MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM (written 1997, posted here 2004)



PROLOGUE



They knew they’d have to take the orange scissors, in case there was a need to shorten the trip unexpectedly. Enig was among them: a mysterious person with gaps in his teeth as well as his memory. Isabel knew him better than most and when he claimed not to know her, a loss of memory on his part could only be inferred ... unless, of course, Isabel herself was short of relative recall powers. So, yes, Enig and Isabel were members of the group, sidling away from each other as suspicions took sway. Others included Ago, Betamax and Prom: a trio of chums who went back a long way. Dressed as men (the trip warranted such garb), they tried to retrieve their inherent feminine charms by the phrases they turned.

“I feel decidedly peeky,” chimed Ago, left hand flopping over the deck-rail like a fish eager for its own environment.

Unlike the ground, the sea was in dire need of at least quarter-mass. The waves were curranted with stones.

“Queasy, eh?” trilled Betamax, whose shirt concealed the size and shape of her large breasts.

“I bet she’s missing her pink boudoir,” fluted Prom, with a swish of her shorn head, having forgotten she no longer had gorgeous blonde hair thus to swish.

The three proceeded to pout and squabble like fish wives in competition for fish husbands.

Enig drew closer to Isabel, with the thought slowly dawning on him that she was probably the best bet, the least of evils, the likeliest softie among a lobster-pot of claws. If he’d known he’d known her before in some, for him, unknowable past, he would have been happy for the future to embrace them both. But, as it stood, Enig needed to advance slowly, which effectively entailed backing off as Isabel advanced quickly.

“It’s good to be off, at last,” screeched Isabel, who didn’t have anything to prove about her natural self other than beat the gale for volume. Her frock ballooned in widening pleats, causing her to halt her bodily progress towards Enig because the frock’s lace-trimmed hem had already touched his leather leggings without any help from her. Isabel reminded Enig of his Ma, in her younger days. Mainly the way Isabel and his Ma had, even during their teenage years, both dressed in a matronly fashion: despite their prettiness. Both, as it happened, were stridently forward with blatant wiles, too.

*

There was no end, other than months of mindless sex which failed to achieve a year. I remember her well, though perhaps that is my way of saying she didn’t exist at all because, barring accidents, my memory is terrible.

Her name...

The town was, sadly, among those that do not register as places where anyone would want to visit, let alone live. My reason for being there was a cross between business and private. Pleasure wasn’t even a starter.

An aunt lived in the vicinity and she wanted to see me following my uncle’s passing-away. My firm had a small branch there and it would be convenient to make a brief surprise inspection. Jugs & Jars Ltd. was what it was.

A neat name ... I’d thought.

The town had hedgerows most of the periphery. The centre was stocked with shops, including, surprisingly, a Woolworths, bearing in mind the population. The traffic was passable. The authorities docile. The pubs with no recent name changes and, mostly, in full view of casual trade.

My aunt welcomed me with the words:

“Your Uncle wanted to see you before he died, David.”

I nodded, hoping to give an impression of “how could I have known?”.

I’m proceeding slowly through this rite-of-past, so as to build up clues as to the first and greatest love in my life, despite the routine sex which the relationship involved—the greatest because my latest and second love contains elements which are actually rather less than routine. Couldn’t possibly tell her about it. Current lovers lack understanding re ex’s, at the best of times. Please excuse the time wasting. We’ll get there in the end. Even if there wasn’t one.

*

Ashmint was a magic land, where dragons, folk legends, fairies, rinklings and oberströps existed but real people, like you and me, didn’t. Enig & co were, indeed, rinklings who had once lived at homes for senior citizens in England, but had now, by means of a mutant reincarnation, transmigrated to Ashmint. The latter was a sea surrounded by an island, where all creatures, fish, fowl and folk legend, lived on sea-faring craft, ever eager for a beacon upon one of the horizons, a beacon betokening at least some form of terra firma. Most daylight hours, they slept, since beacons couldn’t sufficiently shine unless it was at least dusk or dawn.

I had given them this watery world upon which to live, together with the clothes, memories of others like them, memories of land, memories of a fictitious past and, yes, of course, the orange scissors. Rinklings were ironed-out wrinklies, their souls still old, but their minds as young as the sex after which their instinct told them they should yearn. Oberströps were their enemies. I am an oberströp in their world. But, here, as I visit my aunt, I am surely nothing but me, not even a shadow of another person, let alone a different entity altogether.

*

Let me tell about a dream. “Life starts with a dream, ends with a dream and is filled with gaps called life between more dreams between.” That, if clumsily, is how Rachel Mildeyes explained the phenomenon. Rachel will figure largely in these events but, at the moment, may she merely serve as a cerebral source upon which to draw rather than as someone actually in person. She also said, more famously, perhaps, that: “Death is the only memory but then you have no need of it”—or words to that effect. Very few of her books—from which her more famous quotations, proverbs, sayings &c are taken—are still in print. Many claim, indeed, her books have no existence whatsoever, either in print or otherwise.

Not one dream, but many. Whatever the case, let me start with it: there is public house that sells pints, a rough one by appearance of both site and typical customer, round the corner of a corner, in a darkly lit city, probably, say, London, (probably not, say, Paris or Vienna) where I visit quite often, tagged by an essence called Misgiving. I meet my wary friends who show in their faces that they don’t like the look of the place. There is a feeling I can’t describe. Merely that. Not dread. Not anything upon which I can put my finger, not even dislike; perhaps the best word is: Ogden. Ogden? The name of the pub? Someone it reminds me of? Well, until this matter can be fully investigated, let’s leave it at that. Only to say that, one night, the pub was slightly different. A few more corners to negotiate than before. A darker city, if, probably, the same one. A tawdrier site: a notorious backstreet gully. I am carrying a large empty glass jug: big as my own top half. Thus, hefty to wield. I carry it straight into the “new” pub, but I know exactly where to go to find the bar via the shadowy alcoves of hunched drinkers. The barperson, whose face I could not now remember, motions me upstairs, where, no doubt, someone is expecting me...

*

When I told my aunt about this, she looked at me as if I were mad. A glassy stare and then ceaseless chat about my uncle who was her late husband. Little did she know that my visit was central in a search for my first love. This was where I’d met the beautiful girl (yes, she was beautiful), in this town, whilst on an identical visit. Perhaps, this was the very visit, and the meeting was yet to happen. Such circumstances would absolve any guilt with regard to my economy with the truth when talking—or, rather, not talking—to my partner (as they call them these days), a partner who was my supposed second love, about my supposed first love met or about to be met during this visit to my aunt. How would I make time to visit my business hereabouts? These considerations prevented me from paying attention to what my aunt was telling me:

“David, you must realise that Inigo cared very much about you. Us having no children of our own ... of our own ... we sort of put store in what you succeeded in. Despite the fact you never visited us, we were very proud of the things you set up, even here in Ashminster, at arm’s length...”

And so forth.

Until: “So, what Uncle Inigo’s Will will say is that if you will live here to care for me in my old age, which will not be far away these days, you will inherit the house and everything that I will show you of our savings and so forth...” I noticed she made no mention of my current ‘partner’. Was she invited to live here, too?

*

Meanwhile, within the magic land of Ashmint, Enig and the others continued their cruise across an island sea (which, let me remind you, is quite quite different from an inland sea). They seemed, by all accounts, to have a very clear picture of what I looked like, what I was, in contrast, actually like, and whom I looked like most. They spent quilted twilights merely discussing me and my fate: like a read-aloud bedtime story to which all contributed, taking it in turns to be storyteller and listeners in an almost conversational version of the oral tradition. A piecemeal round robin. But that was where the orange scissors would no doubt, eventually, come in handy.

*

Isabel was a bit of a loner; she maintained her femininity in face of the disguised versions of Ago, Betamax and Prom. Although she wanted to attract Enig sexually, she did not intend her dress (matronly in style, as it was) to accomplish this—since, she knew, he was tutored in seeing people for what they were, not for what they seemed. She did not mix readily with the others. As if she were aware of the importance of the matter and of how she was instinctively substituting for someone else far worthier and wordier than herself—Isabel did nevertheless contribute more than most to the spoken saga, as their craft was biffed from salt pillar to salt post.

*

Rachel Mildeyes was, of course, not her real name. Even imaginary people (or folk legends, as I prefer to call them) need at least some provenance of existence. She was not on that raft of a craft in Ashmint—where I would have preferred her to be, so as to add literary weight to the fitful, often amateurish, story-telling of the crew—but she was, instead, in Ashminster, where my aunt lived: ready, probably, to substitute herself, in her turn, for someone else that fate had already said I would meet. Difficult to come to terms with these things, particularly when they were either quite nonsensical within a sane judgement of reality’s course or logical in their (albeit uncontrollable) predictability.

*

The scene is set, the stars are set, too, in their pervading pattern. Emotions are quite cold, until we are ready to cry or, even, laugh. Time for a stylised beginning, something called CHAPTER ONE. But please do not let any style or format dissuade you from those impulsive tears or lightsome chuckle.







CHAPTER ONE



"Can't we rehearse it?" asked a strange bag-lady. David Ogden was looking for a certain random pub but, having been accosted by her in the West End of London street, he saw that she was not strange in herself; it was merely the way she seemed haphazardly to pick him for something her mind believed was far from haphazard.

