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Sunday, February 24, 2008

DARK CHINTZ

Published in 'Dreams from a Stranger's Cafe' 1994

....

Gutger Kyle was to be our spokesman.

....

"Why him?" I asked, pointing towards the framed yellowy photograph on the wall of our bedsit.

....

"Why not him?" asked Lucy.

....

"That doesn't seem to be a good reason."

....

Lucy and I were ensconced in our love-pad, one where we'd not yet made love but one where we would make love one of these days, given the correct ceremony of foreplay or negotiation by a third party. We'd rented the place to live together in. An unspoken purpose, till there was someone purposeful enough to speak it. But what would a single man and woman rent a place for, other than to live together in? And being sound of limb and mind, what else could living-together mean if it were not loving-together? To live is to love had long been a maxim of mine. But to live together was doubly so. Yet, then, neither of us had accounted for Gutger Kyle.

....

When we first moved in on that dark, rainy, soggy-leaved Wednesday afternoon, the name Gutger Kyle was unknown to both Lucy and myself. Only gradually did the person behind the name impinge upon our consciousness. But everybody's name, at the end of the day, is a pseudonym for the body. So we should have not been surprised at the outcome, should we?

....

Lucy had certainly never heard of him before nor, obviously, met him in any shape or form. Me likewise. I suppose it being a furnished bedsit would help us both disown ownership of the photo. But why was this particular photo hiding its own shape of size on the chintzy wallpaper? - wallpaper pasted up on the plaster, no doubt, at the behest of the even chintzier landlady - who recommended the bedsit to us by its view of suburban roofscapes. But ....London.... was full of such scenes, I'd thought. Wet shades of grey, as the evenings drew in.

....

Several weeks passed before we put two and two together, which was never easy when there was only two of you to start off with. The photo was the same as that on a hardback's dust-wrapper - one of several motheaten books the landlady had left leaning against each other - presumably for show, since nobody, surely, read proper books in this neck of the ....London.... woods. Except, perhaps, Lucy and I. They seemed to be cast-offs from the time when Boots the Chemist issued you with library tickets as well as phials of cure-all medicine. Foxed and thumbrinted, with a strange label that centuries couldn't unstick. A squashed insect halfway down page 57. Something worse squashed on page 102. The tome in question with the photo was, of course, by Gutger Kyle, or how else would Lucy and I have known his name? Called GHOSTS A MILLION it was. Another by the same author was THE BLACK SPOOK. Another one - what was it called? - WILD HONEY. In fact, as I began to cast my eyes through them, I felt I knew the style of the prose already. Or was that the benefit of hindsight? Whatever the case, I, too, can write just like Kyle. Rubbed off on me. Got my word-wings caught in that damn honey!

....

In any event, judging by the bibliographical details inside the title pages, Gutger Kyle was more prolific than his lack of fame could explain. However, the most astonishing matter, to Lucy, as well as me, was the smell of the Kyle books. Many book-lovers and word-worms maintain that an intrinsic feature of a book's aesthetic value is the manner its 'nose' can remind one of better days, endless summer holidays, the wonder of childhood, bee-buzzing meadows, the nuances of nostalgia or the cloying of chintz. A cross between mustiness and turmeric. Cough linctus. Newness and oldness combined. And permutations of redolence. Speech-marks and spokesmoke. And whatever. There are no right words. Or all words are right. But redolence is the best. It springs to mind. The only way to convey the colour red in smell? Maybe. Or yellow. Or thick thick dandelion wine. Or liquid bees. Or, even, earwax.

....

The book which smelt, according to ....Stanley...., strangely - so strong, so strange, it brought back memories you'd never had. The book was by Gutger Kyle, yes. Entitled. YELLOW TEARS.

....

Incidentally, ....Stanley.... was the landlady's - he told us Kyle rented our room in the thirties - hence his photo on the wall - but did that follow? - would Lucy's and my photo be put up, when we left? - yet I never asked the question - I needed someone else to ask. ....Stanley.... was a spiv. He sold things on - how shall we say? - like photos, I suppose, to people who didn't want to be taken. He set children on stuffed donkeys. Gave adults the organ-grinder's monkey to hold. Then snapped them. Clicked his fingers and waited for the money to turn itself into foodstuff for him and Mrs Ladle (the landlady). He said he had known Gutger Kyle. Took the very photo on the book jacket. And on the wall. All those years ago, when ....Stanley.... first started out as portrait painter of the single brushstroke. And Kyle was a young writer, without a publication to his name.

....

The time came, however, when Lucy and I started to smell the books purely in the hope of osmosis regarding the plots. But eventually we stopped not reading them: the only way I can describe our negative approach to fathoming their content. In fact, I tried to read them aloud to Lucy,in moments of desperate foreplay. At the same time, I was intent on not looking at the pages, in case I was infected by something in the shadows of the words and in their appearance on the yellow-mapped pages. We spent many a night making the small hours smaller, whiling them, not away, but back, as if summoning up a past that would not have existed if it weren't for us in that past's future: a future created by our very perusal of the pearls of wisdom which a certain Gutger Kyle had once decided to disseminate in the guise of novel ghosts. In short, we laid ourselves open to the serendipities of life and, hopefully, love.

