Published 'Juju' 1999

The reflection in the mirror turned her stomach. There was a scrap of paper which seemed to be stuck on the glass, as if she could reach out and peel it off, but when she tried, she felt her fingernails clinking on the hard surface. Tantalisingly beyond reach.

Seeing that scrap of paper had initially turned her stomach because of what was written on it. Even in backward mirror-script, she could sense its message.

"What smatter?" asked Claude as he came into the bathroom. He was a stolid individual -  a fireman of the first water, with brylcreemed hair. Their marriage had indeed been a series of fire-fighting. The odd burst of flame from a once moribund fire in the old days' coal-grate. The sudden ignition of a garden bonfire after hope had been given up of it ever catching. The chimney fire streaming smoke and setting all the local kids a-goggling as they ceased, momentarily, their game of hopscotch or hide-and-seek. The conflagration that beset a local factory: a memory from childhood that would remain beyond the reach even of the final fire of all: a seething furnace which nothing at all could douse. Their marriage and more.

"Nothing Claude -  I just thought I saw something in the mirror."

Although retired, Claude retained a deep respect for anything untoward. He was the man for any emergency. His lack of imagination prevented him being scared of anything. He had never had a thought beyond the straightforward. Sanity was his watchword.

When he approached the mirror, to check it out, he was devastated, therefore, to find only the reflection of a woman's face -  blushing to the roots.

Somehow, he sensed, in the aftermath of the crisis, that he would never again have the stomach for a fire. It suddenly hit home that his wife had been cremated only yesterday; she'd not even left a suicide note -  presumably.

And more.

Written today and first published HERE

Mind The Gap
by DF Lewis

Snap!

When a photograph was taken of the puppet it seemed fleetingly to become a natural human being as it posed for posterity. Before and after this split second gap of secondhand time during which the puppet was thus exposed, it had strutted stiltedly upon its strings proud of its own potential ability or eventual achievement to fool a camera with a real human gap between two puppet minds.

Hadrian loved his puppet. He had been told by his Mum that it was much older than him. It felt to him better than any imaginary friend even though imaginary friends were often more flexible in what you could do with them than toys (such as puppets) were. But Hadrian's puppet was not really a toy. It was an antique that, if auctioned, would likely prove to be quite valuable.

Only Hadrian was still young enough to recognise a puppet in two, even three, minds. It was when eager cousins jealous of his puppet or other grown-ups with axes to grind took photographs of it that its strings disappeared and its china face chimed with an expression so human you knew it was human. It was almost as if it enjoyed being catalogued. It knew it was a fine specimen of puppetry. And it must have known that to possess (if fleetingly) the ability to discard its own puppet essence was intrinsic to being a perfect puppet in the first place.

One cousin – by the name of Geraldine – grew up quicker than Hadrian, even though they both started at roughly the same time as human beings.

"Girls mature quicker than boys," said Hadrian's Mum, as if that explained the mystery of the universe and why puppets were passed down the ages between shuttling turns of children rather than retained by one's own eventually grown-up self.

"Do boys ma-chewer in slo-mo, then?" asked Hadrian, having once watched a laboured replay of a soccer goal on TV to see if it had been a goal at all.

Eventually, it was Geraldine – lately aware of her own sexuality quite beyond the reach of Hadrian's – who kept the TV as a running thought: "The Antiques Roadshow is coming next week – why don't we take it along to see how valuable it is?"

She did not say the puppet's name, Hadrian assumed, in case it heard her. The girl's eyes abruptly blinked as if to take in the whole room in one abortive childish gulp. But Geraldine had lost the art of childishness. She did not even approach Hadrian's sensitiveness in dreading the negative exposure of his puppet for more than just a moment...

Hadrian dreamt that night of maturing toys. It was a cruel experience of uglification and be-hairing.

When he grew up he became a photo-journalist. He once took the now famous photograph of a foreign peasant child as it was being tortured by enemy forces. And he never really forgave himself for not personally intervening earlier – the split second that may have proved the difference between life and death. But he failed to gauge the length otherwise of the child's pain or through which narrow channels such pain might always have been destined to pass, had things been different.

This might have been a long story of love and achievement. Not about Hadrian, but about that peasant child. Or I might one day venture the story of Geraldine's life, but someone needs to tell me it first. I hope she was at least happier than Hadrian ever was.

Hadrian, indeed, was the one who suffered the most pain, a pain that the strings he managed to conjure up from the sky could scarcely relieve. He felt them tease ... and tense or ease ... then tangle...

His imaginary friends were ever upon stilts along the surrounding misty horizons of his encroaching death. And all his cousins were already dead.

