. OK, OK, I know some authors have tried to predict what they see as the future and spun catherine-wheels of yarn from such tenta¬tive projections of plot, for the benefit of those foundling generations of wide-eyed readers who have a taste for structured fantasising. However, what I am trying to get at, is an ability to tell the future as it REALLY is.

The web of cobbled alleyways radiates from the domed Cathedral which was once called St Pauls. Between the alleyways, the tall wedge-sectioned buildings lean like the ancient warehouses which they were constructed to mirror in a miscegena¬tion of nostalgia and history. Trundle-rattlers weave routes along the byways, toting cargoes of insects tended by other insects.

If I am not too much mistaken, I am the only human being alive (the word “being” used as a doing rather than a naming word). I wonder how the Cathedral has withstood the domino-rally entropies to which everything else human-bred has long since succumbed.

My name is Carapace (I was told that was how the White Spider baptised me when I was extruded from my latest mother) and I really believe I am the last creature able to walk on its hindlegs without over-balancing. They keep me in this zoo-trap, to remind them of pre- and para-history, in case they forget. It spurs them to curtail the cycles.

The insects are larger than life now, with clicking nodules. You are only aware of their existence within the dome’s spinning darkness because their mandibles scrape together and the segments ratchet along their wagging probosces: as well as, I suppose, the light of the sporadic lonely moon glinting off their steely hardbacks.

And so the future finishes too: fizzles out: worse than the ending provided by the present. Without a good finale, the story itself is wasted, however true and/or interesting its web of plot-threads. It’s a pity the story has to end with a full stop at all.

Beyond future’s end, there lies the real fantasy.

I live among real men again: men who fight each other tooth and claw as a kind of past-time or hobby or role-playing game, much as children used to play ‘dares’.

The lawns stretch into the distance and, on the horizon. I can discern the tiny hive-like dome of St Pauls sparkling in the light of the re-born sun. I dream, at night, of this sun’s final re-enactment of its rhythmic deaths, for one last show on the stage of reality, and I can see the innards of the Cathedral being clogged with undulating whiplash feelers, all emanating from a bulging sac of white pus lodged upon the ancient altar ... which could be Earth’s brain, but is more than likely just an inexplicable Jungian symbol created by a story teller with more ability (or pretentiousness) than my-self.

The days grow longer and less ten¬able. Humans have passed away into their own past-times. The seasons have become changeling generations of cross-pollination. The seemingly endless lazy hot days of August stretch and yearn into Carapace’s long memory of forgotten dreams, awaken¬ing the maggot-riddled cadaver that he must have once become: and the hazes of flying insects fill the golden air, turning the whole tableau into an impressionist’s beautiful marginless painting -

The tower was full of gobbling sounds. Even back of the outhouses, beyond the moat systems, one could hear them.

The day I arrived I had expected to see what they had led me to believe: a fine imposing structure, standing tall between the headland and the tor. But, if you fail to imagine my surprise when I caught sight of a simple crofter’s cottage backing on to what looked like an airport hangar which then grew out of the half-finished monolithic tower itself, I in my turn would not be surprised.

I had been brought up to believe the mediaeval realities which the history books would reflect for centuries to come. And, if not for my discovery of such an outlandish edifice, I would have lived and died in such ignorance - and, after all, death is indeed just another form of ignorance.

In any event, one of its inhabitants found me lurking beneath a large animal, when night was about.

“I suppose you’re there because its udder is your hot water bottle, upstart.”

“Sorry, my good sir, but I did not want to disturb your supper.”

His face flushed close to mine: “Give me a rest! You’re here to cause me grief, I’ll be bound. Muck and mayhem are the cargo of the likes of you, no fear. I don’t know who sent you, but nestling there under the breasts of my grazer, you were no doubt going to suckle the night away, draining her of a whole winter’s milk-letting!”

I was at a loss for a moment, but decided to give it to him straight: “They told me your tower was a mighty castellated wonder of the Mediaeval world. Instead of which, here I am, squeezing my eyes up against a sickly sight—buildings, snatched from various god-forbidden eras which, even where they should have belonged or would have done, do toss and tussle from roof to dungeon in belated attempts to better themselves!”