....

Soon we read more into those books and, if it were not for the blur of memory tinged by dream, I'd be convinced that Stanley and the Landlady were merely characters in the fiction rather than the real people who were our neighbours in the house. Skylady and fancy man.

....

A story - one in an anthology that included several famous writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Lawrence Durrell, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Charles Dickens, as well as unknown ones such as Gutger Kyle - was particularly disturbing. Kyle seemed to have condensed his usual free-fall style that often ranged wide in plot, place and people into a more hard-core vision, where word was plot, white spaces and wide margins place and monsters people. In any normal sense, one couldn't relate to it other than as a pure poem which happened to be prose. I often glanced up at the photo as I read the story aloud, wondering how anybody could write like that, particularly a human being, one, presumably, with frailties and a brittle bone covering the brain.

....

Lucy listened breathless. I needed to breathe, however, in view of imparting the words from the page via my voice-box into her eyes - which eyes, in turn, spoke volumes as to her frightened reaction.

....

Halfway through there was a sudden knock on our door.

....

"It's only me!"

....

Evidently Mrs Ladle.

....

"Yes?"

....

Lucy broke her breath-fast with this single word.

....

"There's been a phone call. Didn't say who they were but it was a crossed-line, too, and one of those calling mentioned your names ... but then it went dead - and I wondered if you were expecting a call and would know who to call back..."

....

Mrs Ladle's voice was muffled by the closed door. I placed the anthology upon the bed-quilt and walked over to grab the handle, in the hope of instilling some sense into the end-game of her visit. Getting rid of the interruption was an art form in itself, even if a hard-nosed priority. I forget exactly the outcome but, apparently, ....Stanley.... was worried about anonymous callers. He called them undergrunts. He and the landlady were ex-directory while, by virtue of being tenants, Lucy and I were tantamount to nameless as far as most of the outside world was concerned. The Poll Tax authorities were sublimely ignorant of our existence, and aborted telephone calls seemed more sinister than the possible people making them.

....

Mrs Ladle had disappeared by the time I had opened the door to her, because she'd heard ....Stanley.... shouting - or, rather, banging the dinner gong in the downstairs hall.

....

"I wonder what all that was about," I said, returning to the anthology.

....

Lucy shrugged. I wanted her to kiss me.

....

I forget exactly the outcome, as I said, but, somehow, we had lost all enthusiasm for the Kyle story and its faltering synchronicities. In fact, the dream it described was interrupted by the relentless ringing of a phone which woke the story's protagonist - as I was to discover upon reading it to the end a few weeks later, when Lucy was out job-hunting. It transpired that the protagonist was a monster just like the monsters in the nightmares from which it had been woken up.

....

While failing to fathom my own motivation, I jumped up from the bed - where I usually sat for want of an easy chair - and peered under the photo on the wall. It took Lucy's absence to allow me to show off my bravado in such an act. Otherwise, I may have failed, with her watching, which would have been the worst of both worlds. Good job she was out job-hunting at the time, then. Well, beneath the framed image of Gutger Kyle (the image that had bedevilled our waking lives together, without us really realising it) was the oblong of wall it had covered for - how many years?. And there resided the faded imprint of the same image. Yet, instead of the sepia of the ancient photo, it was a sort of negative, not black and white, rather shades of grey. Shades of grey. That rang a bell. Ghost were shades of grey. But, no, it was more a mirror image where the mirror itself was as insubstantial as the reflection upon it. Nevertheless, it was proud from the wall - previously sunken, no doubt, into the inset frame's back, the one I'd just lifted up - as if the image was trying to escape the plaster. And, indeed, underneath, the wallpaper was neatly cut away, revealing this nether face, uncluttered by chintz. At the eyes, there welled waxen pearls of sorrow, gummy to my yellow touch.

....

My description fails because I am no mirror. I am more that type of insubstantial mirror I was actually trying to describe. Lucy would understand.

....

Of course, I questioned Mrs Ladle about it. She asked me to tell her ....Stanley..... He was the one, she said, who saw to all the odd jobs. Not her.

....

Lucy never returned. Evidently got a job. Or so I was told by a mutual acquaintance who had a foot in both camps. As to Gutger Kyle, I never bothered to lift up his photo again, in case it had all been a dream. I needed to cherish madness while I could: to help me get over Lucy.

....

I conducted some research in the local library regarding Gutger Kyle. He did straddle, as I suspected, the turn of the century. He wrote many novels and was, at one time, as famous as those who remain famous now. He struck up a fleeting relationship with the authoress Ivy Compton-Burnett but as that is omitted from her biography, I wonder if it was true. In fact, that might be where I went wrong: believing what I read in books.

....

Lucy would understand. I can hear her breathing in the wall. Walls can collect sounds as well as memories. Places are people. Plots are pasts without a future. I'll have to get Mrs Ladle's ....Stanley.... up here to see to the pipes, I guess. He says he wants to take an old photo of me.

....

The job Lucy got, I hear, is one of being a real person. Or, at least, a spokesperson. Well, it's a promising start. Pity we never made it together, though.