He tried to unlock his eyes from the ones with which she pleaded—as he normally would with street beggars: those tattery rinklings under blankets who often whispered out for a few spare coins from down in the corner where pavement met wall. "Have you a penny for us?" "Just a coin for me?" Underbreaths of whining. Pitiful pasty plates instead of faces. The sole difference here was that she was well-dressed, or as well-dressed as it was possible for a bag-lady to be. Even standard folk, these days, were no more than a drift short of dapper, he thought.

David was torn. The start was a conclusion: ignore her pointblank. The second option was to ask what she meant by the question so he could proffer an answer. Neither course was a sensible one, however, as it began to dawn on him that she was giving the impression that she already knew him and, what was more disturbing, that he must know her. She nodded as if expecting a certain reply: thus, the last option—an inevitable one.

"Why?" he asked, realising that he was plumping for none of the three options he'd painstakingly weighed.

"Well, it'd make things ... quieter, simpler and cleaner when it ... goes off— and we'd have every corner covered..."

Her voice took the higher ground as she pursued the gambit to its fuse-wire, or a conversational fox to its earth. She began to look prettier than his first impression of her and even more familiar. If this were a pick-up, he decided to be its stylus.

"Yes, why not? What do you suggest?"

He was sinking up to his neck in a gluey pit of misunderstanding. She grabbed his hand and tugged him along, weaving between the long black cars, until they reached Soho Square. And as they arrived in that green oasis, where the people were shown, by contrast, to be stranger creatures than they appeared elsewhere on the city streets, an indeterminate creature scattered a sackful of bread pellets in the vicinity of one of the benches and scuttled off before seeing the result of such an action. An ill-disciplined flock of moth-eaten pigeons swooped amid much warbling as they began to beak up the scraps, whilst fending off the single hop-hoppety bird that tweeted hopelessly for its meagre share. After the pellets had been consumed in such a mass frenzied peck-in, the shuttling swarm departed piecemeal: a whirr of tawdry feathers and birdish instinct. David pointed to a sign forbidding the feeding of birds in Soho Square. The bag-lady smiled, as if condoning such minor law-breaking for the sake of another greater law—that of averages.

"May I introduce you to Padgett Weggs?"

She pointed to an older man who was seated on a nearby bench, someone David had not previously noticed. David was always unnoticing things, it seemed. Yet, here was another vaguely familiar face, one he should have recognised despite the woman's evident assumption that Padgett Weggs needed introducing. It was as if Padgett Weggs didn't exist, unless he was introduced—as if dossers like Padgett Weggs needed wheedling into reality with a modicum of courtesy: in the correct stages of existential etiquette: an ontological protocol. David shook his head. Not for some months now had he suffered such mindless verbiage. The last time he had finished up in a ditchy gutter, discovered by a boy policeman who had inferred drunkenness from David's post-philosophical demeanour.

"How do you do?"

Was that actually the question David had asked of Padgett Weggs?

"Very well, thank you," replied Padgett Weggs, rising with a palm outstretched for one of those slapping handshakes so popular with many of the more modern, as well as down-trodden, people. David forthwith stood his ground and shared the mutual congratulatory applause with a smart flourish that surprised even himself.

Soho Square was by now fast emptying of others, with dusk in the vanguard of an unseasonable cold snap. There was one Chinese lady reading a book not far away—no doubt reading the peculiar hieroglyphics better than David could read his own form of upper case English. A number of loud-mouthed oberströps were limb-splayed around a tree, frequently bursting into raucous laughter: cruel whoops and bouts of gratuitous hobbledehoy swearing. There was no sign of pigeons since the earlier fray had dispersed—not even the black scrawny ones that usually roosted on the conical roof of the Elizabethan wendy-house in Soho Square's middle.

David unnoticed the Chinese lady disappearing—and Padgett Weggs, too. So, at the back of his mind, he assumed they were still in the Square. The bag-lady was grubbing around in a litter bin. She looked up at David and whispered a request for some of his spare coins. A whine in each of her eyes, as if they wheedled louder than real words. She should have been in a home for the old, infirm, senile. Being a number of yards away, he couldn't catch what she softly whistled nor what her look gently piped. He shrugged and continued on his way, forgetting that he had never intended to go anywhere, let alone via Soho Square.

He cried, with no real impulse behind such tears. He wished he'd got to the bread before the ratty pigeons had. The city around him was uncharacteristically quiet—and darker than such a way-station of time should have entailed. He turned on his heels to take one final look at the woman in the gloom. But others had surrounded her: too much like vultures for his liking. Yet they were not the raucous oberströps, as he had first suspected. Those had left stage left, without even any catcalls. No, those surrounding her were the hush-voiced rinklings, the silently whispering wrinkless ones, who fell in around her, clucking tongues in tune with some silent backward ticking of homeless despair.

There must have been an abrupt power-cut in the city, accounting for the black air now swirling about—as if from erstwhile Victorian chimneys. The air moved in swirls of lung-sucking implosion.

"Can't we rehearse it?" Was that what the bag-lady had asked? Things were so unpredictable, even in careful hands. But the law of averages was not an average law. It was the toughest law of all. Best for some sort of dry run-through, especially with senile dementia hitting even youngsters these days.

And, yes, there was Padgett Weggs, waiting for David beyond the Square. Half his face off and body-fluid glowing as if it carried a charge. The fruit of his head was ripe, ready for plucking. Still, Padgett Weggs was determined to die soon, in any event, so that his body could follow its mind into the wings. He had already become old enough to remember when they first put horror into terror. David passed by, as if he had become a stranger again. Things whispered in around: dossers desperate for spare deaths, or vice versa: deaths dying for dossers. Rinklings & oberströps. Parts of people, looking like babies on all fours, were whining for just one bare picking. Dreading just the start of a single wrinkle.

Things would be better on the night. Give or take the odd leading lady and her bag. And the long black cars.



“David Ogden is looking for something which he does not yet know he is looking for.”

“A meaning, perhaps?”

“But as Rachel Mildeyes once said: One meaning can bear several meanings at once, not so much reading ‘between the lines’ on a page as between the letters of a word.”

“The explosion was one just as much of a meaning into many meanings, then, as of people’s bodies into butcher’s rubble?”

“Maybe. You see, words and limbs sprout from a single body.” “Hmmmm.”







CHAPTER TWO



Ashmint sat like a jewel in an endlessly unstrung necklace of such islands—an archipelago queuing along a river for eventual transference to a boundless sea. On Ashmint—as on all the islands—one could hope to see the mainland to the west and east, a mainland that myths said only existed simply because a river needed to have banks. The paradox of the sea, into which the river spilled, was, indeed, its accredited boundlessness...

Not only could the mainland bordering the river be hardly discerned from the shores of Ashmint but also the distant disgorging cliffs of the river's mouth. And seen, too, during day's long trawling trips, could be seen ships, ploughing the grave wastes of frowning water, all of which ships carefully timed their progress so as not to become those legendary blackened hulks, those ships in the night, crossing and recrossing each other without recognition of dark-stained flags. Thus, any sun's suspicion of setting would find them hastening harbourward.

Isabel tipped up her face, with a hand's shade artfully positioned over her eyes, and laughed as Padgett Weggs's stuck-up nose complained of his own scorch-marks. "You should respect the sun," she said, as if she were talking to herself, whilst she inspected the entrance into Ashmint's small harbour. So far, only a few of Ashmint's ships, still decked in ornamental sails, bobbed safely at their harbour moorings. She was overseer of such matters and should there have been anything amiss, she'd've delegated Padgett Weggs to fix it. For example, only yesterday, the wharf-side itself, as opposed to the narrow harbour entrance and its commoner troubles, had presented the greater immediate problem. One mooring ring had somehow worked itself loose and would not have held even the tiniest ship at its berth for long. Another ring had become dislodged and fallen into the salaciously gurgling water, at the bottom of which it could be seen amid shattered coral. A third one had completely vanished, apparently stolen. Today, with the mooring-rings either replaced or repaired, a new difficulty was presented. The entrance gap in the harbour wall was missing...

"Look, Padgett!" shouted Isabel, having forgotten the whys and wherefores of protecting one's eyes vis à vis the sun. Padgett Weggs sniffed in reply. His shapeless brown-skinned body sported a hammock for his privateers. But that was nothing to stir an island into mutiny. In contrast, Isabel couldn't credit what she'd just spotted across the cut-bursts of water—nor could she trust in Padgett Weggs to take the apparent situation at face value, him being blind, as well as many other things. Nevertheless, whatever the case, he would be sent to swim out there to investigate the missing missing-wall, hopefully before sunset.

Upon being tapped on her shoulder by a specific identity whom she somehow suspected to have done so, she saw the sun give signs of dipping towards the horizon with an engorged fury at its own blood-mapped predicament. Still, the sun should be pleased that daytime hours were often at least seemingly endless in this particular fleshing-out of mythological reality: a reality of which Ashmint and its moving-tail of companion islands were constituents. But no wonder the sun felt a new angry agony of death as each of its long-delayed settings ensued, simply because an inbuilt inductive reasoning caused it to feel that way. Isabel laughed out loud at the short-termism of matter and turned to discover the silent tapper-of-shoulders—her beau, Enig—smiling at her.

"At last ... things are already getting cooler." Enig pointed with his nut brown voice at the make-shift ship-made beach huts that had been erected for this particular coming of night. "We've finished. Come back, Isabel. Supper's on the go..."

"But, Enig, look..." It was Isabel's turn to point, the jagged edge of her tone causing Enig to drag his eyes off her scantily clad curves. There was the harbour wall and the low-slung shape of Padgett Weggs moving towards it, his stunted body twirling like the brown otters from her night dreams ... direction-floating amid the dying sunshine ... breaking the besmirched gold, girder by girder: the corrupt ore of darkness making dusk's chassis look and feel more like hologrammatic iron than grey frosty air.

