Published 'Nutshell' 1992
The years over-filled his photo albums. Sinyard Waxx would often browse through them, speculating upon the identity of some of the monochrome faces. These snapshots spoke indeed of unkown generations, some dead, others still alive, even a few yet to be born. Now and again, he would scrawl false spectacles, beards and moustaches on to the naive, blank-staring faces; even some of the images of women had to endure such defacement.
He was alone in the world. Except, of course for the lady who 'did' for him. Ample Clavinity was by nature an up-market char, but she rather admired nice Mr Waxx who sat under that part of the parlour ceiling which was mottled with brown smoke stains. It was not his frayed, threadbare dressing-gown that attracted her in particular, but the courageous way he had actually given up his pipe, cigars, cheroots, plug tobacco and untipped, high tar cigarettes after a long lifetime of such indulging. As a comforter, he would frequently roll a biro under his hairy nostrils, feeling the packing of its imaginary tobacco leaves, before commencing to doodle over the photo albums. But that was as far as it went. It was a joy to 'do' for a redeemed gentleman smoker. It encouraged her to give up the evil weed herself. She'd been a chain-smoker since the age of potty training and, being nice Mr Waxx's lady who 'does', she had to resort to the outside loo for a sly fag (a positive disincentive): for, of course, he'd banned it inside the house. This cut down on her intake quite significantly and, by Christmas, she hoped this would be down to an odd surreptitious puff with the kids behind the bike sheds.
In the old days, when she was a seamstress in the East End sweet shops, she was always to be seen with a fag drooping from the corner of her mouth, hardly noticed by herself, but a vital ingredient of her bodily metabolism, with a long, fragile snakeskin of ash teetering on the edge of collapse above the fabric she fed into the jabbing treadle-teeth of the sewing machine.
She often dreamed of the past: her large family self-consciously trooping past the gaze of her crank-camera memory: "smile little birdie", her mouth moved over the words, but no sound broke the silence of the kitchen she was buffing up. Better see if nice Mr Waxx wants anything. She popped her head into the front room, from where she could see his seemingly self-perpetuating short, back & sides, the hunched shoulders the blades of which protruded even beyond the confines of the dressing-gown, just the edge of the piled albums as he turned their crackling pages ...
He often had to replace the sticky corner-tabs: they were strangely susceptible to the wear & tear of the continual browsing. More than that, the photos themselves faded each time they were exposed to the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling rose. He tried breathing on them, as he often did upon his biro to get its ink running smoothly. He sensed that Clavinty woman spying on him. One day he'd teach her a lesson. He knew about her sneaky drag ...
The house was quiet. Christmas Eve. Sinyard Waxx did not own a television, but he went over to the front bay window and gazed through the tattered lace towards the flickering square he could just about discern in the house opposite. Often, odd people would cross back and forth, thus disrupting his attempts to fathom at least some tenuous stream of progression in the coloured images. He wondered who those people were.
That Clavinty woman had not been for weeks. He'd never trusted her, ever since that day he found a dog-end floating upside down in the lavatory pan, which no amount of strategic flushing could remove. He had had to resort to using knitting needles as clumsy chopsticks.
He ran his finger along the top of the sideboard, put it to his nose and, not knowing how to react to the discovery that the surface was smeared with a substance more akin to oil than dust, he sneered at himself in the oval mirror that leant precariously from the blistered wallpaper above the sideboard. He'd always admired that artefact, for the carvings of its frame seemed to have grown more intricate with the years. Most things blunt with the passing of time, through wear and tear, or weather beating, or grime creeping into all the interstices, or just mere in-growing ... His own face was craggier, these days, too, pointed into that of a furless fox, but grievously unpointed if it had been an ill-maintained corner wall.
He could not have grown a full set of beard and moustache, even if he tried, his complexion being so fair, the hairs were too fine, fragile chains of dust, molecular structures more suitable for close examination by a genetic scientist than for the grooming-brushes of the barber.
Sinyard Waxx did go to the barbers, though. The latter was a portly gentleman with a strop razor, oodles of erasmic and a real beaverhair shaving brush. Customers are to be enjoyed, the barber would often brood to himself, as he stroked his own mutton chops. There was nothing so nice as running a finger along the sharp, straight edge of a measured sideboard. Waxx was his least favourite customer in this respect. Everything about him had threads hanging out, which no amount of snipping could rectify; not even the artfullest topiarist could trim shapes from Waxx's frayed edges.
Sinyard had just returned from the barber's, his face scarred with the scraping. Flaps of flesh hung off here and there, slow bleeding scores and runnels, not only down his cheeks, but upon the back of his neck, where the blurred shadow of a haircut crept insidiously down his back, like a creature seeking out its mate somewhere deep in Sinyard's trouser system.
He quickly turned the pages of the albums, as if this was the last chance he had of absorbing the panoply of history. Faces revolved like upon the spindle of an end-of-the-pier 'what the butler saw' contraption. They gradually merged, became the one face in the mirror of time. And, above him, the browned off part of the ceiling grew tobacco leaves like fungi from yoggoth upon its mushy surface and dripped dankly upon his balding dome. The smoke that curled gently but incessantly from his biro was like the finest hair seeking skin to grow upon.
Ample Clavinty turned to her husband beside her in the tumbledown bed, and said "How many kids we got Henry?"
He snored fifteen times and then died peacefully in his sleep. But the designer stubble on his face carried on growing for days afterwards, Ample noticed.
A respectful period of a month after the belated funeral, she returned to 'do' for Sinyard Waxx. As she walked down the cobbled, terraced street, she smiled. There were several multi-potted chimneystacks lining the roofs like sentries against another second world war, bearing TV aerials as their swords and spears. Despite the February chill, only one chimney billowed smoke (that nice Mr Waxx's chimney, bare also of all costume jewellery). Much more healthy than central heating, she mused. With a sigh of relief, she placed a fag between her lips, lit up with a Swan Vesta and forthwith forgot about it and its unbroken line of descendants for the rest of her shortish life.