....

........

8:35 AM

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Saturday, February 02, 2008

The Ox-Boy and the Riddler

Published 'Black Lotus' 1993

The knurls in Nancy's lucky stone each told of a lover, past, present and future. Dandiprats, taint-worms, chuck-farthings, gutterbloods, bowel-priers, dizzards, dumb-cakes and the many afterwitted, gag-toothed individuals too many to mention let alone remember - all claimants to Nancy's fan-nerved hand. One crack-brained cuttlebone - a real down-drug of a loafer who sported a cauliflower-wig - often toted a muck-fork to his moon-blasted allotment where he over-bred turnip-flies and turf-hogs. Another lick-spigot, with engored nostrils and an ever-cruddled nose-cloth, waded the poachy, mouldery creeks, an eaves-drip stuff-chest of a man, who wielded his lust-fired ripping-tool like the other did his muck-fork. The two fought a duel, but both were victorious and the quick-grass soon covered the ten-bones of their pleading hands - smileful ends, at least for Nancy, Then, of course, there was that yerk of a Riddler: a near-legged dingle-dangler of a fellow who loomed through the autumn air-threads, just as Nancy was feeding her stilt-plovers. Being a slouchy, venom-mouthed ink-maker, he daubed jokes all over the vitrifiable surfaces of her cottage with the by-blows of ear-picks - smearing myrrhine peccancies and pretty-spoken verjuice from elfin veinlets upon her jut-windows and steam-domes. Even his spinal-brace became salamandrine. But this gobble-gut of a Riddler was a drunkenner on quince wine and thus suffered torrified hunger-rot. Nancy was skeery. She removed the demonifuge from below her cot, played the magic tomtom and spellful strumstrum and yearned for yesterfang's lovers. All would be forgiven them. But the black-browed Riddler took his blubber-spade and belaboured her. During the Rag fair, beside the worm-wheel down by the whipple-tree, they were wed. Soon, however, the Riddler caught a dose of pug-piles from another lover's left-over nostrils and died of rhinal panspermia of the temper-screw. Not even bubblyjock could get the riddles going again. Nancy felt she had no option but widow-sacrifice. The Ox-boy who ever sat in the nettle-tree promised to make her a tesselated grave with her lucky knurled stone as headpiece. The Ox-boy was an orange-pea of a pitcock and would have made the best lover of all, if it were not now too late. And us witherlings can only weep - as the Ox-boy, after polishing one knurl in particular, placed the very last mauve mosaic upon her angel-bed.

It was a pity Nancy never understood the words.

2:52 PM

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Friday, January 25, 2008

Soundless Movement

SOUNDLESS MOVEMENT

Published 'Heliocentric Net' 1993

Graham had all he could stand from digital alarm clocks. They often went off at the wrong time, and, what with power-cuts, leaking batteries, dozing devices, lack of hands and, above all, buzzers instead of bells, he found them little better than useless. And useless was only a notch neater than nasty. So he sought to buy a good solid wind-up model.

Surprised how cheap it was, he obtained one in an old-fashioned hardware store that you once often discovered in out-of-the-way shopping parades. The clock seemed to have been standing for years, nay decades, behind the various grades of electronic timepiece in the showcase. The shopkeeper appeared to have been leaning behind the counter for at least just as long, with brown-speckled skin and milky eyes. At first, she claimed that she had sold the very last wind-up model to a Mr Donkin before he passed away on night-shift some twelve years before. But her hand had soon pounced upon the dusty case with splayed heavy-duty feet, with large face, wide wind-up eyes and curlicue hands of seeping time. Graham thought that the loud ticking had started as she removed it from the cabinet.

Good heavens, he could never sleep with that racket going on, as he heard the cranking parts moving behind the incessant Chinese-burns of its rhythm. He considered changing his mind, but, on second thoughts, he didn't have the heart to do so, since the shopkeeper had gone to so much trouble. He would indeed take it for what it was - an honest ticker.

He was relatively pleased to see there was a good deal of change from a tenner. Its box also proved a delight, with a design in the Forties utilties style on the lid. Art Deco, he thought. He could keep odds and ends in there, once he had removed the contraption to his bed-head table. And, as she placed it upon the squashed-up tracing-paper inside the box, he heard that it was still ticking loudly. Incredibly, it showed the correct time.

Graham shuddered at the uncanniness of the whole transaction. He felt like walking straight out of the shop, without another word. He still did not have the brass neck to say to the shopkeeper's face that he didn't actually want the merchandise at all. He wouldn't mind just the box, however. And the weighty winding-key was a work of ancient art in itself.

As he drove home, he could hear it ticking in the boot where he had stowed it, sounding out above the engine - which was impossible. Like a bomb. Yet he reached home, just before dark, it being one of those winter evenings that draw in faster than you drive. The house was quiet - that was, until he brought the clock inside. Then, he placed a record on the turntable. A fad to listen to 78's, he knew. He wound the wonky handle at the front, so that the heavy black record would play at near enough the right speed. There was a crack which, together with the ticking of the new clock, created a peculiar counterpoint to the jazz rhythms actually between the grooves. As the music finished, Graham shuddered, for no particular reason, except perhaps because of the sky darkening through the window where he had forgotten to draw the curtains.