Published 'frisson' 1997

Ian, Tom, Claude, Sue, Wendy and Petra abandoned me at the bottom of the hill. They clambered up a slope to obtain a better view. I was scared of heights. The ruins of the castle (or fort or earthworks or whatever it might be called) stretched right down to where I then stationed myself with everybody else's rucksacks and a single person's share of the sandwiches. My glasses had steamed up, possibly because I was so annoyed with the others - and with the ancient remains looking nothing more than god­forsaken rocks. There were other tourists, some breathless from ball-games and others simply preparing picnics, many of them children. Then I saw things coming up from crevices and from cracked masonry, figures that, despite everything, I never wish to see again. In one way, they looked like old gargoyles come to mobile life, with stone bones, as it were. But, on the other hand, not really stone at all. Small and imp-like and, yes, demonic. Others taller, a few with vestigial wings on their heads instead of hair. Only later did I gather my thoughts and the words to describe them. The figures gaped and mouthed silently at the people whom they seemed to have picked out from the tourists. The more I watched the creatures, the more they seemed like holograms, as opposed to anything touchable. They reminded me of the image of a fortune-teller at the seaside where the face of a real person talking to you is transmitted upon a three-dimensional screen in the shape of a human face-mask. Here the masks were grey stone. I could see Ian and Petra waving to me from the hill-top, so I knew I wasn't dreaming. The rest of the tourists seemed to take these "apparitions" at face value, apparitions which mingled and started makeshift conversations with real people. Even holding hands. I wasn't close enough to any of the groups. But, then, one of the apparitions, a childish, or rather elfin, simian-like creature hopped up to me. It smiled slowly, smiled painstak­ingly, as if it knew smiles were attractive to people like me, but it gave the impression that it had never formed one on its grey lips before-forcing out a grunt which I could only take to be obscene: a sound that, if a word at all, was unutterably foul. Whatever its meaning, the word touched me in such a way that I was uncertain how to react. Terror? Anger? Ennui? Tolerance? Amusement? Abasement? Joy? A word that altered its meaning in hindsight, with the stream of thoughts it set in motion. Eventually I decided simply to ignore it, to deny its very meaning. And as suddenly as they had climbed from their hidey-holes, the apparitions scamp­ered back in evident fright. The one nearest to me lingered for a few seconds - and in those few seconds, I realised that it had fallen in love with me. I could actually see its heart beating, the only thing which was real. I cried, as I watched the other tourists returning to their packed lunches, acting as if nothing had happened. But, in spite of the whole memory now having taken on the feel of a meaningless dream, there is no doubt in my mind that, at the time, it made sense and was real. Even if there is doubt now, there was none then. Also, when Ian & Co. came crazily hooting down the hill towards me, in hysterical holiday mood, one of them (I forget which one) shouted out at me: "Who was the friend we saw you with? A secret lover?" In answer, I remember smiling very slowly. 

Published 'Palace Corbie' 1996

          ***

Published in 'In Your Face' 1996

The footpath through the forest looked as if it had outgrown itself for at least the turn of two centuries.  If I had not known it was a right of way from Barymance to Stromper, I would have taken a different route.  But I pulled on my rubber nettle-waders to mid-thigh, providing as much protection as possible, and followed as best I could the map with which the hotel had provided me.

            The line of the path on the chart took the form of a series of railtrack symbols, tracing an endless snake from the Town of Inns called Barymance to the seaside resort of Stromper, twining between the grid of number-alphabet designated squares which the mapmaker had deemed suitable for the coordinately unwashed.

            The only line, in fact, on which to hang the dirty underwear of my misplaced sense of direction was bedded in the trees like a ridged veining utilised by nature to transport sap from one end of the country to the other.  It was a communication cord that allowed forest root-creatures to talk to one another, a historic path helping the fixed green things breed in and out, at the same time as giving man's own Earthfree limbs the opportunity to find routes between.

            I mused on these matters as I found myself in deeper and deeper forest conclaves.  The birds at the top of the trees had grown silent, pent up with foreboding, tracking me with their right-angled stares from above clenched beaks.

            My new wife had gone by water to Stromper, in one of the river paddlesteamers which often took fares into the bay itself.  She would have already arrived at the sea-front hotel, drinking gins and tonic in the bar with other men who could only admire the curves of her young body.  The Spring sun would at this very moment be setting like an eye disease - casting those saltblood waves of flame that careered, cream-topped, towards the beach.  She would have almost forgotten her husband who had chosen the more difficult path to reach Honeymoon's end.

            She had no feeling for the forest.  I had none for the sea.

            The darkness commenced at the level of my feet.  The sky seemed to hang fire, hugging to itself any last reflections from glossy flickering birdwing, like a jealous lover of light.  The branches appeared to pulse with a heartbeat of the Earth which only the dusk could reveal.

            Soon, I was unable to perceive the face of the map: the tell-tale character lines, the frown of the contours, the ear-lobe tattooes of the landmarks, the ley-lines upon the palm of the river delta, the cross in a circle denoting Stromper, the edge of coast upon which that town was situated coiling an unreliable division between sea and land, and so forth.

            My wife had unbuttoned her blouse to the navel.  The heat was coming off the sea, despite the night.  Upon the balcony, men vied with each other to buy her drinks.  And vied with women too.