Enig shivered at the thought of butterflying, like Padgett Weggs was doing, in what had suddenly taken on the appearance of coldness made visible by the runnelled smokish sea—despite the hot sun having baked it for seemingly everlasting hours of daylight.

"Let Padgett Weggs do his job ... he doesn't feel the cold."

"But, Enig, have you seen what's happened. The fact that it's never happened before doesn't mean that it hasn't happened now."

It was true that Enig had not yet appreciated the implications of his eyes in showing him that the oh so necessary gap in the harbour wall was missing. Without a gap, artefacts, such as a harbour walls, were relatively nonsensical affairs—just as perfect people were imperfect because of their very perfection. Yet, Padgett Weggs was far from perfect, thought Isabel, having established for herself the general trend of Enig's thoughts. The scamp was useful—up to a point. But she drew short of affection for him.

Padgett Weggs's own conduit to reality was solely via smell. His other senses, such as sight, sound, touch, taste and, even, perhaps, thought, were entirely unknown to him. Enig, however, was as near to perfect as a person could possibly be. He had now ascertained the "damage" to the harbour wall, evaluated it and set it into context, by saying, almost in the same breath as Isabel's barely earlier pointed statement:-

"It's not there."

Isabel sighed with relief, having heard, in her own mind-transcribed words, if not in Enig's, that there wasn't a problem at all. Padgett Weggs would simply swim back to the wharf, with a snort of disdain for anybody left there—having been self-evidently sent on wild duck's chase. Better Padgett Weggs's complaint, though, than what she'd originally feared about the state of the harbour wall.

She took Enig's hand, so as to stroll back towards the newly erected huts where night would force them to shelter until it had finished recooking the sun on its under-burner. Padgett Weggs would be allright left to his own devices. He'd wade ashore before long, cursing the smells that only he could smell ... the salt tangs, the fucus fug, the cold swags of air, the shivery tingles over shimmery skin, the moonlit scents, night's awakening frisson...

Within their hut, Enig and Isabel were set upon an act that only nights could embrace. Daylight was too clinical, if sufficiently lip-cloying, for anything as close to animality as a kiss. Now, with dusk certainly on the turn towards what they felt to be its final deepening, they had forgotten all about Padgett Weggs. As far as sweethearts were concerned, assumptions were as near to truth as full-blooded lies—because all became one. The philosophy of damage limitation was love.

But Padgett Weggs was caught widdershins and turned turtle within a whirlpool near to where the gap in the harbour wall used to provide leeway for shipping to slide in and out. Nobody had predicted that Ashmint was so closely approaching its turn for disgorging at the river's splayed end, where all varieties of rogue current and sharkdrift were said to prevail. He would've drowned before, had it not been for the instinct that kept him afloat in all weathers and in all possible strains of ocean-myth. Today, his lungs filled like balloons. His heart bloated with something approaching a passion (of fear, anger? even Padgett Weggs knew not). Indeed, the passion, in truth, was a jealousy of which neither Isabel nor Enig could even suspect each other to be subject: even if both were. The buoyant blood in Padgett Weggs's veins fizzed with a tingle that had first tickled his nostrils. He poked his tongue between his teeth. Or it did it itself. Like a sea snake.

Enig fondled Isabel as if her body was new to him. Each time was the first time. That was true love. Yet as they reached climax beyond climax, their voices droned on in companionable conversation, for sex needed a scene-set, an undercurrent, a backing track ... while night folded back on itself, time and time again, with the sound of a nearing sea's width.

"Had Big Ship got back?" asked Isabel, some cross-rhythm of her mellowed mind recalling the earlier doubts, which love had since unselfed.

"Yes, I think so. It followed Little Ship, in its back-wake. Soon after Padgett Weggs got back from the checking the gap," announced Enig confidently, as he teasingly knuckled the other's left nipple.

"It's strange, but I don't recall Padgett Weggs coming back."

"He must have done. Nobody would be out in the darkness now."

"I suppose so. I have these feelings which I can't really describe. Anxieties. You know. Sometimes words mean more than they mean." Isabel nested his balls in the palm of her hand, as she spoke. "I can't get 'men's shoes' out of my mind. Men's shoes. Men's shoes. Always men's shoes until men' shoes, just the sound and a new meaning attaching to the sound, take on an evil aura. As if I'm dreaming about not dreaming."

"Men's shoes? That's a funny expression to have a phobia about. Your tongue must be to blame for pronouncing it with a meaning it wouldn't otherwise have." And he kissed her slippery tongue to taunt it back to good behaviour. "My phobias are different. I fear words do have the meanings I fear they have. Like slippery. Undercurrents. And, oh yes, just ordinary words that are so ordinary I can't bear to speak them. You know something else, Isabel? Isn't it amazing how there is a civilised veneer over everything people do? All our public fronts neat and kind. Yet behind it all, everybody who's anybody in public life swear like troopers in private. Fuck this, fuck that. Yet accepted wisdom is that we are all clean-mouthed and caring. You wouldn't think that, would you, listening to political debates and light entertainment, that those people go home at night and scrape wicked words off the wall?"

"I know what you mean, Enig. Looking at sweet sweet Isabel during the day you wouldn't expect her to whisper in a man's ears for him to fuck her hard. But, do so, Enig. Fuck me hard."

Her whisper became a hiss as the prurience seemed to fetch sweet curdled saliva into her mouth, like blood thickened by thought.

The unshod sound of slippery footsteps was silent. Then, a face, with two gaps for fangs in its teeth, eventually mooned love-achingly through the ice-crazed window of their mizzen-made hut: a drowned-out shape who needed blood to assuage its appetite for life. Smell being the only sense that the sea surges clean, the only sense left to Padgett now was that of death.

Ashmint inched tentatively into the limitless reaches of the Gulf stream, as the dark slept on. And, seeking different, more welcoming, if less protective, harbours, ships crossed themselves in the night.



“I understood most of that, but the bit about ‘men’s shoes’ was quite difficult to grasp.”

“That’s the whole point. Ashmint itself is difficult to grasp. Ashminster, too. All is oblique, so more can be wrung from the words. A nameless public house. Padgett Weggs’ leaky boots. The Aunt who was to be isolated in a single people’s home for the fundamentally aged. So aged she ceased to see the sides of reality and saw only an effulgent river of insular light flowing-between-the-sides Godward. In other words, mention of men’s shoes is that we were born as rinklings or oberströps, branches of the Menshu tree...”

“Ungraspability, then, has more essence than pure definition?” “Maybe. See, I can only say this ‘maybe’. Rachel stole ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ from my lips during a dream which I still sense I am dreaming even while I sit here on the rocking waves, waves which I know must be real, because I must logically be where I am in body, for where else am I? Concurrent dreams can only be inferred.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Rockabye Baby In A Treetop...” “Waaaaaaaaaa!”







CHAPTER THREE



I was spending a few days with an old friend in a seaside resort where he had lived as a child. Whilst he was at work, I rather enjoyed mooching along the promenade, playing flipper machines, seeing how long I could sit in the council deckchairs before I risked a charge for so doing, eating soft twirly ice-creams, seeking out attractive sun-worshippers on the beach.

However, most of the day-trippers were elderly or fat, usually ugly and short-tempered. A number of people seemed to have come here specifically to act out an argument they had been wanting to have for years. The old people from a home jabbed glances from side to side, like birds, suspecting all kinds of evil which might encroach upon them if they let slip a lifetime's guard. Whatever their age, the trippers were mostly thin-lipped things I called Undergrunts, complete with tattoos and dirty fingernails, making me want to dig back into the dreams of my mind where better creatures lurked.

The tides were grand affairs, flouncing out of the estuary, leaving swatches of choked seaweed and other unrecognisable rubble across the expansive browny-grey sludge and shingle. Later the tides swept back, even before anyone realised they were returning, making everything suddenly seem more a proper seaside again. The pier was the longest in the world. My friend told me that the tides had been the reason for its length, as if that explained it.

On the very first day of my visit, we had walked to the pierhead—a great distance, despite the contrary impression from the promenade. Although appearing to be a narrow gantry ramp or a giant crane on its side, the pier bore a train back and forth which shook the stanchions and narrow planked walkway, as if the whole thing was too precarious for a precious life such as mine.

From a lateral viewpoint on the beach, the train seemed a slip-fastener on a huge piece of God's jewellery that He'd dropped rather than let it dangle like a medallion around His neck. The rattling of the train could be heard from the promenade: a reminder that this half-bridge to the other side of the estuary was a vital symbol of an alternate world, suggesting that holidays were an escape from reality in more than the usual sense of that out-worn phrase. A walkway perhaps to those dreams I was after.

The funfair, close by, was indeed fun. To watch, if nothing else. Peter Pan's Tunnel Of Love. Merlin's Grotto. Enigma Mirrors. Yet, the pinch-faced trippers apparently wanted to scare themselves silly, rather than bask in warmth and fantasy. Their eyes, closer up, I had noticed, were already branded to the quick of the retina with unseen passions, even without the aid of being tossed about by wild machinery. I wondered if the metal workings of the rides were simply whip-tentacle extensions of the pier's roots trying to free themselves from those cantilevered foundations which threaded and fretworked the tenebrous sludges of an otherwise collapsible world.

