Published 'Saccade' 1995

I didn't dare open them, did I?  I truly believed that by opening them, I would be struck down by God.  The whole classroom of us had them squeezed tight, while the schoolteacher, whose eyes would also be folded over, conducted a gloomy intonation of a communal prayer to that same God.  A formful of infants, all with lidded peeps, hands pressed palm to palm before the nose, some actually touching the hooded nostrils with the side edge of thinly cushioned thumb knuckles.

            How did I know all this, if my own eyeballs had eye-lashed wings of flesh covering them?  The simple answer was that all the other pupils would be struck down by God, if they weren't doing what I said they were doing, wouldn't they?  Teacher informed us that prayers needed to be said with the soul's well-heads overgrown with the controllable excess face flesh which God had seen fit to grant us—to allow us to dam out the conflicting light, so that we could 'see' His unique light.  But not daring to open my eyes didn't imply that it was a physical impossibility to open them at the deepest moment of worshipful prayer. 

            One day, the temptation became greater than the instilled fear.  I could not resist experimentation—even if damnation was a side effect.  Death was almost preferable to not knowing.  And so, that sunny day, as lessons drew to an untidy close, with clouds of chalkdust choking off our childish pleas for yet more plasticene, I vowed to release my eyesight at the optimum point of prayer—and this vow, in my book, was even more sacrosanct than my faith in God, holier than our holy prayer to Himself.

            Usually, we ended the school day by lifting our chairs on to the desktops, after we'd said our prayers.  The consequent wooden clatter was a sharp dispersal of the prayer's calm contemplation.  Yet, sunny day or not, the prayer never seemed to reach the anxious Amen.  Teacher's face droned on about Goodness and Sacrifice and Creatures Great and Small and a Crossened Christ—as if Teacher knew I was watching and couldn't finish the prayer until I stopped watching or died or both. 

            I opened my eyes.       

            My now ever-wingless sockets eternally watch along the spiders' choking cobwebs in chalk-clung beams of sight—a stony gaze, from an increasingly knurled face, squinting from either side of the moth-eaten moth's wings pressed together like praying hands—until my eyes mis-soar like docked angels within a cat's cradle called Hell, a Hell that is a single moment of unending prayer and uncontrollable excess flesh.  Meanwhile someone else went on with life as me or instead of me.

            All I know, his name was Huw.

Mr Rampives asked Huw to mend his car.  Well, have you ever been asked to do something which you know full well you can't possibly do?  Huw didn't know why but he became flustered as if the man's eyes told Huw more than words could ever do. 

            "Yes, of course, Mr Rampives," Huw said. 

            Mr Rampives pointed with his head at the old black jalopy parked alongside his terraced house.  Huw only knew him from having been his paper boy for the last few months, so why he should expect Huw to be able to mend his car was a mystery.  Huw looked down at the man's brown boots with the laces still untied from the night.  The rumour was Mr Rampives never went to bed, but merely loosened his clothes.  Huw's mother had not even one kind word for him.  "Full of fleas, I wouldn't wonder," was her common expression when referring to Mr Rampives and his ilk.

            Anyway, Huw queried the nature of his car's malfunction, saying that would help mend it.  Huw lied, of course, because no amount of background information would be sufficiently enlightening for him even to hope to plumb the car's mechanical workings.  As with Huw's own body: he got up in the morning, did things all day and went back to bed: all without knowing the least smidgeon of a human being's physical make-up.  Of course, Huw was aware of the various functions of each piece of his equipment, but he never knew why or how.  Only clever kids did biology at school.

            "It won't start."  With that, Mr Rampives disappeared further into his front porch and, no doubt, into the rest of his two-storey house.  Huw had often scrutinised the back of this terraced row, but never really gauged which was which.  It was as if backs blended together more easily.  None of the curtains matched, of course.

            Well, the first hurdle to jump was opening the bonnet.  Most modern cars, according to Huw's Dad, were pretty foolproof.  However, Huw was more intelligent than others of his pedigree and, so, after a short while, he cracked the combination, which ended with a nifty turn of a catch just below the heavy-duty steering-wheel.  The bonnet sprung up like a lazy monster's yawn.  A monster who then died.