            I felt older than the forest.  This was my first marriage and, unless I could rediscover the forest path, also my last.  I had fallen in love almost immediately, upon meeting Isabel at a social gathering arranged by my dear mother.  Although the whole affair was probably a match-making exercise, there was plenty I could have done about it.  I need not have gazed at Isabel's innocent ankles nor the supple fleshy valley between the bones behind the knees above the calves below those topless thighs.  I could have asked her outright to come to my bedroom so that I could explore her body with my inexperienced hands.

            And she would have come, too.

            That would have got it out of my system.  But because of my foolish hesitation, the mystery remained and grew, became all-important, semi-religious.  And, in so being, marriage was the only answer and prerequisite, the only outlet for my stifling scruples.

            The wedding was simple, celebrated by a priest who happened to be my uncle.  He had laid my hand upon hers ... the first and probably only occasion that Isabel's and my flesh touched ... and told us we were man and wife.  My mother had smiled ... beneath the tears.

            And so to the honeymoon.  I had arranged it in my usual ham-fisted fashion, digging out travel books and hotel guides, finally discarding them all for Stromper in the Spring.  I booked the paddle-steamer, a cabin suite for us two alone, a dance band to play outside our cabin door, rare cocktails to be delivered to our bedside, huge breakfasts for appetites far bigger than ours.  These were things arranged so meticulously, but with no real awareness of their effects or implications, as I was to realise far too late.  She was too young to encompass such an intense one to one relationship: all she really needed was the company of many men and women;  she sought nothing but laughter, voices, looks, innuendoes, peccadilloes, cockadilloes, canoodles: desires which I discovered too late.

            However, I did board the paddlesteamer with her, but subsequently stowed away in the catering firm's empty crate as it was loaded back on the dockside.  I watched the paddlewheels churn foam between the arms of the harbour, the craft disappearing like a wounded spider into the broken bloodyolk of the horizon.

            In disgust, I threw the map away into the darkness of the forest.  It was not even of this area.  I wrapped my arms around a tree-trunk which rose like a long huge brazil nut towards the sightless disoriented moonyellow patch upon the night sky.  The wind had risen; the branches above kicked and pumped, much as Isabel's limbs would thrash when one of  the handsome saps in Stromper settled upon bedding her for me.  And a root of the tree coiled easily from the Earth, to gain my body upon its turnspit: revolving endlessly but imperceptibly with the age-old cycles of Mother Nature.

            The birds revive into their dawn chorus of words, telling of one who has just died from heartbreak and who left this his last message in their beaks.  The first Cuckold of Spring.

Published 'Stygian Articles' 1996

Jack The Cutter

As Therm thumbed his way towards the meanderable lanes of deepest Surrey, he maintained a picture in his mind's iritic eye of his old stamping-ground: the lamentable one-way gutters and blind alleys around St. Paul's Cathedral. He knew a dosser had to do what a dosser had to do - and that was probably die as soon as possible, both to rid himself of the world and vice versa. But death was never the easiest way out.

Of course, he could've used the services of another dosser called Jack who wielded knives in the dark like shooting stars just for the hell of it - but Therm decided he could think of better deaths than at the business end of one of those. Furthermore, he rather resented popping his cork beside some damnable City Bank. He wanted to taste sweet countryside, not only upon the pan-handle of his tongue but also with the very ends of his teeth. Only the twittering birds would suffice, he deemed, to attend his swansong, those in the beck-dripping woods further south. Not that he thought with such poetical turns of phrase and there was some doubt whether his mind generated such ill-cut gems of English prose, in any event, since he felt a larger than life force acting upon his mind - one that not only controlled his destiny like a Christian god so out of control it had forgotten about the free will of its flock, but one that also loved and hated him, in equal measures, more than any god of any religion ever could.

The lorry driver chuckled. She glanced at the hitch-hiker who was a mass of melted mutter in the passenger seat. She had never given lifts to thumbers like Therm before, so she couldn't comprehend why this old toothy toper of a tramp had managed to halt a reluctant juggernaut on the hard shoulder and wheedle his way into the cab for a lift to Ruffet Wood (where its route didn't lie, anyway). So, all she could do was chuckle: humour being the only cure for life's absurdity that humankind could ever find. The tall lights gradually faded from the sides of the road, whilst she steered between them, Therm thought, as if she were on a fairground ride. Gradually, humps of indistinct trees blackened the night around - leaving only hazy fleets of stars in the narrow inky channel above.

"Where do you want putting off, exactly?"

Therm thought her voice to be saying something quite different, since he replied: "Yes, I love you, too". And the lorry plummetted headlong into a massive tree which seemed to be planted smack in the middle of the carriageway, causing the trailer to jack-knife violently - rattling the bodies inside the cab, floppy dice in the game of Fate - and then tinning them like pig spam within a blood sump. Evidently, the Christian god hated one of them more than he loved the other. And there was very little poetry in that, other than the fact that the two iron-clad corpses of Therm and the lorry driver were discovered hand in hand by the cutting crew.