The fireplace, beneath the mantelpiece, with its grate of congealed brown teeth, yawned wider, he imagined, as he heard scrabbling noises further up the flue. Then, someone was tapping at the window. Only the onset of heavy rain, he decided - until he decided that might mean it was someone tapping after all. The law of averages, after all, was not an average law.

Taking the initiative, he grabbed the weighty clock and carried it up the steep stairs to the dark landing. He felt it throbbing in his hand, as if it were trying to impart something. Easy to believe that all the die-cast shafts, fly-wheels and cogs were teetering on the brink of tangled grinding, ratchetting, meshing - until the brazen clangour of the alarm-bell erupted. The hammer oscillated violently between the ringing walls of his skull, mistaking dark for deafness.

The workings of the clock eventually wound down with soft springy whimpers like a beloved pet dying - simply sensed by the hands rather than the ears. Graham was, of course, unaware of the creatures with winding-hole eyes that wanted shelter from the rain, summoned by the bell down the chimney, moving like furry clockwork toys, snicker-snacking up the dim stair-well behind him...

The shopkeeper smiled mischievously in her sleep. Nearby were the bare luminous numbers of her own Art Nouveau alarm-clock, one with soundless movement. Mr Donkin snored beside her.

8:13 PM

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Saturday, January 05, 2008

The Dead Diamond

(unpublished)

First impressions of landing on another planet; 'first' being the operative word; maybe 'last', too. In fact, these impressions are the only impressions I ever recall. It is as if I have just awoken from a dark dream of death, to find myself a ready-made person: with this huge vista before me or below me, a sloping horizon, a panorama that drunkenly approaches through the glass aperture of some cockpit. That cockpit may be my head. I'm not sure yet. I'll keep you briefed as things progress

But I am not being completely straight with you. I must admit to a hinterland which some would call 'the past' or others a force that drives reincarnations through the time zones, so as to maintain the species of life that I happen to represent. This hinterland, this dubious past, I'd call instinct, an instinct that I am human, a consciousness with a human body, with all the cultures and predispositions of a human being, including, for example, this very knowledge of the word 'human'.

I guess I could be accused of cheap science fiction ideas, here, which makes me such a slippery narrator, unsure of his own reality as well as that outside the cockpit window. I say his reality with some feeling. There are some things that are certainly not open to question.

The planet below my craft, still fast approaching, I also know (as a fact) to be an alien world. Not Earth.

I do know instinctively of a planet called Earth, even though I have never been there.

The dark dream of death which has been my only past heretofore is just a memory in itself now, perhaps. This thought comes from simply letting time pass and such matters slowly to crystallise – and, perhaps, I will later recall that blank expanse of nothingness to be interspersed with real dreams.

Real dreams? That thought seems to be a bit of a paradox. But these dreams are populated, no doubt, with figures that I once believed to be my friends and acquaintances, even someone who claims to be my wife, upon a rotating Earth where, I insist, I have never been before.

That woman's face – who has the word 'wife' written all over it – has a believability which I cannot shake off. A vision of meaning almost as large as the planet that shudderingly wheels into position (even as I speak) beyond my cockpit window. It looms through a vast panoply of twinkling diamonds; it shouts words that are louder than Big Bangs.

I am determined to concentrate on landing.

My first impressions of the landscape that my craft orbits is one quite unlike anything one might see on the place I think of as Earth. The colours themselves are nameless; and very bright, unlike the dull browns and greys of most vaguely fertile terrains within my instinctive expectations. The angles and curves of its contours are mostly puzzling, unmathematical in configuration.

The roaming life that seems to have its home here is made up of just shapes and shadows with pinprick lights that are quite in the wrong position to be eyes. Do I dare land? And if I do not land, what other options are there?

There is a sucking sensation behind me – as if some polar magnet draws me back, without any volition from the force that I call my mind.

Human faces (at a quick glimpse), as I rotate the cockpit to ascertain the nature of this sucking force, seem to be patterned in the force's weft and woof like a modern painting that nobody can understand.

Each face seems to enjoy prominence for a while, before others take its place. Recognition is not a word I would use lightly in present circumstances. But I did say a quick glimpse behind, and that was all it was, because the cockpit automatically rotated into its more natural forward position, intent on helping me land what is quickly turning out to be an unwieldy craft. Upon what is equally turning out to be a troublesome terrain.

The planet is probably just one of those many twinkling diamonds through which I imagined my surrogate wife's face looming – and, indeed, beyond its unstable rim, I glimpse the huge mountainous nose of some other sister planet that probably keeps this one in gravitational balance. It is probably millions of miles further beyond, but so huge it looks much nearer than that. It is as if Jupiter had suddenly taken upon itself the need to rise as a moon upon Earth from the normal Lunar distance.

I suddenly recall a fixed memory in the past. A lighthouse beacon in a stormy sea of amnesic nightmare. It is a ring on a finger. Sparkling with the glint of love's power. A golden ridge near a mountainous knuckle. A diamond as bright as the soul I can no longer find within myself.