Towards the end of my stay, I noticed the funfair's Big Wheel tilted slightly from true. The faces in the dollies that spun in a different plane to the main wheel itself, did not seem to be screaming any more. They took their frights for granted. One of the faces I recognised as my own, although I was not at first perturbed by this fact since friends and relations often told me that they spotted me in certain places and at specific times, commitments impossible for me to have fulfilled in view of my true whereabouts at the times concerned. My aunt, indeed, often claimed she’d seen me in the local Sainsbury’s. Even after I died. Or was it her who’d died? Whatever the case, you get the point. It was simply that I was easily recognisable and replicable. Always an extra extra on TV screens, as it were.

I left the funfair, in a state of retrospective shock. The face next to the one I recognised as mine in the top dolly of the wheel, as it stood stationary for others to disembark and embark, was mine also. In fact, all the faces were mine, turned in my direction, uglier than I had ever seen my face before. The Universal Undergrunt.

I managed to reach my friend's home where he calmed me with a cup of hot, sweet tea. He said I didn't look myself. I decided to brazen it out with ordinary conversation—gulped before saying: "I saw a raft in the estuary today, but it was so big it had eight funnels exactly like an old house's chimneystacks. Also the factory chimney on the other side of the estuary you told me had been there for years and years, well, it wasn't there today."

He nodded. He knew I fantasised. And why not? I hadn't told him the truth, in case he believed it. Or, maybe, it was because I had forgotten exactly what familiar monster I had seen with my own eyes from the Big Wheel looking up at me. That monster's spine would not be dissimilar to the pier, I guessed, but in bone rather than metal. I grunted and unsheathed my claws to make my friend believe at least something strange...

In the same seaside town, where strangely I now lived, I saw a couple at a bus-stop. (I had somehow received money from a bequest which related to an Uncle’s death and to seemingly interminable years of living with my Aunt to earn my inheritance—many years, indeed, which seemed to spread between one day and the next like an invisible flow of time). The bus-stop couple’s hard-bitten look must have been as the result of all the arguing—and the woman gave the impression of having something peculiar in her bloodstream. Her catchphrase was: "All you are is GIMME GIMME GIMME!" She was playing with some coins in her grimy hand.

The man was a long-suffering type, evidently trying to ignore her by talking to complete strangers who also happened to be mustering around the bus-stop. Sooner or later, he would talk to me and, amid all the other gibberish, pretend that we were chums of long standing—a preamble to laying off his current troubles on a stranger.

Then the bus came and nobody, including me, got on it. I could not account for this, as my full intention was to catch that particular bus (to find a certain pub) and I can still see the driver's bemused expression as he drew away with next to nobody on board.

"All you are is GIMME GIMME GIMME!" she continued to intone from the shadow in which she stood.

"Oh, shut it, cow!" the man retorted. He then turned to me and announced, out of the blue-black of his own five o'clock shadow, that they were holding a party that very evening to mark their wedding anniversary. Would I come, accompanied by a bottle? It was to be a real thrash. We shook hands, although, again, things were taking on a momentum of their own.

Most of us members of the bus-stop fan-club then shuffled off after the couple, since we were promised the party would be at a place just round the next corner. But it so happened that we were led into a part of the town where I had never ventured—streets of terraced houses with closed curtains. And it was true that I had never really understood curtains, as people should not really have things to hide. We are all cousins on a spaceship (albeit a pretty large spaceship) called Earth. Even the filthy habits of us humans should not be concealed. We must learn to gain comfort from whatever's thrown up. So why curtains?

People went to University, I reckoned, to learn about curtains. They were taught how to sew hems, to choose the correct floral patterns, to erect ladders up to silent runners and pelmets, to ensure the satin sweeps always met in the middle. But I had no time for such thoughts as we quickly reached our destination, a detached "two up-two down", back to back with the bus station. I had always wondered what was beyond the bus station. That's a lie—I had never wondered that but, ever since the night of the party, I have wondered why I had never wondered that. The pub I was after finding could have been there all the time...

Whatever the case, the party sounded as if it were already under way as our host ushered us via the front door straight into a parlour where an ancient would-be bag-lady, wrapped in several shawls, was sewing. The roaring underlay of early Sixties music pulsed from an old-fashioned valve wireless tuned to Radio Luxembourg.

"Hiya, guys and gals," she cracked, as if she were one of those aging disc jockeys so common now in the proliferating media. As a record faded, there was a glitch of silence, before our host's wife continued to chant:

"All you are is GIMME GIMME GIMME!"

The old lady scowled at her and said: "Dear, my son did not marry you for your money but for your looks. Now you don't even have them."

Having said her piece, she went to twiddle with the knobs on the glowing console—to see, she announced, if there was anything on the Light Programme.

If I weren't there, I wouldn't have believed half of it, let alone what happened next. The old lady took her son by the hand and led him a strange old dance, roughly similar to a waltz. The other bus-stoppers and fare-stage groupies shrugged and, regardless of sex, coupled off and rhythmically curtsied round the small parlour in rhythm to a recorded Wurlitzer. I was the odd one out. But, wait a minute—the "gimme gimme gimme" woman, who turned out to have body odour fit to sink a dredger in the estuary, gave me a few turns—but, when she slid her hand against my flies, I'd had enough. I took what was left of my dignity via the front door in a jiffy.

I reached the bottom of the street and, against my better judgement, I looked up to see that the house on the hill was sufficiently illuminated to warn ships off the fantastical circle of rocks from my dreams, let alone ships merely in the Thames estuary where this seaside had its being. Every window was ablaze with glaring effrontery and I could truly appreciate the value of curtains; they would have mercifully hidden what I could see going on for some time at the party—body-parts saved from the early Sixties, embalmed and stuffed.

As I wended my way home, I thought the only saving grace was that the old lady had been hemming and tatting when I first arrived, and hopefully is doing so again now. Not before time. A saving stitch for the laddering curtains of civilisation.

And behind my own curtains, I was indeed a father and husband. Like becoming used to always having lived in a place without having lived there at all, I was now and shall ever be someone else. Indeed, the children have got used to me being their father. They take it for granted, when they return from school on grey afternoons, that I shall be there—crouching in a dark bedroom awaiting their clumsy attempts at tea making. If it weren't for them, I would probably moulder away and become one with the self-perpetuating dust. I take it for granted, too, despite the lack of underpinning for any memories associated with them. Once, though, when they were younger and their mother—whom I eventually did meet in Ashminster—was alive, I carried out an ordinary job with ordinary wages, and paid an occasional visit to the local pub—never, though, the pub I was really seeking...

Their mother always wiped her hands on an apron, as she watched me waxing the family shoes each weekend. My own shoes I never bothered to buff. Working men’s shoes didn’t seem worth keeping waxed. The two of them, girl and boy (four years apart), were thankful, I suppose, that they were not orphans. Yet I threatened them with the naughty children's home, with a meagre supper of bread and water, beds of bare wooden trestles, but only if they were fractious. This was, of course, a silly joke—and, although slightly fearful of my intentions, they tended to laugh and accused me of teasing.

Beatie and Max, those were their names and, when their mother died suddenly, they packed round me as if I were the child. They put my pipe in my mouth and sat, pensive, ten and six, between my feet. Mum's gone, but Dad's here, and we can survive it all, their eyes seemed to say.

Nosy neighbours, of course, proffered untimely assistance. Distant cousins asked the post office to send condolences. Half-hearted insurance men acted out their own special part of the drama. Beatie and Max, they sat by me and listened to stories of my earlier life, when I had first met their mother.

Beatie and Max, now 16 and 12, have honest, up-shining faces. They're as true as a bright sunny day—or a wet gloomy one. They've an unshakeable faith in me as a father. They care for my cares. In turn I tend to their's. I comb through Max's tangles, give him manly pride—tell him to be what he is and proud of it, my son, my only son. I admire Beatie's steady growth into womanhood and give her intimate advice as her mother would. I teach them that they should brush their teeth night and morning and I make sure they visit the dentist regularly. And leave silver coins under their pillows in case they need a bribe in the night.

They trust me. Their eyes are full moons. One day, several years ago, I will carve their sight out with skewers. One Sunday lunchtime, all that time ago, it’ll be. So sudden will be the action—a pair of skewers, one in each hand, with split-second lunges—the blood trickling down their cheeks like tears.

The night before, aeons ago, I will have read poems to Beatie—a delightful habit of many years' standing. I will have shown Max my old marbles—the ones I played with at his age. I will have taught him their names: Big Red, Split Dark Blue, Blur Green, Spot Yellow, Thin Red, Big Green, Large Light Blue, Thick Red, Bubble Red...

The pair of them, eternities ago, will have tucked me up into my bed (the one I used to share with their mother) and wished me a sweet night and I will have wished one back, with a blown kiss or two, a cuddle-me-to-you, a counting of fruit-stones, a naming of marbles, a Lord's Prayer of 1 to 10 and back again. I will have then talked to the fairy who lived under my pillow. Beatie will have brought me a glass of water, the last thing at night, and the house will have settled into its long, long rest.

A poem I once read to Beatie, one with no fixed lines—children trust me implicitly: eyes honest full moons: live under the pillow now: breath short: self-perpetuating dust: hear children playing: far-off recreation ground: children in the house: once: once upon a time: ages ago: an ago so aged senile have I since become: nice apron: use it as a bed-cover: 'minds me of a seaside holiday even more ages ago than the past ever reached: pillow very wet: sheets slicked with slime: Tooth Fairies die: and, when dead, leave behind flame-hearted eyes: pillow soaked in their dye: Big Red, Thick Red, Bubble Red...