In a fleeting after-life, Therm was a woman, one without his teeth. The end of the world came suddenly, as the sun fell from the sky (faster than gravity could dictate) becoming smaller all the time, crunching towns in the near distance as it finally came to rest.

Once an undead always an undead - and Therm quickly regained his body's pigsweat. The most disturbing part was an after-life where he was female. The teeth didn't matter so much. He clutched at himself below the bedcovers in a sudden irrational fear which the resumption of reality had brought with it. Somewhat relieved, but further disturbed by the fact that he had actually seemed to need such relief, he turned over on his side to find his wife staring at him, with Jack the Cutter's luminous eyes. Her two hands each had a knife that looked like an elephant tusk.

Then he glimpsed a real after-life one which would eventually become his wife's. A Christian heaven was meant to be a home from home, wasn't it? How many times did they want telling? Her son had spilled all the cornflakes over the formica table. *And* her husband had done his favourite trick of making only one cup of tea - for himself.

"I didn't think you were getting up yet," he claimed.

"You could've brought one up, then," Therm replied in the shrill voice of his wife.

"Good job I didn't, as you're already up."

There was no winning of arguments with a pig, especially a man's man such as Therm's husband who had become a fire-officer by means of countless acts of bravery. Therm shrugged and turned her attention back to her son the piglet whose rummaging in his satchel finally gave birth to yesterday's sandwiches which he said he couldn't eat because they had too much blood inside. She was halfway through spreading a thin plasma extract on a new set, as if she were priming the surface for another generous smoothed-out dollop of fresh blood, in turn reminding her of the skidmarks on the underpants with which she was presented every other day by husband and son alike. She could not help thinking she was mad - because a mind in after-life automatically imported its own disbelief.

The house was dead quiet. Therm's husband and son had both gone. There was staccato twiddling with the wireless. Housewives' Choice was announced this week by one of her particular favourite disc-jockeys. What was his name? She couldn't get the station. The dial she twirled fine-tuned nothing but high-pitched whistles or a voice that called itself Jack. She wound herself up into a frenzy. Tying a scarf around her head in that pixied way most women did in the fifties and sixties, Therm released the heavy overcoat from the broom cupboard and bustled with it into the street. The sky was pink like the underbelly of a pig, with an aureole of teats around a faint white splodge where the moon had once been.

Organic spaceships. Unidentified Fixed Objects in the sky, sprinkler systems for a world about to catch fire. The words buzzed in Therm's head as if her bee brain had broken loose. She was Queen for a day. Nobody else about. She wandered the empty streets, weaving between the ill-parked cars, feeling herself undeserving of the senile dementia to which she had been abandoned by the head-lease dreamer. She was the tenant in a fleshy bivouac which could be sub-let no further down the scale of reality. She almost wished her two menfolk could return. At least, they presented some form of sanity, even if in the shape of teeth-tusks. The pink in the sky turned slowly black...

Therm woke from every conceivable after-life, including the one where he actually had a wife with his own name. Dressed in a cardboard suit, he levered himself over beneath the cold dark dripping arches. In the near distance sat the hunched silhouette of St Paul's Cathedral. He was alone in the whole world, neither demented nor sane. That was the worst thing of all. He tried to get back to sleep and retrieve some of the feminine wherewithal that he seemed to have in the after-life. There had been a Charles Lamb story about how civilisation invented roast pork. Such stories were almost sufficient to warm the cockles of his heart, like memories of his sandwich-making mother. He once loved the cold waking he had of it. The songs on the wireless still buzzing in his head. Would sleep never return? Could flesh be made palatable by freezing? Existence was like being encased in sheet iron which moved with the body, unfelt for most of the time. He poisefd his two protruding teeth upon the engorged arteries in his wrist. The yellow street-light flickered out, making it easier to sleep - and to welcome the cutting crew that rescued the undead from life itself.

Blacked up ready for the night, the Devil sat in his dressing-room, staring mindlessly into the mirror. His pointed face was ringed with flickering coloured light bulbs, so he could not fail to fathom his own eyes. They were staring so hard it seemed as if he were playing a make-or-break game with himself: the last to blink would explode.

Then, he plumbed such a long way, he saw a thought, an idea, a concept, a caprice, one which he did *not* want to see. Deep deep down in the dungeons of his soul where the funnel of his sight ended - deeper indeed than Hell itself - was a doubt. And never had the Devil doubted before. This doubt gnawed at his vitals and tempted him to believe that he was not the Devil at all, but a dosser called Therm: nothing but a wine-bibbing tosspot who spoke to himself in nonsensical rhyming couplets, to blot out the nagging loneliness in his heart....

There came a sharp rapping at the door: "Five minutes!" The voice was deep but heavenly sweet.