First impressions, then. That it is my future, not my past. But which way does time flow, I ask? No answer. The ringed flesh is grey and brown, not pink – with carbuncles like compost heaps that promise fertility, if nothing else. Each a stinking cockpit.

The diamond is dead but its sparkle remains, because diamonds are cut to last, cutting to the bottom bone of dream.

'Words' that convey an intrinsic felt love, but like all words, have to end somewhere.

1:24 PM

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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Meddle Age

MEDDLE AGE

As he walked home that Sunday Morning he heard church bells: a very 'Sunday Morning' feeling, indeed. He tried to think of the music most unlikely to contain such bells: and Pink Floyd came to mind. But he recalled they had – in their music somewhere – an alarm clock trilling and a football crowd chanting, so why not Sunday Morning church bells?

Pink Floyd were OK in their day, he thought. Their name meant a lot. See Emily Play and Arnold Lane seemed to be fixtures in his youth, and he even recalled with some significance the avant garde repercussions from those early beginnings when Pink Floyd started banging giant gongs in deserts. Or was that some other group he was thinking of?

Time to stop meddling with the past. The past was frozen and immutable: nobody could hope to return to the past. The past is a foreign country, as someone once wrote. A go-between it was: a sort of fixer of time zones as they were then and crystallising them again within today's present moment. A sort of nostalgia? But nostalgia was always wrong wasn't it? A false gift from a misunderstood past. The same went with the flooding-back of memories created by the music of Pink Floyd when re-heard or re-appraised – and that area of rediscovered time when he was courting and had his first kiss…

Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Times Past also had another title in English (when translated from the French): In Search of Lost Time. Which title was right? Probably the latter. Because searching did not entail finding. Whilst actual remembrance was a confident grasping of what one considered as lost time.

Eureka! There it is, in his hand. His past in all its crystal-clear and unalterable perfection. It was not perfect simply because it was perfectly ideal and wonderful as a period in his life. But it was perfect in the sense that he recalled it as it exactly was (bad and good alike).

"Wish you were here" – came back the postcard from the past. In his own childish handwriting – with a grainy mis-coloured photo depicting an ancient seaside resort as it then was. Walton-on the-Naze, with the unchanging sea and the pleasure pier just as long then as it is now. But everything else is different. Including him. This is further back even than early Pink Floyd. This is more nineteen fifties than sixties. He can sense it.

As a small child, he lived in Alfred Terrace, not far from Walton's backwaters. It wasn't called Arnold Lane. He also lived in a house in Walton called 'Olive Villa' not far from the pier. See Emily Play. He saw ghosts of people from the future. One of them may indeed have been a child called Emily – but he never went along the correct paths to meet her. Nor she him.

He met others. Emily passed on the other side of the road. He never saw Emily again, if at all. But she could have been that anonymous girl playing in the distance -- on that nineteen fifties beach at Walton -- a little girl who was probably Emily in person. Not that he knew it was Emily. If there was ever an Emily in the first place.

As he walked home that Sunday morning, he saw a middle-aged lady across the other side of the road. Wheeling a pram. Probably the lady's grandchild. He nodded and pointed to the sky as if the church bells were there – in God's Heaven itself, rather than coming from a nearby land-locked, time-constrained church.

He wondered why Pink Floyd had triggered such nostalgia. Their music had never really played any significant part in his past. He remembered clearly other songs, and other singers. It was a different person to him who had been brought up with Pink Floyd, someone younger than him, someone hippier.

He – I? – you? - was in his late fifties. Soon he'll be back in the sixties. No possible meddling with that.

(unpublished)

5:35 AM

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Wednesday, December 19, 2007

RAW AIR

Can anybody's life be called ordinary? To the person living it, each passing moment should be all important. Even the scrubbing of a dirty new potato ready for lunch must be felt for what it truly is - a precious moment of rare life, to be cherished as a gem of priceless sparkling beauty.

"Make sure you do those potatos properly. Last time I gave you a job in the kitchen, I spent the rest of the week clearing up your messes!"

The voice came and went, like a bird of prey that merely pecked at my carcass, then, thinking better of it, soared back into the blue sky, blotting out the glorious sun for just a nonce.

It was Christmas Day. There WAS something special in the air but, equally, it was not like Christmas Days I remembered as a child: those were so special, all the people I saw that day would seem to have a halo glowing above their heads. But today was not significantly unlike any other. In fact, we all decided to split up, get into our various vehicles and tour the local towns and countryside, before lunch, it being such nice weather for the time of year.

The turkey was already "doing" inside the oven, plus the bag-pudding hissing above the steam, my potatos ready-scrubbed in their milky liquid and, finally, but not least, of course, the various items of alcoholic beverage lined up in the fridge eager for consumption. I noticed that the stuffing was still on the kitchen table and not safe inside the turkey's gaping belly ... but I did not draw attention to this, for fear of delay to our trips.