The poem continued until I was again someone else ... until I and someone else's wife (the woman I very nearly met during an earlier visit to Ashminster) were curled cosily together. We heard the front door go and, then, steps on stairs—heading towards the landing outside the bedroom. It wouldn't have been the woman's two children. Beatie and Max were staying with their grandmother—to keep them safe from their Dad, since prison bars were not sufficient for such a monster.

"Get under the bed!" she shrieked in a whisper.

I took one despairing look at the inch gap between the floor and the bed's chassis. I started for the window as an obvious, if unviable, alternative. The woman's husband to whom the steps were assumed to belong must have escaped from the prison. He paused on the landing—or certainly the erstwhile steps had become clumps before they grew silent.

Feeding her body into the boob-tube she had lately doffed, the wife made a staggering lurch for the door of the ensuite bathroom, as if to remove all signs of heavy petting from her appendages and orifices; whilst I, having surrendered the window as a possibility in view of its closer proximity to the sky than the earth, attempted to squeeze between the mattress and the bed's sprung frame—thus creating a telling slope of quilt and duckdown duvet.

The extrapolated husband turned the handle of the bedroom door from landingside, or what he had mistakenly taken to be the door. But we heard something fiddling and scratching at the wall. The wife, now making finishing touches to her demeanour, caught a sound of snorts and splutters from her beached lover who suffered, nay, suffocated, under the heavy-duty mattress. She hissed words of encouragement to me as she went to open the door...

I day-dreamed that a complex metal structure had been clamped to the bedroom wall, upon its landingside—like the internal workings of a gigantic alarm-clock, its steel stanchions actually embedded into the brick and plaster, erected on scaffolds which appeared to root somewhere below the floor level. Within this frame, springs were powerfully tight, in coiled clumps, poised for whatever feather-trigger.

She stared, not daring to move, even breathe—but her body-stocking slipped on slick sweat. Parts of her oozed out...

The contraption pounced like a bear-trap and shot its blade-bolt with a mind-numbing snap. Whether it implicated or exonerated, she'd now have no chance to make a clean breast of the whole affair. Not voluntarily, anyway. She'd only, in fact, pretended to be someone's wife, to add an illicit sprocket to her revolving liaisons of extrapolated love...

Her erstwhile lover? I stuck there, skewered on a snapped spring, slowly, ever so slowly, slipping, dripping, drooling, dangling through the bed's metal map of haywire dimensions. So much dead meat. If the window had been my choice, I couldn't have got very far very fast, in any event, since it was choked with chicken-wire. My car, too, illegally parked outside, had been truly wheel-clamped: so deeply demobilised, to drive it at all, the world itself would have had to cease spinning of its own accord. The stuff of day-dreams.

Orphaned by my own body. Rolling heavenward. The call of "Daddy!" in my ears. Life indeed had been a busman's holiday: a cruise on planet Earth to find an unreachable Dream. I never really found it, of course, but I did eventually discover Ashmint just below the surface of my mind where death couldn't reach. And, as a freak of fate, those already in situ when I arrived in the Ashmintian lamp-room were those things I called Undergrunts who frequented that lost world's commercial markets. Most of them gamblers and dice-throwers. Strangely, I considered myself to be part of that scene, but not for some years. Yet everything flooded back when someone shouted: "Hey! David, chucked a clutch of sixes, lately?"

I scowled—or at least I thought I scowled. I was all sixes and sevens: quite another ball-game. The gas-lamps were so aligned with the wall mirrors, they cast shadows over the faces on the stuffed settees, but made the ceiling brighter than a sunny sky in Earth's seaside July. I proceeded to the wall-hatch where pootch was being served at a guinea a schoonerful. The young Isabel serving, in contrast to the customers, was in full view, not even a rogue shadow down her generous cleavage.

"Six schooners," I ordered.

She poured them from a cask with a brass spigot. I was amazed to find that the schooners were huge glass jugs. And when I say huge, I mean huge.

"Top them up—there's at least half an inch of head missing,” I said.

She stared ... confident of the use of her own face. "Oi, Mister, you may be a right oo-de-lah in your mummy's eyes, but here you get what you're given. That'll be six guineas and, if you want me to smile, that'll be another guinea on top and no head!"

I fidgeted my feet. The lamps flickered as a nearby underground train shook the building. Like ghosts, the other drinkers' faces were partially revealed by the tapering, leaning and blueing of the gas-jets. I recognised at least one of my fellow shakers from the old days, one who owed me more than vice versa.

"Hey, Betamax," I called, "give Isabel here a guinea and she says she'll smile."

"Yes," she laughed (without cracking the face's veneer), "I'll smile for a guinea and give me yet another guinea and I'll let you ..."

Seeing that Betamax was acting too nondescriptly, I went over and put my whole hand into his pocket and tugged out a wad of his tight change. I then threw it into Isabel's cleavage and heard the splash several alarm seconds later.

"Is that enough, Isabel?"

She smiled with her flashing teeth, but the eyes remained as cold as North Sea whelks. Meanwhile, Betamax had stepped out of character and approached the hatch. If anyone had a misaligned smile, he did—either that or his head had been put on at the wrong angle.

"Come to rub along again with your old Uncle David, eh?" I heard myself sneering. "We were muckers once, so let's call it quits—give me a shaving off the paper money sewn into your lining, and I'll let Isabel here have it ... and mayhaps she'll entertain us both together, later."

"And mayhap I won't," she said, as she topped up the six schooners.

"Thanks, Isabel, have the seventh for yourself!" As I said this, I dreamed I was a dice-thrower again and wrapped the six schooners in my fist. Without warning, I smashed them all to the floor, splinters and flying flecks of pootch ricocheting in all directions—save one, where I myself stood with Betamax.

The rest of the company were not so lucky. They had their women picking shards out of their cheeks for weeks after. But that was the last six I ever threw. I left the lamp-room that night—smiling from ear to ear.

Isabel (if that was the strumpet's real name), when dressing later that night, told Betamax that she had enjoyed it more than ever, his new pouch being far more chunky. But it had been strangely dark in the lamp-room and, in that day and age, what mattered was the trumping not the trumper: names were wild, bodies shuffled, tricks far too easy to take, press-gangs at every corner and who cared whose deal it was anyway.

Ashmint became my home, almost without thinking. I wondered where the sea was, since I knew the place was an island. But even islands, I guess, have moments of ambivalence regarding their surrogate horizons. I forgot, too, that if monsters were sought they were always to be found in the bone dug-out of one's own mind. And even Ashmintian tides couldn't have shifted the pier from its slimy foundations. Yet there were always deeper places to go, if one simply knew the frightening limitlessness of depth. And, later that day, with Isabel replaced in the pack of black-hearted ladies, I found myself in a museum. Prom, a rinkling as confident as ever, uncurtained the painting of a bloated dark-bellied spider with the jutting head and torso of a man where the spider's face should have been.

I had no idea that this grotto gallery housed such unnatural works of art, and I said to Prom: "That's a strange item. Would you say that the man is trying to escape from the body of the spider?"

"There's an intriguing story attached to many of these paintings, but have a look at this, Prince David..."

With a flourish, Prom released a black curtain from in front of another painting. I took in an involuntary breath, since the surface of the picture had a brilliant sheen, but the paint itself had been daubed in thick splodges. The light was so broken up by its queer angles that it was some moments before I could even begin to home in on an image.

Prom smiled broadly, as if a second mouth had appeared from nowhere. Prom's billowing curtain-cape, I saw, swept out behind, with a life of its own no doubt. I caught a glimpse too of the tunic worn beneath. I had heard of many cults that had survived the timeless centuries since history had been expunged from most minds—but this tunic was one that I felt evoked a past that I had been taught to forget.

Prom continued: "In a time before you can remember, Prince David, there were men who were really men. And my Ashmintian ancestors were such ... Knights Templar and so forth. Even now, to one who is not brought up in the tenet of continuity, they are in the wings, just waiting for the signal..."

I had the gumption to interrupt, as I suspected where it may be leading. I looked up from the spider painting to the other one yet unrecognisable and then back again to Prom.

I said: "Memory has long been consigned to dream, even for you, Prom."

"But you, Prince David, continue to remember the past."

Prom's eyes fixed harder on me.

But I had an answer to the charge ready: "I have no concepts, I assure you, other than those of the everpresent present. When death comes, is life remembered? No. We live life as we expect to enter death, mindless but happy. Life is a ring that does not touch the finger, death the air between. Princes like me are no different."

"But what of these paintings, Prince David? I know that books are banished to your endless pyres across the Ashmintian waves, but a painting holds an image like a goblet holds wine..."

"It is true, Prom, I fear it is indeed true. I have now seen them with my own eyes. There are paintings here that defy comprehension and evoke false images of a life actually beyond dream memory. It is sheer lunacy to mirror realities, in this way. Why have I not been told they were here?"

Prom smiled again and I saw that the angles of light shafting through the stained glass of the gallery had given a new perspective. I felt as if I was on the brink of a ritual passage. An initiation. From Prince to King. No, I sensed it was something far more fundamental. Only a dice throw away. Six sixes.

I could now indeed see that the second painting was of myself, as I was centuries ago, a moustache upon my upper lip, arm held straight out at an angle from my chest, my badge depicting a swastika...

Prom strode between me and the painting, snapped heels together and stripped the regal insignia from my bosom. I knew I had entered a new historical perspective, from which point in time, new ideas, new angles, new wars might begin, if nothing was done. I recalled that "He Wears A Spider To Increase Knightly Awareness," was the motto on the Ashmintian Coat of Arms. Indeed, the armies of Ashmint once marched on their stomachs, mercenary hordes to repopulate a world: each soldier's Coat having eight sleeves for eight Arms.