The man blanched, as if he were ashamed of something I’d said. Called away from the tower, along with his bluff, he was fast becoming what I should have recognised all along: a sack of flesh. riddled with doubts and evidently now tangled and tongue-tied.

I continued: “You’re no better than an outhouse beast yourself. You stink (as well as pray) to high heaven. And I bet the halls you’ve just left are crammed with others, even fouler than you...”

My monologue continued for as long as I could keep it up, until I became lost in my own non-sequiturs, paradoxes, dead-ends and ridiculous tangents upon tangents.

Given half the chance, he enjoyed conversing as much as me. He eventually told me that the tower was crawling with men and women who pursued an almost ever lasting roisterous roundelay of blind encounter, self-perpetuating coprophagy, safe cannibalism and other forms of creative love-play. Those naughtier than most (or sillier, or grown too senile even for death, or downright wicked) were expelled to the outhouses from where they could look back in awe, across the moated canals, towards what was called the Tower of Turdhelm ... knobbling all over, as it continued to be, with wayward annexes.

I forced him (and his grazer) to play pat-a-cake, ring o’ orchids, bone-loaning games, leaning-dances, elbow-fights and, finally, the-last-one-alive-is-a-dead’un, until there was a silence in which even the gobbling had ceased. It was then I realised, with a frozen smile, that true History could only be told by such primary sources as the illiterate dead.

The poet who couldn’t write—I first met him in a pub, down by Thames Side, and he was the first to admit that he was drunk. Though drunkards are rarely dependable.

“You want me to tell you about old Dell?” were the first words with which he opened the conversation. All I could do was nod but, even now, I’m unsure to whom he was referring.

“Well, I first met him in a University north of here. It was towards the end of that decade now called the Sixties...”

The pub was to shut in about half an hour (for licensing hours were still thankfully observed), and he continued, ignoring my pointed attempts at intervention: “He was a bit of a beardy-weirdy, that Dell—I suppose that’s the best way of describing him. He toted a shotgun to student union meetings and if it were not for the likes of me, I’m sure he’d now be a hunted man as well as a haunted one.”

I couldn’t resist raising my eyebrows a notch or three, but I put it down to the drunkenness which had pervaded his brain more than he was now able to admit. But he still continued: “Anyway, Dell, that was his name, though I bet you anything if he was tracked down today, he’d not own up to it. He’d pretend he’s somebody else, even if it meant laying claim to the opposite gender. He last wrote back in the early Seventies (when nobody had even heard of such a decade) and told me that he still held precariously to his self belief. But the world, now quite beyond his jurisdiction, was growing younger day by day, and thus in parallel he was fast becoming a buffer of the last water...

And he interrupted his own gossip, as he dug inside his flies to produce a sickly-looking toadstool: he sprayed cider towards the fruit machine in the corner—which shorted and hacked into circuits that set its own nudge against hold, by passing the gamble which reared its unlikely head be¬tween—a facsimile of life itself, I mused.

The lights flashed. Last orders were announced. And I knew that if it didn’t all come out now, the story would stay just that, another piece of pub talk for nobody to take seriously except perhaps on another night with another drink in our hands. I visited the bar to obtain his final drink. As I landed it in front of him with a pecker of pork scratchings (since, he’d told me, his tummy muscles were in overbite), I asked him what his last word was on the matter.

He replied inaudibly: “My dreams are sweeter than most. And the dream I cherish most, the one that has yet even to be dreamt, is of that Dell who has probably forgotten about the University where we once met in an era that deserved to be called an era rather than the nondescript tranche of years called the present.”

I was truly ashamed that I could not grasp the importance of his pub talk. It evidently meant more than a thousand erudite books on philosophy.

I said a hearty night night to him and to his vision of that friend Dell he’d lost somewhere in a past that may not hopefully have yet begun. I helped him to the pub exit, where the autumn night was lighting up with stellar crusades. He sighed and I watched him strut home through the on¬coming shadows. “Goodnight, Dell,” I whispered.

If the truth were known, I’d probably just met a beautiful ghost that was haunting its former body.

He was watching her. She was to be his own personal girl companion, the one he had adopted from the whole human race as a fitting tribute to the work he had been undertaking for at least five eternities and which was now fast approaching its conclusion...

The sea was moving in the way her mother used to cast the silk table cloth into the warm mountain breezes, to be laid out for Sunday picnics.