The Devil fled back up towards his sight, tussling through the blubbery membranes and red threadworms which surrounded the eyeballs. He would soon be on - if "on" is a word sufficiently weighty to convey the performance he was about to undergo, with no rehearsal, no other actors, no props, no stage to speak of, no audience....

Therm woke briefly from an undead's unnatural sleep. He sat up straight in the darkness, startling the other cardboard-suited dossers who had been lightly dozing nearby under the midnight moon. But now the moon was nothing more than an artist's careless smudge. This was because, upon the blackdrop of the sky, a circle of flashing fairy lights slowly revolved as they grew bigger or came closer.

"Blimey, they're piggin' spaceships!" muttered Therm who proceeded to squeeze his eyes shut tight like a child making pretend he was sleeping. Perhaps dreaming of tin-openers again. Or an after-life in Hell.

There was a raucous orchestra tuning up in the pit. Tap-dancing with cloven hooves was a deafening act to under-perform. So, he tip-clodded in, flowing mane coiffured by Hell's finest stylists, skewed antler-horn painted out against the scenery, forked tongue being tasted by its own guardian teeth. His mascara eyes were blinded by the searing twirling spotlights from above the seats in the gods. His innards felt like lolloping eels still alive, but he jabbed away desultorily with his furry hind-limbs. As the spots faded, he spied a spare pair of sparkles in the audience - like eyes on spikes. And Therm the vampire, thankfully, was consumed by a sleep like delicious death - too numb even to feel Jack the Cutter's preparing hands ... except from inside such hands like fingers in gloves.

Published 'The Zone' 1995

Glock, the unsung hero, felt duped and unable to reconcile the various events.  He had long since abandoned thinking about his life as a whole, the missed chances and the wrong turnings.  He had realised that he needed a wholesome woman to take the edge off his selfishness - rather than the more opportunistic sex he once wreaked from the city streets.  Idealism went out the parlour window with the rest of his ambitions.  Today, his thoughts remained centred on the mundane: a day in the life, today, a single particle in the onward tackiness of reality, a victimised private in the forced march of Fate, simply today, merely that, or especially that.  

*

"If Handel came back to life now, he wouldn't recognise his own music," said Clive.

            "What do you mean?  Music can never change, can it?" responded Rachel.

            "Well, today's orchestra's different than it used to be, and the training of a singer's voice, too.  The tone of modernity alters anything old.  You see, even modern people themselves, and sexual morality, civilisation, everything in fact, would be seen through ancient filters we cannot even begin to imagine..."

            The two speakers, a middle-aged couple, were skirting questions of art rather than discussing something far more personal to them.  They sat in an untidy huddle, close enough to be unheard by anybody but themselves.  They were in a concert hall: or what used to be a concert hall before the auditorium seats were ripped out and the platform replaced with a smattering of cafe tables - tables which, in turn, had been abandoned to the ravages of recession.

*

Events had come throughout the day in a seemingly random pattern, but when Glock reviewed them during the evening, whilst boiling milk in a saucepan, they created a meaning beyond their separate significances.  Even the heaving milk formed frantic faces with the new-risen bubbles of its ambition to be a drink's drink.

*

Clive suddenly stood up, kicking over his chair in the process.  The echoes clattered, causing Rachel to jump in her seat.  She turned her neck, without moving her legs, a painful stance that proved time was taking its toll.  She indicated that she had been startled by something else altogether - or thought she had.  However, she belatedly tried to conceal her reaction to the effect of the invisible cause.  She smiled through her own confusion, and said:

            "Where are you going?"

            "Only for a breather - before we talk about ... you know what."

            She did know what but wasn't prepared to admit it.  She could have denied her susceptibility to any implications he was trying to make.  His words were traps, each with jaws sprung back for pouncing.  Yet, as he would not leave, until she'd responded, she waved her hand which he took as think-nothing-of-it whilst she had really meant nothing-at-all.

*

That very morning, Glock had left for work and was accosted by a frantic woman saying she would soon commit suicide.  He merely nodded and walked on.  In the city, there were too many crackpots and he did not want to be mixed up in anything that disrupted the equilibrium of his day.  On the bus, there were several middle-aged women who were apparently going somewhere together.  One smiled unaccountably towards Glock: not a cursory glance, but a full turn of the head positively seeking him out.  He had not dared return the smile, not because he feared used smiles could create more animosity than amiability but rather since he was entirely convinced that she mistook him for someone else.  However, on departing with her companions, amid the gossipping gabble of rising speech-bubbles, she freshly looked at him as if sad at Glock's lack of reciprocation.  In hindsight, she had indeed reminded him of someone he'd once seen either a short while before or many years in the past.

*

When Clive had departed, Rachel found herself listening to every sound that seemed to constitute silence.  Here, in this hall, during her younger days, she had performed the toughest soprano roles - soaring to pinnacles of voice which other singers could only have reached if released from their own bodyweight. 