Prom brought me back to attention by reminding me what abominations men had once been. Prom then gutted me to the bottom of my black swollen stomach, then further towards my men’s shoes, allowing more than just a part of myself to be shelled from its prison. Prom was ever kind to be cruel.

And, at last, the monster stood shell-shocked on the sand: a complete stranger on the shore: beached like a forsaken holidaymaker from history. The pier rattled planet Earth into life, preparing for yet another world cruise. Joyless screams from the Ghost Train—an alarm call for someone called Daddy—went unheard.

As the tentacles that had been transport across the Ashmintian wastes retracted, the monster screeched: "GIMME GIMME GIMME!"



“Surely, we’re not here faced with a surrogate Hitler?”

“Anything is possible when words explode. Look in the mirror of waves when they are still enough to reflect—and you’ll see you’ve got a wadge of letters stuck on your upper lip!”

“Ha ha ha ha.”











CHAPTER FOUR



The hitch-hiker could have changed the whole course of my life. He boarded at Toddington service station where I had decided to breakfast before proceeding north. I was much surprised when he actually joined me over the bacon and eggs—his cheeky way of thumbing. He promised unlimited conversation, all the way to Ashminster. And, I thought, well, at least he had the courtesy to submit himself for an audition rather than to lean over at the side of the road like a dislocated highwayman.

"What sort of conversation? I don't take too easily to small talk," I said, meaning the opposite, but the hitch-hiker was not to be drawn. He smiled mysteriously and said his name was Enigma. I was intrigued to find out what made him tick and, by consequence, learn something new about myself at the interface of two complete strangers (of which I was one). As it turned out, the journey to Ashminster was unremarkable, the conversation cantilevered by mere pleasantries. I even resorted to the in-car hi-fi. The reason for the journey was not central to my need to remember the journey itself. Something to do with an aunt of mine. Anyway, it was once crucial, but, those days, importance seemed to have taken a back-seat to triviality. Spending one's life thinking about death, for example, was not to be recommended. That's why I no longer go to church every Sunday.

Late in the day, I met Enigma again near Ashminster railway station, close by some disused canal locks. I cannot recall whether this encounter was planned or coincidental, but I had spent some of the day there, mooching around a rotting hulk of a Narrow Boat, its bare ribs demonstrating that it once had more in common with a creature than an artefact. The place stank of dead fish. However, some were still alive in the dark water or, at least, wriggling. I asked Enigma if he were taking the train back to London. But he insisted on returning with me in the car, saying I need not worry, since he found my company less boring than I would ever credit.

Then, it all started. As soon as I had my fill of petrol at a service station which I never knew existed, let alone visited before, there developed an irritating squeak from the dashboard, soon taken up by the natural undulations of the road. It seemed to travel with us, fast becoming the sole topic of conversation. I tried to blot it out with loudly relentless Philip Glass cassettes—but their innards tangled in the workings, more from my hamfistedness than any shortcoming in the equipment's design. My concentration spasmodically short-circuited, causing a few mishaps on the motorway. One fellow driver waved vigorously as he tried to overtake in more or less the same lane as mine. I did not wave back, since I felt sure the other driver was mocking my ability to drive. Enigma settled the matter by adjusting a vent, which initiative appeared to staunch the obsessive squeak.

The conversation then took queer turns. I suppose it was as a result of realising how close to death one was on an English motorway. Vast issues were passed to me for handling but, like hot potatoes, I eventually dunked them in the lifeless pond that seemed to underlie most conversations this side of the Atlantic. Life or death. Ugliness or beauty. Mind or body. Fiction or truth. Madness or sanity. Reality or unreality. Dream and non-dream. Living worlds or a dead universe. Mainland or Archipelago. None of them exact opposites, but each a philosophical dilemma soaring as a twin-winged angel, only to flap uselessly in the vacuum that was literally blown from my mouth with each statement I made. "Real or unreal? I live in the Surreal," I jested. Whether my statement was a key to some overbrimming treasure trove of tales, the rest of the journey consisted of Enigma's uninterrupted display of imagination tinged with fact. Or was it vice versa?

It is a lesser known fact, I was told, that those who wander willy-nilly the streets of London, foot-loose and fancy-free, are more prone to bombs, or to strange disruptive, even eruptive, words, or to mere way-laying by ne'erdowells and/or highwaymen, more prone to these things than other people who have a fixed goal. Enigma hadn't made up his mind. He had simply decided on an away-day to the West End and see what he felt like doing when he got there. It was like opening himself up to the chances and coincidences of a friendly universe. But as it often wasn't always that friendly, he stashed his valuables in private parts of the body where looters wouldn't pick.

Soho Square was Enigma's customary bearing-point, whence he scouted round for an odd film in sometimes even odder cinemas. There was a public loo in the vicinity, too. It annoyed him that the entrance fee was two bob; it made him want to turnstile his private parts; but, never mind, spending two bob made the produce of his urine quite valuable in the scheme of things. More valuable than the air everybody breathes, for example. And, he thought, if life was to be cherished and savoured moment by moment, even such activities as peeing needed to be milked for all it was worth. So, on second thoughts, two bob was cheap at half the price. He laughed at his secret joke. But it was soon time to pinpoint the area of entertainment for the afternoon. The best trips to the West End were ones with no premeditated purpose for as long as possible. He fully relished his loose-end of a day, with no strictures of appointment nor parameters of orienteering. Nevertheless, he must eventually grasp the nettle—or the freedom of choice would be wasted. Perhaps find a pub that didn’t yet exist but would do so when he finally found it.

He ascended into the daylight from the dank ripeness of the underground bodily-waste transfusion-centre. A whole world was waiting for him. Perhaps he would simply dawdle, scribble out some ideas in his note-book, browse a newspaper, have a surreptitious afternoon snifter at the yet unknown pub. It did not feel right for any pubs to be open in the no-man's-land of time between 3.30 and 4.30 p.m. No wonder, people of the human persuasion like Enigma felt ill at ease supping pints in pubs when good honest folk were working or, at least, watching television soaps and quizzes in suburban parlours.

It was at that point of fruitless extrapolation from his sub-conscious that a grizzled individual did indeed approach him. "It's make your mind up time, Mister!" Forthwith a thump was delivered that set Enigma reeling back on the balls of his feet. "You geezers who come up from your posh suburbs, with nothing in your head, piss us serious folk off, since we have to scratch a living from your bleeding Disney World of an amusement arcade!" And the geezer pointed at all the coloured lights of Leicester Square. "Whilst you're here, though, us streeties might as well get the cost of a kidney-tap from your silk-lined pockets! Never look a lily-livered gift horse in the well-drilled teeth of a mouth, that's what I say." Even if Enigma hadn't been temporarily stunned by the fiercesome thump, it was to be doubted if he'd've comprehended the didactic idiosyncrasies of the grizzler's speech. And so the ne'erdowell with a line in preaching vanished into the underground bladder-station where he spent the two bob bit he had ripped from Enigma's innermost viscera. He had ignored the rest of Enigma's money: ripe pickings for his fellow muggers and footpads to tear and share.

A rich heady head of steam no doubt rose from the gurgling urinal. It was a good day for streeties. Life was a fantasy island, better than wonderful for ne'erdowells, especially when self-laid bait like Enigma trod the stagnant streams of a guttered city. Padgett Weggs laughed and left Enigma to his own future devices.

But in seaside resorts it was marginally different. The sun-bathing area was awash with weed that began to reek as it stained the sand green. The sun felt even higher than at noon, its heat coming in waves. Enigma had been on holiday here for three weeks and the resort was becoming unbearable. The pier shimmered in the heat haze, but he could still make out the Big Wheel cranking slowly to a halt, leaving some joy-riders, like hysterical spiders, high and dry in the topmost dollies. He heard the sickening crunch of dodgem cars as their shunts became much more than merely fun. Noises from the Ghost House were no longer the joyful terrified screams of people on holiday, but the twice-tortured inhuman shrieks of mortals in sheer Hell.

After a while, Enigma's desultory attention was drawn to some divers standing up in the sea, after evidently snorkelling through the weed-choked shallows. They were the members of a family in their glistening black rubbers, shaking themselves like mongrel dogs, grumbling to each other about something. He could only catch Undergrunts, but it was obvious that their once keenly anticipated holiday had taken a sour turn. The various constituents of the group were recognisable from the tell-tale bodily bulges, but there was one asexual creature who slithered along the beach, rather than walking, in the size of a twelve year old child. In due course, as if giving their holiday one last chance to live up to expectations, they returned to the sea. For a time, he could see their backsides rising and falling with the sluggish waves, like otters, as they skirted further along the coast. Eventually, they removed themselves to land nearer the pier, one member fewer than he recalled. The barely discernible father, half-wading, was gesticulating violently—pointing to one of the pier legs which, from previous closer scrutiny, Enigma knew was literally crawling with thick black slime. The Mother was the first one to step upon the beach, crowded with holiday-makers in stick-insect deckchairs. She stormed off along the Prom, still in her rubbers. Enigma hated to see family rows. He came from one himself. His parents had celebrated mending a quarrel, by an act that had its spin-off in conceiving him.