One moment—sitting at the hemmed edge of the cloth, with a crystal glass of wine raised to her lips, with the shattered eye of the sun shining through it and revealing foreign bodies amid the sparkles; the next moment—far far away from those matriarchal mountains where the crustless sandwiches were eaten as soon as snatched from the creaking homely hamper ... to the sea that, even now, encroaches close to the girl’s sand-curling toes and is upon the brink of creating a new memory more fixed in time than those distant, indefinable picnics which, for all she knows, never happened, may never happen.

Her breasts are nude. The brushfire of hair below her flat belly is dashed with salt-white as the surf cascades nearer. It is peculiar that she should recall those childhood excursions to the mountain with her mother for, although every detail of the picnic is still coming back to her like paintings in a gallery, her mother she cannot picture at all.

The girl’s alone on the beach, but she would not worry if other tourists wandered onto the shingle to thwack a ball from tide’s edge to sea wall. It’s quite common to sunbathe bare these days, so she’d probably not get even a sidewise glance.

She feels as if she’s being watched anyway.

A black spider crawls like a phantom birth from the midst of her brushfire hair, as big as the palm of her hand, and waddles towards the sea. It must be blind for it does not flee the rattling pebbles of the strengthening tide.

Much to her surprise, several more spiders emerge and scuttle like crabs in all directions except back to her, until the whole beach is covered with their swarthiness. Even back in those picnic days, she recalled the irritating insects that often infiltrated the food, the ant-hill on which they had inadvertently pitched the tablecloth, the smoky clouds of hover-flies, the dead beetle floating inside the screwtop...

But today is something different...

When Reincarnations come to an end, all manner of peculiarities break out before the final death of one who has lived before through a thousand thousand deaths at least. Even the Reincarnators themselves reach their last eternity from time to time; the one of whom we speak celebrated his last throes by scattering all the black playing-cards in a tantrum across the gambling-table; he picked out one card from the table, to tempt fate, and found it to be the Queen of Spiders.

But was this the mother or the daughter? He knew the answer even before he posed the question. Through some unaccountable miscalculation of temper or tactic, he had indeed condemned himself to spending the real eternity of his retirement with the mother not the daughter, the mother whose only pleasure in her many lives had been to drop creepy-crawlies into the food she prepared and into other nice things...

The sea had covered the beach and all that was upon it, except the girl. She has returned to her hotel, feeling that a great weight had been lifted from her, as if she’d escaped a death worse than fate.

Those dreams without a dreamer were surely tangible at last, stories that I could actually remember or retell. Yet the roar of intoxicants pounding the pub door gave me final pause for thought, as I discovered that my efforts had been nought but wishful thinking—an array of dead-end nightmares: a dip-in duck-out of an odyssey. Moreover, there was no evidence I had narrated tales to myself, least of all to anyone else. After all, a bacteria’s ghost upon a suppurating dollop of residual scrag in an otherwise empty microwave had no mind, no thoughts, not even wishful ones, let alone a mouth with which to speak them.

The snug-room was empty, bar the accoutrements of booze and a grub-oven carelessly gaping in the spooky renewal of silence. Nevertheless, the real pub door would itself open wide shortly—and with the fire in the grate cheerily relit, the drunk man would again toast his makeshift fists, knowing I loved him for being me.

(published 'Atsatrohn' 1993)

A typical seaside town, one slightly posher than the run-of-the-mill versions further along the coast. My only visit was on the occasion of a carnival, an evening of lighted candles in the park and a fancy-dress parade on the pier. The sea attracted me most, however, where the orange and turquoise dusks were a sight to behold, with merely a hint of breeze - and, once upon the cliff, looking down at the strollers on the prom, I thought that the whole world's history had led to this one point in time. The past and, indeed, the future only existed to frame this single moment: and, closing my eyes with a sigh of lashes, I sucked deep of the sea air. My troubles gradually dissipated with each breath.

But all good things have their ending built in.

I have always considered myself to be part animal, part angel - the combination that made Rhona. I wore clothes that did no justice to the shape within, sported heavy cosmetics which my face did not need and concealed my lights under such spectacles which would not have been fashionable even ten years before.