            As she day-dreamed, the sense of headphones and, even, eyepieces, closed in claustrophobically upon her narrow skull - and she believed that a version of Haydn's Farewell Symphony, in which the players of the orchestra continued to scrape and blow, as they walked, one by one, from the concert hall, was about to be performed.  Or, rather, Haydn's Return Symphony which, to her knowledge, had never been composed.

            Instead, Muriel flew in, as only women of her sleekness could fly.

*

At work, it being Monday, there were lots of temps newly arrived.  Glock was sure that one of them was the cousin with whom he had once played, when they were both small.  She had been a pretty little girl with a sweet smile.  He had not seen her for years, since time often took its toll on those unvalued relationships of childhood. 

            He smiled at the temp in question, but she did not smile in return.  Somehow, even her name had remained in the past.  And, what was more, his cousin would be much older now than any of the temps.

            During the lunch-break, which he often passed at the pub, there was a man with a clipboard who was measuring the tables and sizing up the decor.  He even scrutinised Glock himself as Glock sat, minding his own business, eating an individual pork pie and slowly supping a tepid beer.  Glock half-recognised the man, but with only half his mind.

*

"Rachel, where's Clive?" were Muriel's immediately instinctive words.  Muriel was dressed as if she were about to perform in a Wagner opera, which she probably was, bearing in mind that she was long past the first blush of youth.  She had indeed rushed here from a dress rehearsal, because she remembered something she had forgotten to do - or that was certainly the impression she gave Rachel.  Her blonde hair was as rigid as a helmet - yet there was a softness in her eyes, an echo of other times which Rachel failed to remember.

            "He's slipped out for a moment - to catch his breath."  Rachel smiled, although a smile was the furthest thing from her mind.

            "Have you decided anything?"

            "No, of course not.  You know him.  Always dithering.  He even got the strong characters he sung to look feeble, in his time.  No wonder he's always been a has-been."

            "Don't, Rachel," interrupted Muriel, "give credit where it's due.  Clive did make a sort of living from singing, which thousands of others would've given their eye-teeth for.  After all, it was you who encouraged him to get his voice trained.  Before then, it had the power, but the charm, of a power drill!"

            "Yes, Clive became a passable bass, Muriel, but that was no good (was it?) when he could only use his body like a countertenor's - or a castrato's!" 

            Rachel laughed at her own joke.  She was intrigued by those eighteenth century singers who'd sacrificed their finer parts for what they thought were finer parts on the stage.  Or had they been press-ganged into it by deep-browed, hinge-nosed surgeons who received the pay dirt of the era's musical patrons?  Whatever the case, there was a grain of truth in what Rachel said about Clive.  That deep booming voice was housed in a man that minced about the stage, instead of strutting.  He could have stuck to wind-up or wireless performances, but his voice, although good, was, unfortunately, just one groove short of a record.

            "Rachel, love is a fragile thing to keep unwieldy people together."  Muriel grinned at her own turn of phrase.  "You and Clive can surely sort something out and put the glue back in the supergun.  And what about your children, Rachel?  They'll end up in no man's land." 

            Muriel bit her tongue after saying that, but wasn't sure what, if anything, she should or should not have said.  Furthermore, she was now confused, rather than pleased, by her own expressions.  She glided from the seedy stage, nose high.

*

The last event of the day occurred on Glock's return journey from work on the 190 bus.  The woman who looked like an older version of his long-lost cousin evidently used the same route home, not unlike the woman who had threatened suicide earlier in the day.  At that precise moment, Glock really should have recognised the pattern in events.  Coincidences could never be quite that coincidental.  Synchronicity with a soul as well as buses.

*

Yes, Rachel's children.  What about them?  Rachel had been a child herself once and nobody had ever bothered to give her the time of day.  There had been no tug-of-love where she had been concerned, when her parents had suffered what seemed to her small mind to be a global fissure.  And neither her Mum nor her Dad wanted to look after Rachel, nor even have intermittent access to her.  But why should they have done?  To be born was never as certain as to die.  What else did they owe her, beyond the tawdry gift of existence?  No, her own children were side-issues.  If they'd been birds, they'd've flown the semi-detached nest ages ago.  This matter was purely between her and Clive.  Even a bosom pal like Muriel was a loose cannon on the shifting storm-tossed deck of the good ship Marriage to which Muriel had never been party.  But perhaps there was more to Muriel than met the eye.  The missing link?  Muriel and Clive.  Tristan and Isolde?  No, Muriel was Rachel's crutch.  Hence Muriel's well-intentioned visit to this empty hall, this walled camera, this husk of hushes and ancient echoes, this deep throat...