Enigma stood up and stretched. Gulls were sinking through the thermals, squawking like ducks. They hovered around his head, ambitious to be vultures, and then skimmed off above the sea, eager to catch surfacing sprats. Just as the pier lights were switched on in all their tawdry splendour, he heard the Wurlitzer droning and snorting from the Music Hall—as if a monster had got its head caught between the pier legs. There was now no sign of the family that had been on a diving holiday, unless they were those figures changing on the public beach, whilst studiously towelling each other down. The heat haze turned to thick sea mist, before he had chance to regret not bringing his binoculars. The Big Wheel appeared to be moving slowly along the Prom towards Enigma. That seemed ages ago.

Not so long ago, however, he’d been turned away from a pub! The reason they gave was "change of tenancy", so Enigma wondered whether the new tenant wanted customers at all. Or if it were only him they eschewed. He decided to strike out across the fields, beyond the two-tier stile towards Ashy Wood, in search of another pub that he somehow knew, from the grapevine of memory, existed—but which he had not visited for more years than he cared to remember. It seemed, in fact, as if he’d been searching for this very pub all his life!

It had been a dry summer so far, but a late storm last night had freshened up the grass: the beaten track was narrower than good sense could credit, with long straggly strands of unrecognisable vegetation filling his trouser turn-ups with dead flies and smearing a muddy substance even as far as his back-side.

He noticed a movement at the far edge of the unkempt field he was negotiating. At first, he thought it was an infant slowly nodding or, even, a scarecrow's living young—but on closer scrutiny from the sanctuary of the blurred footpath, he saw that it was a pink balloon, pinched in at the middle: a carnival's cast-off flown here from God knows where, if at all. It sagged with an air's contents grown heavier than itself. Despite the uncertain terrain beyond the faded track, he felt keen to venture from the straight and narrow—eager for the message that some child must have tied dangling from the balloon's left tether. He decided against it. Perhaps, on his return from the pub, if he ever reached it in the first place, he would take pains to plumb the balloon's mystery.

Enigma eventually reached the pub (not exactly the one he’d expected) and, complete with jug, cigarette and beef sandwich (the latter horseradished), he noted down the details of his journey, in case he forgot them later. But details or not, he omitted various items, such as the fear of fresh rain and the silent scornful line of high-squatting drinkers ranged along the bar. He omitted them, for he suspected their irrelevance. He dared not return the way he had come, because he felt like the very monster who might abuse that memory of a child. It was as if the balloon still contained the toddler's breath. But no—more likely his father blew it up. Men desire women, and women men—on most days. On others, their desires are often different and, perhaps, more insistent. He prayed that whoever had left go of the balloon, which was a token of lost childhood, would be safe tonight, nursing innocence to the last possible moment. But he somehow feared that a wicked father would inflate another pink balloon, to prize the small tender cheeks apart. And, although this pub welcomed Enigma's custom with open arms, did they realise that the previous tenant of his mind had been indeed such a wicked father? His coin was as good as anybody's, however.

As his thoughts wandered uncontrollably, the surly drinkers along the bar turned and stared at the remains of horseradish sauce on Enigma's trouser flies.

Then not so long ago, but long ago enough to be half-misremembered, there was another occasion worthy of telling me. A conversation that was just another story. "It was strange."

"What was strange, Isabel?"

Enigma should have asked why Isabel made such a statement in the first place. Strangeness, in itself, was a blatant non-sequitur. But, instead of ignoring her, he had asked the question.

"A building I saw."

"Near Ashy Wood?"

She nodded. He was humouring her, and she knew it. She was attractive without being beautiful. A cross between pretty and puckish. And this, despite having a hump-back bridge of a spine. Her skirt rode up and down her thighs, as if its hem-line couldn't settle on the degree of flaunting with which Isabel actually felt most at home. Flirting wasn't even in it. He'd had her more than once, in any event. So, there may have been other motives for chatting her up this time, some of which he suspected she had implanted in his mind. Not that he was a rake. More a normal young man with a recurrent itch in his pants. He waited for her to continue, as he knew she would.

"It was a tall building—but it looked like one of those turn-of-the-century heaps that still serve as schools in some places. But, it was too tall for a school, really. Far too many storeys for kids to climb up and down from lesson to lesson. I can only describe it as towering bulkily into the sky and I assumed it must be a Victorian hospital of sorts. Perhaps an asylum. You know, for strange people..."

"Strange people?"

She appeared to be puzzled by Enigma's question. Isabel was stranger than most things she considered strange.

He knew she placed him relatively high in the pecking order of peculiarities. One of her foibles was to examine normal aspects of life so as to wring out at least a smidgen of the absurd or outré.

"I was kicking my heels," she continued. "Nothing else to do. Then I saw the chimneys in the new houses opposite the asylum. Their bricks had been laid in zig-zags, making the stacks look as if they were dizzy or drunk or worse. Either a new-fangled quirk of modern architecture or..." She paused, having come to the crunch. "Or the chimneystacks were not bent at all. Merely, the insane souls in the asylum, looking from the high windows, were actually seeing them bent."

"But that wouldn't make you see them bent, Isabel—standing down in the street. Would it?" Isabel looked askance at Enigma. He had evidently not come up to scratch in the degrees of humouring her. In retrospect, it was obvious what she had meant. But, by then, he had hobbled off, feeling scoured out by remorse, a crooked man seeking his own crooked style.

He came from mad stock, he assumed. Look at his Aunt, for example. The only blood relation he had left. She was quite mad. She lived in Ashminster. The place with mad schools as well as even madder old people’s homes. He recalled a day not so long ago, but long enough to warrant filtering the memories. Or, at least, trying to!

The event resembled School Sports Day. The field was strewn with the constituents of an outlandish obstacle race. A number of bedraggled people in their late thirties shuffled their feet along the touch-line, sporadically cheering as their wizened faces became streaked with tears of cold. The few "contestants" in bulging shorts crept on grazed knees like baby ruminants between the flapping tatters of tent-like contraptions, some threading themselves between several overlapping clothes-horses of skewed and leaning lumber, a misadventure playground, a tilted township of dwarfish shanties—but it was really a crèche where those parents who worked for the Devil in Hell could leave their overgrown babies.

Those adults who remained unemployed hung about there, presumably because they enjoyed watching the silent games. Their houses were too empty to stay in. Whatever the case, the Devil's agents always came to this field if more stokers were needed down under. Often, women were required below ground to change little demons' nappies. The few stragglers who remained to watch the obstacle race were special folk legends, once professionals such as Solicitors, Doctors, Architects and, even, Bank Managers. Now, with their brains numb from the New World Order and vigorously rubbing their hands together in the cruel blasts of the wind, they prayed for at least one day's employment down under, say, boat-poling on the Styx or inverting all the crucifixes which somehow righted themselves when nobody was looking. Their children's blue-veined legs made them feel even colder simply by imagining coldness greater than the coldness they suffered. Those (like Enigma) who had found it necessary to remain in their houses—blocked to the very nose with a slime sickness that first affected the toes—listened to the false echoes of the walls. They wondered—why them? Well, in the old days they had not been special folk as the professionals had: they were once housewives, labourers, clerks, office jobsworths and, even, salesmen. It was a strange world where one's previous occupation determined what bugs you caught. Still, those who had to work in coalmines often had Black Lung.

Everybody had indeed given up smoking since God vanished and the Devil took sway. Nevertheless, even with the disappearance of cigarettes, cigars and pipes, the muck that coiled from many noses—like atomised ectoplasm—was not dissimilar to smoke, except it was far worse for one's health. But with breathing no longer a necessity in the heady atmosphere imported from Hell, the lungs could safely shrivel up into the appearance of bag-spiders—the latter being a new breed of creepy-crawlies that swarmed from the ground upon the Devil's Day, only to die in droves when the endemic winds ensued. And talking about wind—bloated tummy trouble was now the order of the day. Enigma knew this fact because, being the Devil's own personal assistant, as he was, he found that such a sickness began to be recorded on many stokers' absence notes, second only to the aforementioned toe gunge.

One day, the unemployed grown-ups were in a fractious mood, despite their weakness in numbers. There was not much point (was there?) in watching an obstacle race with only one contestant. A single overgrown toddler was even at this moment fighting off the tarpaulin it was intended to crawl underneath—as if the green waterproof sheet had strangely assumed a life of its own. Perhaps the tarpaulin wanted to make things more interesting for the sparse knots of spectators.

Down where Enigma worked near the coal infernos (the gas versions being at a deeper level, just above the flesh ones), he wondered if he'd be the Devil's personal assistant for very much longer. Still, Robinson Crusoe had needed Man Friday to change his large soggy nappies. But tomorrow was Saturday, so who could know? Enigma's greatest fear was that the recession would take its toll even on busy places like Hell. Nothing was strange, because everything was.

And, strange, too, the way he launched into a tale of driving a car many moons ago, even before scissors and orange glue had been invented for his cut-and-paste fables. After all, driving a car was exactly what he was watching me do. A tale about a tale. But as soon as told, forgot. He was back on foot, it seemed. The directions that had been issued were easy to follow, even for someone like Enigma—give or take the odd discrepancy. The turning which appeared an ordinary road (if a bit twisty) on the map, was rather strange in real life. The main road itself, at the lower end of an arterial route in South London leading to the M25, was ordinary enough, he supposed. But, even this thoroughfare was not exactly short of an atmosphere—empty shop-fronts squeezed between garish petrol-stations and the darting glances of a stranger or two. A tale of strangers he told to another stranger: me.