            All the while, Mr Rampives kept peering through the net curtains, to see what Huw was up to.  He didn't know Huw spotted him thus eyeing out, but the man's face was very wan (despite his ethnic origin) and it stood out against the background of penny-pinching darkness.  His eyes looked redder, now; no doubt reflecting the one electric bar Huw's Mother said Mr Rampives kept burning day and night, whatever the weather.  Or perhaps the redness was the outcome of chronic sleeplessness.  Huw's friends from the biology class said you had to sleep to live.  Huw reckoned instinctively, however, that you had to sleep to dream.  But never mind.

            Huw gazed in bewilderment at the array of engine parts presented to him, all in arcane liaisons.  He fiddled with the plugs.  He knew they were called plugs.  Spark plugs.  He had a magazine at home which, inter alia, had an illustration of spark plugs: one that he had thought then would never be of any use to him.  Yet, in hindsight, knowing their name was pretty pointless.  But at the time, it increased his confidence by an unwarranted geometric progression.  He unscrewed one plug with a laissez-faire that he tried to conceal from any of Fate's spies that might have been lurking nearby.  You see, Huw had a paranoia that usually only people who know that word can truly suffer.  He was being followed, stalked, tested, assessed, at every corner of life he turned.  In fact, Mr Rampives was probably the arch persecutor—the one who was now laying the final trap.  If Huw did not mend his car, what the repercussions?  If he did mend his car, what the repercussions then?  Huw couldn't win.  Nor lose.

            He went to turn the ignition to see if his fiddling had done any good.  The engine gave one sick crank and joined the erstwhile monster.

            Inevitably, he returned his gaze to Mr Rampives' house.  Yes, there it was: the wan wide-eyed face, mouth downturned, nose squashed in pain, teeth redder now than his eyes, for his eyes were dull, almost sad, no longer piercing.  Huw smiled, acknowledging an awareness of Mr Rampives.  It was a haphazard thing to do, Huw knows, but desperate measures were called for.  Smiling was a reflex action, yet one based no doubt on instinct.

            Mr Rampives smiled back.  Merely that. 

            And with one further turn of the ignition the engine burst into sluggish life: fitful, yet positive, turnings-over of whatever inner force made engines work.  It then choked, and died with the faintest whimper.  And, instinctively, Huw ran.

            The car's back-reflectors sparkled in the new-unclouded sun, as he turned round, against his better judgement, for one last gaze at the recalcitrant beast.  At least he knew he would be safe from Mr Rampives and his ilk until darkfall, but then Huw'd be fast asleep in his back bedroom at his mother's house, hopefully.

Fast asleep, though, often meant dreaming.

            The man walked into the pub to get legless.

            "How are you, Mister?" queried the landlord, almost too politely since, not waiting to hear the answer, he scooted off to sell one of his blood-red cocktails to a sophisticated lady who sat on a bar-stool nearby.

            "Middling," the man replied to himself, suddenly realising he had spoken to himself.  It was a pity that the landlord was now busy chatting to an apparently more attractive customer. 

            He used to be a soldier in an army fighting in a war few understood.  Some may not even have realised which side they were on (and there had been three).  Many officers had been retired from the ranks early for surrendering to their own troops.  But why give a present the past?

            He glanced along the bar and surveyed the lady in the tight red skirt that accentuated the prime cut of her thighs, and the buttonless blouse which, despite its loose fit, did little to hide the weight of her bosom and its deep valley (and the graspable plummy nipples).  Before her on the bar was the most strangely constructed cocktail that the man had ever seen.  Fizzing liquids of varying degrees of redness had been mixed but in such a carefully arranged column of specific gravities each shade remained unblemished by the other.  Thrust through these undulating subtle stripes was a large colourful brolly that protected the drinker from the upward erupting bubbles.

            "I'll have one of those," he suddenly decided, pointing at the drink in front of the striking lady.

            The landlord, abandoning one of his knowing looks for the lady to ponder, sidled back to the bar in front of the man and, staring him straight in the eyes, said sarcastically:

            "Hast thou the readies, eh?  Hast thou a brass farthing?  It'll cost thee at least an arm and a leg.  Or, at least, a frozen chicken."

            "Put it on tick."

            Saying this, the man shuddered as if he sensed the landlord had really wanted a frozen child.

            "Time's gone for tick, Mister.  Even your pub-talk has more credit than your purse!"

            And the man talked to the pub—in preference to himself.  The way he used different voices gave a certain provenance to the conversation...

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