*

Now, Glock kept watch on the saucepan, as the seething milk climbed its sides.  He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and raucously gave voice to a song he had heard on the pub's juke-box that day.  Yes, Glock himself had to be the missing link in the day's dark serendipity, he thought.  He recalled another occasion, about a month before, which felt more like a premonition than a memory.  An ordinary evening, other than perhaps spotting Concorde skimming just below the high clouds, its characteristic deep roar changing operatic tone, as it turned over on its side and disappeared, like a shark of the goose variety, across towards the Inner City.  Glock knew its flight-path often traversed these particular skies, but this was the first time he had actually witnessed it.  This brought to his mind a recurring dream where there were all manner of sky-craft cluttering the airways above the suburbs in which he resided.  Some were modern affairs with inexplicable appendages fresh from some space extravaganza, lurching with a cacophony of engine tones ... in mind-boggling proximity to each other.  Equally, some were similar to the old-fashioned war-time bombers and dog-fighters, with single- or double-decker wings and multiple propellers churning the clouds into milky curds: these, too, almost touching span to span, as they fish-boned the sky, emerging from the past into the present like angels upon splints.  A couple did in fact clip wing-tips and they cartwheeled off to land with tympanic thuds in distant parts of the city.

*

Rachel did not believe that Clive had simply gone for a breather.  Nor had he.  He took a short stroll which grew longer, by default, the further he went without turning back.  He did not realise that Muriel had awaited her cue to enter sinister stage left, as soon as he had walked from the once communal stamping-ground: that erstwhile echo-chamber that all three had once used as a sounding-board or, as it seemed at the time, a Tower of Babel.  Clive missed the heady days of youth that he was beginning to replace with false memories, many of which excluded Muriel.  Thoughts abseilled through his untethered mind, while he unintentionally reached a familiar suburban road - where he had lived with Rachel in their high-pitched hey-day - before their children were even twinkles in the Third Eye - when Muriel was simply just another best friend of Rachel's, instead of the catalyst she had since become in hindsight.  Clive wondered who owned the streams of consciousness in his mind, because, at times, he was convinced he was tripswitching through the background hiss of Rachel's ether.  It was a strange world when one didn't have the nous to own up to thoughts.  Even these secondary thoughts of doubt were not necessarily Clive's own. 

*

Glock questioned why normal individuals such as himself should be able to have dreams quite beyond their waking power of imagination.  On that occasion a month ago, he had looked down at the pavement as he continued his evening walk towards the bus stop.  It was covered at this spot by indelible coloured markings: arrows, numbers, mathematical designs, which he put down to workmen preparing the ground for the eventual skull-splitting surgery of their power-drills.  He would not have noticed these, let alone remembered them, if it had not been for the fact that he was beset with some sense of strangeness.

*

Clive wanted to peer through the net curtains of the semi-detached house and see who lived there now.  The exterior was remarkably in line with his recollection.  He almost heard the same music as Rachel had liked to play in that very front parlour to which he was surreptitiously approaching in the orange dusk - stooping and staggering across the garden like a burglar who had never burgled before. 

            Squatting under the window-sill, he stole deep gulps of air, but not so fresh as the breather he'd hoped to take when first excusing himself from Rachel's presence in that erstwhile screech-hole, that hell-hall where guts were once scraped and inner throats rasped to cylindrical rashers of burnt bacon.  Stagnancy enclosed the city, sticking to the roof-tops and plumbing the nursery chimneys for tenderer lungs to coat.

*

That month-old bus journey had been, however, uneventful, Glock recalled as he stirred the milk to force it back to the bottom of the pan.  When he had arrived at the pub on that occasion, it contained a group of respectable evening-dressed people, some of the men in kilts, most of the women showing off the top of their boobs in dresses that seemed fresh from the Fifties, cut at the bodice like half-eight ravens, stiffened in the wings.  These women, whom, in the hindsight of premonition or the foreshadowing of subconscious deja-vu, he should have recognised for their potentiality for coincidence, had coloratura voices in shrill counterpoint.  They kept tugging up the front parts of their dresses, to retain some semblance of seemliness as far as their bosoms were concerned.  Despite this, Glock could not imagine why such people should be congregating in a down-market pub.  And kilts would never seem normal in Glock's neck of the woods, at the best of times.  Such people must take courage in numbers, he supposed.  To cap it all, after this group had absconded to the restaurant clutching wooden menus too big for them, a couple of real toffs in trouser-suits entered, so sharp-dressed Glock wondered why they had dreamt of coming here at all.  The one who had a red handkerchief artfully peering from his top pocket carefully opened a bottle of champagne whilst it was still embedded in the crunkling ice tureen.  It turned out to have more fizz than was good for it.  They deliberately ignored the spray cascading in all directions, as if nothing had happened.  It would've been undignified to make a song and dance about it.  They offered each other a studied "cheers" and continued to share a ritual conversation which was created from inscrutable bubbly patterns of pub chat, small talk and business gossip.  Glock had listened to them with a smile.

*

Clive shook his head, to free it from the unwelcome thoughts.  Rachel could radiate herself even at great distances of synchronicity.  Or was it Muriel?  He could never be sure which woman was the culprit, which had the hot-line to the autonomous muse that some called God, others merely the breath of inspiration.  He shook his head again.  His attempts at mind withdrawal were even more ridiculous than the way the thoughts were reworded as new thoughts.  In the same way as a sculptor's task was to release the ready-made sculpture from within the rock, composers needed to pluck the strung strings of vibrancy in the air, prise open the sprung jaws of cadency that many breathed without knowing it: to make songs and souls as one.