Many people were out and about, and I was relieved they all looked as ordinary as myself. My own particular husband and children harnessed themselves into my car, all excitedly chatting about their Christmas presents (many of which had been brought with them on the trip, no doubt only to be discovered several months later when I got round to clearing out the back of the car). I was a great collector of secondhand books, so I'd not been given any of these, for most people think Christmas presents should be new things. Somebody HAD bought me a new paperback, but it was a science fiction novel I would never want to read, if I had not read it already from the public library.

The other families staying in the same house as us for the seasonal weekend, including my own parents with their new children, drove off in their jalopies, even before I'd had the chance to start mine. We were all to return here by "lunchtime" (a moveable feast, if ever there was one). I was glad I was not ultimately responsible for its production. (Perhaps I SHOULD have told someone in authority about that stuffing). I was eager for a drink, but driving.

We soon became lost in the first town we encountered (the one we were staying in). Because of the recent bomb threats, most of the roads that the public could use as short-cuts through the garrison areas were fenced off. Not all of them, since we saw soldiers toting their Christmas slop buckets between barrack-rooms in some of the less sensitive military demarcation zones. In any event, the maps were sufficiently confusing to send us on a wild goose route through the smaller town of Bulstrode. But once there, we scaled the climbing alleys, till we reached the market square.

I do not know whether my family noticed it was becoming less and less like a proper Christmas Day. There were a few stall-holders calling their wares in the square. The one that surprised me most was an old fellow with a brazier selling off portions of fish and chips. "No time spent in waiting for drinks", he called. I did not quite understand the drift of his sales pitch - maybe, today of all days, he was giving the drinks away free or, at least, speedily, while they were still piping hot.

I was delighted to see in one corner of the busy square a man selling secondhand books. Tomes of various sizes were spread around him on mats, some huge purple encyclopaedias and entrancing little matching volumes no doubt containing rare fictional gems. I could not wait to get my hands on them.

My attention was temporarily drawn by the others in my party to the fact that some of our fellow guests at the house had turned up at the same place, evidently also confused by the shut-down garrison and the undependable maps of the area. They were haggling with a shopkeeper at the entrance to his open-plan emporium. From this distance I could not actually discern what he was selling and indeed what they were buying. They had not yet noticed us. My mother must have been among them since I could hear her voice right across the square.

At the same time, I spotted Auntie Enid wandering through the crowds in another part of the square. SHE was not staying with us for Christmas, so it was surprising to see her as lost as the rest of us. If I recall correctly, Auntie Enid was a relation that everybody seemed to acknowledge, but nobody knew exactly who she really was. The nature of her relationship with the rest of us was to remain a mystery of the tenable universe. She bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen. I waved at my mother to point out the whereabouts of Auntie Enid, but she had evidently already seen her and decided that it was impractical to leave the others to make herself known. My mother had not yet seen me. By the time I turned back to the secondhand books, the man had already cleared them away, surrendering any hope of likely customers on Christmas Day, and scarpered, mats and all, whilst the going was good.

One of my children was by now tugging at my person, pointing eagerly into the blue sky. Why I took it for granted, I do not now understand, but I was not surprised to see that the child was indicating a peculiar-looking flying craft. It seemed like a huge piece of electrical equipment, one of those components sold in shops which I always thought were for experts or, at least, for people who were clever with their hands. It spread its spindly wings on ratchets, even as I watched, its insidious roaring making most of the people in the square to block their ears. It was buzzing very close to the tops of the buildings and, as it careered towards us, I saw it was literally enormous, bigger than a jumbo jet. Then, from another quarter of the sky, there came another monstrosity like a floating steel works complete with chimneys and silos. It must have crept up on us, unawares, for I now only noticed its crescendo of booster-engines for the first time, as it thundered close above our unprotected heads, blotting out the sun for more than just a nonce.

The two craft darted off together as if they were playing tag, towards what I took to be the direction of Colchester; and we could now view them as smaller contraptions, emitting bumble bee noises as they made flirtatious sorties over the Essex marshes. As they gathered speed to make a re-approach to the outskirts of Bulstrode, the roars sporadically returning to our ears, they clipped wings: it was an accident, I was sure, but my husband said they were fighting. How he knew, I have no idea. In fact, I had no time to question him, for the two craft scattered apart, cartwheeling out of control, and with a pair of ill-timed skull-cracking crashes they made a messy landfall elsewhere in Bulstrode, beyond the unsuspecting rooftops. Thickly plaited plumes of dense smoke streamered into the sky. And I cried. I still do not know why I cried, but it seemed the most appropriate thing to do.

I then saw that the shop where my mother had stood with the others was in ruins, evidently collateral damage of the engagement.

My mother was never to know about my duplicity with regard to the turkey stuffing.

We drove home in silence and convoy, easily finding the way. My husband was missing. One of my children was hopefully with him. Unaccountably, Auntie Enid was with us. I cannot remember much of what happened when we returned to the house, but I certainly now felt selfish in having kept that job of potato scrubbing all to myself. For one fleeting moment, I thought there was a faintly shimmering halo above Auntie Enid's head, as she dished up the food. I cracked myself open a cold beer. It would soon be time for the Queen's Speech.