Imagine my surprise when I sensed a stranger within my body's territory, just as I was finishing my clumsy nirvana. I looked up at met the eyes of a woman scarcely out of girlhood. She smiled and then lowered her head slightly as if expecting me to strike up a conversation after her first move. She was dressed in a grey corduroy skirt, ending just below her knees, a half-length cagoule - which surprised me as there had been no sign of rain for days - and high heels that must have meant a difficult climb to this point on the cliff.

She spoke, evidently having surrendered any hope of me taking the initiative: "There are not too many evenings like this..."

I nodded but still could not bring myself to speak, since this intriguing encounter had been too sudden by half, too soon in the scheme of things. Rhona was not ready for such attentions from one of her own sex.

The other woman continued: "When winter winds loudly howl in chimneys, I dream of evenings like this. The sky could not be more perfect, don't you think, makes you want to be in contact with anybody who is near..."

I found myself studying her face, believing that the dipping sun was hiding my stare by shining off my glasses. She was no doubt all angel: skin luminescent and features finely modelled beneath a coiling sprig of dark hair at which the sea breeze gently tugged. And such mild eyes, belying her outspoken manner to a complete stranger such as Rhona.

She wore her soul upon her pretty face.

I broke from my prison of silence at last: "I do not know his name, but that author who wrote 'only connect...' was right."

She shook her head violently: "The author was a fool, then!"

And she raised the cagoule, to reveal - not the pert girlish bosom I expected nor the lace-trimmed brassiere she ought to have worn. Where nipples should have been were the wriggling ends of blind but evidently malign cancers still germinating from within the body's incubator and striving to close the circle of their disease like a snake in search of its own venomous tail.

I closed my eyes - in one moment of horror and grief and compassion and, even, guilt.

I opened them. She was gone of course. A damp grey mist encroached upon the sea and, eventually, upon Rhona. A solitary war plane droned and juddered in the distance. I set off to return to my hotel, in the desperate hope I would pass a chapel where I could light a candle in her memory. Not a carnival candle, but a holy one. The fact that she never existed did not seem to matter. But, by the time I reached the prom and walked amongst those late strollers with dogs and spouses, I had forgotten her.

Rhona stared at the red biro, shaking her head at the careless way it had been manufactured. It blotched ink everywhere.

The parlour was frankly too full of my knick-knacks. Too chintzy by half. But I enjoyed my parlour more than I enjoyed anything. Merely the plain sitting in the wing armchair with knitting-needles clacking among my fingers. Or embroidering fresh antimacassars for my still dark hair to rest upon. Or simply listening to the Home Service on the wireless, at such an ungenerous volume I could hardly make out the words of the bespoke announcers; only the chimes of Big Ben marking the top of important hours were sufficient to break the autonomy of the relentless clock's ticking from its carriage on the marble mantelpiece. Rhona, if past her prime, was at peace at last.

Noises in the road outside were far and few between. The heavy velvetine curtains, which I preferred drawn tantalisingly close, particularly on purling moonlit nights, muffled any extraneous outburst from the soap-cart kids who often used my pavement as their race track. A motor scooter or bubble car back-firing was bearable ... just. But when the dust-carts arrived, I sat in ear-muffs, staring blankly at the wireless. I rather resented these rough and ready men clattering uncouthly along the otherwise rather select road ... because I prided myself on never putting out any rubbish for them to collect. Rhona, you see, was not a rubbish sort of person.

There was one particular person I recalled, who permeated my day-dreams. Charlie whom I had almost loved. A person of the breed Mysterious Man: who wore made-to-measure suits, with trousers specially for a gent who "dressed to the right", as the tape-worm of a tailor had once sneered out loud whilst measuring Charlie ... in my presence!

You see, I was a lady who always wore high-fashion gloves whatever the occasion and, for me, Mysterious Man's attraction was the heady smell of after-shave, the jar of Brylcreem, even the cakey cylinder of Erasmic left suggestively at the edge of the wash basin. I did not want to delve deeper into other more dubious activities nor know more than was good for me about his private areas.

So, I pushed Charlie out of my life. All because of a chance remark made by a bespoke tailor about some intimacy of a crutch-panel lining. Life's too short not to have standards.