            Clive caught the barely perceptible sound of music emerging from the front parlour: the sound of two people casting their voices to the the magic of an Elfin horn, reaching him from over the hills of dream.  He raised his sound-box of fragile sculptured bone with its gristly appendages, just at the same time as the net curtains were snatched aside to reveal a face with folded nose surveying him from behind the smeared glass.

*

Glock had supped his beer, expecting there would be no other surprises left on this particular evening - after the champagne charlies had departed.  Surely, eevents must eventually revert to norm.  Life was not that strange.  And he was right.  Except, of course, on the way home, waiting for him at the bus stop was a vast hovering smooth-shafted jet-liner with huge round turbines at its rear.  Without demur, he boarded it and was presented with the whole lighted panoply of the city and its environs, where he simply knew he must live, somewhere, sleeping, dreaming dreams, singing silent songs, perhaps stirring a saucepan of milk. 

            It was a delight to touch wing-tips with others.  In the distance, he saw Concorde again, twirling to the sounds of Tchaikovsky like a young ballerina on her first stage.  But as the vast giraffed fan of a beast glided fearfully close, he saw faces at the portholes, raising tapering cut-glassfuls of, not champagne, but what appeared to be milk.  And then he spotted the target: an area of the city where the streets wound in on themselves, circles within circles, with the red-light district at its very bull.  His sky-craft wheeled gracefully, aimed itself and fired off its turbines in pent hover.

*

Rachel, still in deepest solitary empathy, knew that a young couple sat in the parlour, a parlour where older people had once spent their time peering through a flickering square screen of monochrome with drooping eyelids.  Instead, this pair of gentle people, who still lived out their tender years, absorbed each other's tiniest features of both face and dress.  They held hands, as far as that was possible from their respective vantage-points.  A black record fell upon the revolving pad and started spinning.  They heard the sapphire stylus of an old-fashioned auto-change settle into a groove with the initial scratching, surging sound, leading into a width of sound that pre-stereo days rarely managed.  It felt as if the identical ancient Plain Chant was inside each of their cathedrals of skullbone.  Sounding as if it were being sung for the first time.  Steeped in actuality.

            One smiled knowingly, or simply the smile itself knew what to know.  The other returned the smile, knowing that moods were simple echoes, without knowing how much each smile simply knew.  This was love: stretching from beyond memory into a diffusion of memory that only the future recognised: a love that caused each party to forget their names.  They leaned forward in unison - and kissed a kiss only two creatures of the female sex knew how to kiss, a new kiss which, if mediaeval lovers kissed, they would have recognised as a kiss they knew to be among kisses they knew.

*

Back home in the certainty of the present moment where dreams and memories were correctly pigeon-holed, Glock forgot the milk in the saucepan, while he retrieved the tape-measure from his top pocket and went to take the size of his empty bed.  He then fetched the clipboard from his office brief-case with arcane figures and devices upon it, to see if he had really been minding his own business in the pub that day or whether he had indeed captured the significance of finding another version of himself outside the realms of a mirror.  A man too mean to be me, he thought.

*

The young female couple were startled by a background hiss on the record.  A hiss which hid the hiss of breath - from just outside the parlour window.

            Rachel switched off her fabrications of empathy and emerged from the unpeopled past into an equally unpeopled future, trusting that the present could fend for itself.  Old age was younger now than it had been in her youth, she thought.  In her heart, she knew that the ancient concert hall tonight had been and was to remain empty - except for a solitary figure sprawled in an erstwhile cafe seat: a figure bearing one of her two stage names.  She refused to cry.  Truth was relative to belief.  Only ordinary people were stars.  She smiled and sung Dido's Lament quietly to herself.  Then Handel's Largo.

*

Glock eventually decided, from all the evidence, that there was no option but for him to withdraw gracefully from the world. 

            As he filled the bed with a shape of self, he heard the gentle sizzling of the saucepan and then the even gentler hiss of naked gas, with the gentle angel-flames of blue having been doused by the seething-over of milk.  Reality had received its offering, its sacrificial victim, its scapegoat, its wild card, its bribe ... so that it could continue on its straight and narrow flight-path towards its determination.   But not exactly a bribe, more a reckoning without Glock.  Sometimes, Fate faltered - but was never duped more than once.  It may have all turned out differently if he had actually swept that distant cousin with the sweet smile off her feet and thus allowed both of them to live happily ever after.  Something he'd nearly done all those years ago when they were both still young.  Rachel was her name, he remembered at last.  Into Amateur Dramatics or something like that.  Tried to drag him along to rehearsals, with that awful female friend of hers.

            Glock heard the skull-splitting roar of power-drills drawing near - to the tune of a song he couldn't sing - even in the falsetto of unmeasured man.  Life was so fucking avant garde.