"When she was a child, her only Christmas presents were an orange and a sparkling silver threepenny bit in a stocking. She was far more excited about those than ever children these days feel about the most expensive new fangled science fiction hardware..." Rachel Mildeyes (THE SAYINGS OF PETAL FRANCES)

Published 'Gothic Light' (1991) part of which was recorded directly from a dream.

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9:14 PM

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Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Healing Process

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THE HEALING PROCESS

Purple Patch: an exotic plot, a royal flower-bed, a strange plaster, a remarkably rich tranche of prose or, more likely, a hardy poem-plant that I – not a poet, really – have managed to tangle round with my dark weeds for many a turning season. Yet, now, here is another multi-leaved clover, pricking out amid the many stapled blooms that have cloistered me with more welcome fulsomeness than simply the words their petals grew. I'm glad, then, to have added to the texture. Today, ready painfully for unsticking the plaster patch to see if I'm healed or not.

(published 'Purple Patch' 2001)
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WAITING

The world waits for its call. Why everybody thinks their time is well spent in waiting, I do not know, and may God forgive them for using their life up in such a fashion.

I was one of them once. I had great yearnings to stand in bus queues, sit in dentists' or doctors' waiting-rooms, lining up for ticket returns at the smash hit performance, forming part of an endless snake as it winds round the London streets for yet another Tutankhamen exhibition....

Now I've grown out of all that, my deepest relish is making others wait. Now I'm famous (shot to fame in fact because I went on all the TV chat shows claiming that I was the one who had waited longest for most things which, when all added up on Balancing Day, would be tantamount to more than the average lifetime). I give everybody the runaround: my agent, my live-in lover, my publisher, my private doctor, even the buses on occasion stay at the request stop longer than they should until I arrive, cohorts in tow.

I wish I had made them wait longer! It would have given some modicum of fairness to the end of time accounts.

I died yesterday and I'm still waiting for death to put me out of my misery. That's why I've got the time to doodle with words. Even the undertaker is getting fed up, still in his black top hat, kicking his heels, his hearse idling....

(published 'Tuba' 1988)

1:29 PM

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Monday, November 12, 2007

The Picnic Party

THE PICNIC PARTY

Gushing Downs were peppered with picnic parties: a loom of dawnlight; twirling parasols; bright checked tablecloths spread over the greenest grass possible (possible, that is, outside the scope of a painting); wicker baskets brimming with edible goodies of every dietary persuasion; and joyful, sexy people.

"Nice day, Louise." A hand both saluted and shaded the sun.

"It'll be even nicer when the wine coolers arrive."

The voices of chirpy, dimply children mingled with the deeper grown-up sounds. The clink of glasses. The buzz of bee. The chomp of molars. The giggles of those deep in love with each other.

"It'll be great when the competition begins."

"Yes, it'll soon be time."

Any stranger might have questioned what competition was in prospect. Three-legged or egg-and-spoon races ... or both together? Tug of love? The loudest laugh? The furthest roll of the hoop? The fastest spin of the top with a cracking whip? The prettiest frock? The sweetest smile? The longest beard? The shortest? The ugliest pulled face? The biggest this, the smallest that? The most durable picnic? The maroon-party to beat all maroon-parties?

It was probably none of these. Whilst it wasn't, after all, any old stranger who questioned the prospect.

As a rubicund retainer arrived with cases of chilled white wine and amid the consequent hilarity surrounding the popping of corks, it gradually became clear to the stranger what exactly was to transpire. Each group of picnickers was sited beside one of the many natural geysers that abounded on the Downs. The openings were controlled by manual valves - and the intention was to release them in one fell swoop, whereby the winning group would be the one with the tallest and longest lasting fountain. Furthermore, a special prize was to be given for the fountain that emerged with the fanciest configuration.

As the sun dipped below the distant wooded hills, it spread along the horizon like thick cut marmalade. The wine corks took up new crescendoes of popping, as bonfire beacons were set alight across the Downs by each picnic group. Then, there was a secret starting signal (which was only obvious retrospectively to the stranger) - and the geysers were released in a perfect flashpoint of simultaneity. Some spluttered in short silver cascades or spirts of gurgling spray. Others were sufficiently tall to steal gold from the sunset and become gushing giants of myth and magic. A few, even taller, sported every colour of the rainbow plus colours unknown to the painter's palette. Yet, there was one geyser, the tallest of all, which lost its colour as it sprayed new-born stars across the darkening sky - and at the mountain-peak of its fountaining power, it formed a mighty dragon's head. The roar from the head's gargling mouth was incredibly even louder than the geyser which had originally given it birth.

The picnickers were cowed by the intrinsic, if short-lived, magnificence of such a white-water beast looming from the earth in cataclysmic contrast to the rearing tides of night...

After eventually packing their hampers, the parties wended their way home across the Downs, each jollifier with a blazing torch. The stranger followed, keeping himself to himself, and softly sobbing. He had stayed on the Downs long enough to watch the geysers being pent up within their rightful confines of dark earth - except, of course, for that single squirt the picnickers had forgotten to cap within its oubliette, one that continued spluttering, perhaps pathetically, perhaps otherwise, forming snowdrop petals in the marooned night. Tiny silver frostfish sparkling: sparkling, even, without light.