The parlour was an audible game of Pick-a-Stix, as my needles competed with the clock. A ready-laid fire in the grate asked for lighting, its ruffled tongues of yesterday's Daily Telegraph showing from below the meticulously arranged firewood. I was willing to shiver rather than start a flame just for their benefit. I feared it may remind me of what I had stuffed up the chimney...

Despite the whining of winter winds, the soap-carts trundled outside, kept in queue by the gutters. Those kids should soon be off for their high tea. Meantime, their otherwise shrill voices were deadened by the curtains - as I hoped would be the incessant peep-peep of the dust-cart's reversing.

Rhona stared at the blots on the paper and wondered if there would be enough ink to complete the story. It would be a shame to waste omniscience. After all, there were few leaks in certainty. And even fewer floods in moonstreams.

The Old People's Home was set back a little from the road, up a winding path between some bushes that had evidently been scorched by an out-of-control bonfire in the recent past. I took him around the grounds and even laughed when he said it looked as if they must have had a pretty wild fireworks party that November. Now being December, the undertent of the sky hung browny grey: soon, all would be blunted by snow.

I was not exactly ancient. However, senility was now particularly prevalent in those of my sex. Scientists said it was a disease; others, less tactful, said it must be as a result of women leaving the shelter of the family home and trying to go out to work like their menfolk.

My visitor was in fact older than myself. He was rather gratified to see how well I looked, compared to what he had imagined. It was not as if I had lost all my faculties but he must have felt the saddest part was when I called him by my late father's name.

We strolled, arm in arm, towards the large double-doors of the Home's entrance. He felt the spattering upon the back of his neck and, unaccountably, he began to dwell upon a memory of one of those rare white Christmases as a younger man. I was then a mere slip of a girl, with pigtails which I often tied together across my flat chest. I became excited about the Christmas Tree and its topmost angel. He used to give me rides upon his knee.

This memory made him cry, but he concealed it from me as best he could. He guessed I could see it in his eyes. In fact, he wondered whether I recalled those old days, when he used to be invited along to all major family occasions as a vestigial uncle figure. I smiled, as we walked into the relative warmth of the Home.

He tried to keep his eyes on me, so as to avoid seeing the other inmates nodding silently to each other from their armchair rafts. The large television in the corner had a flickering image but no sound, and many of the residents stared back at it, glassily. They thought it was the Light Programme.

I still maintained my figure and a certain dress sense: although this may be the credit of the Home's service. Whatever the cause, I was still a woman at whom people could not help looking twice if they saw me walking the streets - which, of course, I never did. The skirt-length hung in tantalising pleats and folds, with a tuck-ribbon fastened at bottom-back, just above the closely-carved ankles. My bosom and hips were graciously shapeful, if I may say so, the neck revealing the positions of the slender bones, the cheekbones high. Despite Rhona's dimming eyes, the onsetting weather had not blunted her figure.

I looked round at him once and then joined the ranks of the armchair brigade, to nod away the rest of the evening before going to bed. In that one short glance, he must have read a sort of farewell which, despite its vagueness, plumbed to his tormented depths of self-delusion ... hinting in my own half-wit fashion that I still recognised the obsession in his soul ... for me. I suppose I blamed him for my present troubles. Something in the past hung in the air between us, something mostly forgotten. It was as if I felt his hands on my budding breasts, even now. He knew it would be pointless to try to convince me of his innocence.

Having come to the conclusion that my mild eyes had not said anything at all in that last moment in the Home, he left without even giving his regards to the Matron in charge.

Outside, the tears no doubt turned to snow upon his cheeks, as, increasingly desperate, he looked for his car. You see, Rhona narrated parts of the story she didn't even know. Women have more instinct, which even senility cannot change - or which senility actually engendered. In fact, there was a wondrous wisdom about women like Rhona.

When she had finished writing, there was ink upon her mouth like smudged lipstick. There were rodent ulcers travelling from the roof of her mouth to the bottom of the throat. She glided to the bedroom window and selflessly drew back the floral curtains. It was a turquoise summer evening, between dusk and darkness. She felt drained by the gurgling moon but happy that death was to rid her of all the pains at last. She looked down at her lap. She must have eaten her own breasts. Only puddingy tatters remained and one scabby nipple...

Strangely, despite the change to calm weather, the wind in the chimney howled in agony.

(published 'Ah Pook Was Here' 1994)