The stranger knew - despite the carefreeness of those erstwhile picnickers whom he followed - that the treasure which Dragon Earth greedily guarded was itself.

Having the sense of floating upon one among an archipelago of ice-carvings, the stranger shuddered with ultimate fear. The fear of self.

O Stranger, O Saint George.
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6:44 PM

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Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Last Thermal For R’lyeh

First published 'Stygian Articles' 1995

Two soldiers took a breather. They had been fighting tooth and nail for at least two hours, believing there was at least one cause to make it worthwhile - a teeth-tested cause, of course, that both cherished, if from opposite sides of its coinage.

Landscapes stretched around them. Strewn with those soldiers who had already given up the currency: bodies so thickly lain, it was impossible to see the red grass. The river was jammed with limbs, torsos, heads and other parts, jostling like misshapen logs, positioning themselves, dividing, rejoining, or simply idling, growing one with the choking flow of the currents.

The soldiers were the last two left both whole and alive, because they were the craftiest combatants of either army. One was Johnno, a guy with waxed moustache and jutting chin and a drawling way of speech. His mother had said that the army would make a man of him. The other was Cobby, a man of big bones with ample supplies of muscle and flesh to hang on them. His neck was a mass of knotted cords, face a shining coconut and feet, Johnno thought, a yard long.

"Hey, man!" roared Cobby. "Hang on a second - if we be going on hammer and tongs like this for much longer, you be going to be die cast." Cobby waved a hand towards the carnage. "Deader than all that lot are being cast!"

Johnno, attempting to regain his breath, thought most of the body lumber looked at peace, their accompanying souls long departed to wherever brave souls went. Johnno wanted to give up there and then, so as to become part and parcel of such a bone-prickly landscape. It would bring him communion with something beyond common religion. Johnno had been raised a Cthulhuist, taken to the Chapel of Nyarlathotep by his parents every Thursday. There he had learned that human bodies were mere chips off Great Old Blocks and the important task of one's carnality, through lifecraft, was to make the body worthy of re-union with a Block come the Last Fall. Such faith stemmed from several different Squatter Cults in the Shanty lands whence Johnno harkened. Visits of the parish Niggurath Man to Johnno's family were still fresh in his mind. The Niggurath Man toted a large black-skinned book with gold clasps and an unreadable title on the cover, a book which cracked, upon opening, like the red-tipped whip used in Yielding-of-Yuggoth ceremonies. Johnno's parents had smiled - this because the weakening of the flesh, in preparation for the Last Fall, did indeed have to start young. But, now, here Johnno was, on the battlefield, his flesh so weak, it had almost diluted and was already sloughing off the bone-arrangements like teaky sweat. All he needed now was the final nudge, as he teetered on the edge of a matter-corrupted Nirvana - but he twisted, bisected, cracked his nuts, opened the book of his head, allowed grey wriggly entities to erupt from his belly-sump and, finally, he became the youngest Old One to be allowed initiation into the occult cross-currents of the War's last osmosis.

The nudge Johnno needed was for someone, who had previously hated Johnno with all the hateful guts in the body, stretching hate as far as hate would go, subsequently to love Johnno even more. Such was intrinsic to lifecraft. The craft of love, too, was nothing unless it first hated....

Johnno pondered upon the chances of obtaining love from the dark man who squatted nearby and picked crawlers from between his toes.

"What?s your name?" asked Johnno.

"Cobby, that be me, Cobby, and I be thinking you, whoever you be, soldier, be as fine a fighter as I be having ever fought. I be killing all the others - but you, you be getting such fire in your belly-well, such grit in your ball-bearings, it be seeming to make your thin body be fighting like a warrior on heat. I never be seeing the likes of you. What be your cast?"

"Johnno."

"You be looking so weakling, Johnno. Your flesh so thin, I be seeing your bones being nothing but those being inside a chicken's wing."

"Strength starts in the mind, Cobby."

"I be even seeing your brain-parts in your head-bone, kicking about like a drunken knot of worms. You be getting other things in there, so white, so gristly, you must be being cast as good as a dead thing yourself."

"My ambition has always been to die, Cobby - so please kill me, now. I shall never forget your kindness, if you do. Take me into your arms, Cobby, and suck my brain out through the mouth." The last sentence Johnno whispered almost to himself.

Suddenly, the river unclogged itself, with the groan of the just cast dead. Cobby stared at Johnno - but Johnno was of course already more dead than any in the river.

Cobby sensed his eyes filling with tears, since he had not had time to prove his love for his direst enemy. He cuddled Johnno's corpse to his chest, a chest which eventually collapsed with an audible sigh and silent cracking.

Perhaps Johnno did reach a version of heaven while Cobby slept off his fatigue and sadness. The red rubbly landscape into which the corpse seeped was more beautiful than the meadowy paradise described in a poem which nobody had yet written but Cobby had thought he'd once read. As the sky turned over another page of night, the white lumps that had been Johnno's brain sprouted translucent wings of empurpled web - which wings, with Cobby aboard, cast off to soar into the newly moon-coined blackness, intent on catching the last thermal for R'lyeh.

4:04 PM

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