From inside a car, everything would have been quite unexceptional but, being on foot, he was vaguely irritated and, often, apprehensive. This was as nothing compared to the actual first turning-off from that dual-carriageway. At first, Enigma thought it was going to be a typical suburban stockbroker-belt avenue. But none of it. The narrow road reminded him of those residential streets in places like Ashminster which fanned out in grid-locked patterns from a central factory-complex. Or cathedral. Or High Church. But some houses along here were large and separate, with gables and porches and bay windows and tall chimneystacks and...

He noticed also that there was indeed the odd row of terraced houses interspersed between. Some houses were lived-in but blatantly bereft of curtains. But, it was not really the houses themselves which permeated him; it was the general atmosphere which made him feel as if he had lost a little grip on reality. Or as if reality itself had given up the ghost. And that was not half of it, in truth. Some of the smaller turnings-off from this side-road were even weirder. Not alleys exactly. But places he did not want to venture down. Mostly hedge-rowed but with a few gate-pillars poking out on to gravel tracks. He thought, for one instance, he caught a glimpse of the profile of a small chapel. He was relieved to see by the map with which he have been furnished that he would not be called upon to leave the main side-road. His destination was marked with a red cross where the residential parts seemed to peter out. So he put his best foot forward, psychologically blinkered against any unwelcome attentions from inhabitants thereabouts.

He need not have worried. The area seemed bereft of passers-by. There were not even the walking dead one often saw on pavements further north in South London. Indeed, many of the windows were still uncluttered by curtains and he could see straight into the front rooms. A number had an above average supply of books on shelves and glass jars and pianos and wickerwork chairs—yet decidedly no people. The only living being he saw, other than a cat snoozing on one of the doorsteps, was a bare-chested postman using his bike like a scooter through the hot afternoon. The postman’s face was mostly hidden by a beard and he did not even acknowledge Enigma's presence, even though Enigma had politely turned his head towards the postman. Enigma could not recall whether the postman's bag looked full, but the chap did not stop at any of the houses, before disappearing around one of the many bends.

Enigma was sure it must have been the time of year, but many front gardens were overgrown, but in a cultivated fashion. Not allowed to run riot, but channelled by shear and shovel to appear unkempt without exactly being so. One such was his destination—a house called 'Terracottage' on the edge of a cattle-field. What amused him, just as it dislocated him, was its nameboard hung from a hedge at the start of the garden path. Unlike many of its neighbours, there was no gate to speak of—which pleased him somewhat, since he hated garden gates—the way the hinges were always stiff and creaky—the way a gate juddered in his hand as the bottom edge rasped along the concrete, giving warning noises of chance arrivals. So, the person who lived at 'Terracottage' appeared to be a man after Enigma's own heart.

The postman was already at the front door, apparently stuffing brown paper parcels into the letter-box. He looked around and smiled, before retrieving his bike and wheeling it behind the house—which made Enigma question whether there was another residence tucked behind the first one. Enigma could still hear the rumbling roar of traffic from the main arterial route which seemed an age away now. Coming from inside 'Terracottage', he caught the Undergrunts of a shipping forecast on the wireless. So someone was at home—despite the postman's evident reluctance to knock so that he could deliver the parcels other than via the letter-box. One of the packages was still wedged in the slit and Enigma watched it being painstakingly tugged back by someone inside. The brown paper ruptured, scattering a weird variety of paperless words; and he could see that the contents were wrapped in polythene, looking like something from off a butcher's slab. Enigma took the key from his inside pocket and fitted it into the Yale lock. It turned sweet as a nut. He prided himself on not requiring the letter-box (or even the secret cat-flap) for enforced piecemeal entry.

The hospital had said Enigma had been cured of schizophrenia—and the hallucinations were unlikely to return in full force. But he might just possibly have a few phantom echoes of his previous troubles, for a short while. Hence the directions on the map. He was pleased that he easily remembered the whereabouts of the stopcock in the kitchen so as to make himself a nice welcome home pot of tea. It would be great to get back on his round. Enigma was always such a dependable deliverer of billets-doux, party invitations, birthday cards, black-edged telegrams and registered envelopes. Never forgot a number worth remembering. First things first. Enigma should have plenty of time for other matters later—not the least of which, perhaps, would be to turf out that hairy sun-roasted lobster of a man from the back garden, lolling in Enigma's deck-chair.

The man had spotted Enigma in the kitchen. No doubt, the man would go quietly—now that he saw Enigma meant business. Enigma was a trifle peckish. There had been some meat in the fridge when they originally took him away. He wondered where the toilet was. They hadn't given him a map for that. Hospitals always let you go home too early—or was it too late, he was not sure? They had promised a district nurse every day, to tide him over. A dangerous profession. But she would never find 'Terracottage'. Unless they gave her a map, too. If it was a female nurse. The M25 was a good clue.

There was a loud juddering and scraping along the concrete by the side of the house. The deck-chair in the back garden was empty—except for an object that looked like a sausage. Home sweet home. A good night's rest would do Enigma a world of good. One never could sleep in hospitals. Full of people who wanted to look you over all the time. Most of them pretty weird. An Englishman's home was his castle, they said. Something was snuffling at the letter-box.

Then another story unfolded from the familiar territory of mismemory. Yet another contraflow, another load of annoying traffic-cones—yet this time it was not so simple, looking as if the left hand filter in which Enigma had found himself was conducting the through vehicles off the motorway, purportedly to return them further along to the full three lanes of the carriageway after the roadworks or whatever obstacle had been circumvented. He could see no reason for the detour and he suspected that the whole thing was a matter of spite on some official's part. The faster cars were led in Indian file between the various items of pulsing-yellow juggernauts, but remaining upon the motorway proper. The slow lane, in which he was stuck as result of a moment of misplaced politeness, looked, however, as if it were the short straw, looping roundabouts and negotiating presumptuous traffic signals. Indeed, the ribbon of road was now winding through the hillsides, with no opportunity of egress by junction or turn-off. There was not even one of those legendary "escape" routes often provided for lorries when their brakes had unexpectedly, if not surprisingly, failed.

Enigma's mind wandered, as the surrounding car followed him. The affair became more than a little irritating when there continued to be no sign of the motorway. It seemed a long while since he had been cruising: heading towards a night with a new girl friend in Ashminster, with not a care in the world except, as on the back burner of every driver's mind, the fear of blow-out of tyre or shattering of windscreen or dozing off in the fast lane or...

And, oh yes, the nagging pain in one of his back molars. Curse his luck if that were to evolve into a full-blooded abscess. French kisses could be more trouble than they were worth, in such circumstances. He could not stop his mind from wandering hell for rubber. The car broke the brow of the hill in a sudden flash of sunshine which must have been previously hidden from view by the threatening clouds. He realised with a similar abruptness that the rest of the traffic had done a bunk—including the Land Rover with a delicious peroxide blonde at the steering-wheel who had hugged his back bumper and haunted his rearview mirror for some miles.

Enigma was now, however, alone on the road. The car throbbed around him, struggling to slow down in its descent of the hill that it had just scaled. The gear-lever seemed to be stirring liquid muscle. In fact his legs were no better, as they attempted to pump whichever pedal showed most signs of reacting. It somehow seemed a larger more unwieldy car. Empathy was, nevertheless, manifold. As if people surrounded, followed and—yes, often—were you. Indeed, light flickered. Isabel huddled in her bedsit, looking at her watch. Rain played a dyslexic version of quick-fire Scrabble on the window which she had curtained out of sight. Enigma was late. He was supposed to have arrived two hours ago. She had checked the traffic reports on Ceefax—but nothing recorded there save a few minor contraflows. And a mountain of metal and gore somewhere on a road near an island off an inaudible coast. She felt her pulse, for no other reason than being reminded that she was a hypochondriac. Enigma had often scolded her for it. It was racing now. With him being late and the wind gulping in the chimney breast, she felt decidedly off-beam tonight. She looked daggers at the telephone, daring it to ring. No news was always the worst possible news. And she did love him, almost too much sometimes. The only man who had swept her off her feet. Pity about the teeth, though. His kisses were so horrible to taste. Like he had a pit in the stomach feeding up bad food from Hell. A power-cut abruptly sliced the city's lifeline to its dummy light. Then, thankfully, she heard the familiar brum-brum backing into her car-port. Its engine was coughing more than normal and there was no friendly peep-peep on the hooter.

She stumbled to peer through the curtains. The rear lights slicked the wet blackness with a substance so dark red it almost beat night at its own game of blindness. The air was stained with impenetrability. Her mind was on overdrive ... wandering ... when she realised that she didn't recognise the dimly lit registration plate. And eventually the shape became clearer as distant parts of the city were reconnected. It was not Enigma's Cavalier but a Land Rover with what appeared to be a hairy white hat tied to the aerial. Something clambered out and pretended to be more misshapen than it actually was. It used the air to throw a net up her wall like a spider's work-out. Isabel could even smell it—and, as she pressed her hands to her ears in mistake for the eyes, the whole city around throbbed brum-brum with the toothache of gridlocked traffic. No news was sensory deprivation.

Enigma sighed and gave up the ghost of the conversation of tales. He merely looked straight ahead at the endlessly speeding carriageway, as we wended our return journey from Ashminster to London. Some distance ahead, a car's rear-lights shone white, not red, making it appear as if it were fast reversing, keeping its tantalising distance, despite picking up more speed myself.

"There's a living red-riddled corpse driving that car, his arm stirring the engine like a gear-lever," I idly said. Or was it Enigma? It was certainly one of us who said it. Just as I nearly managed to draw the other vehicle to us, in the manner of beaching a boat against sea-drag, with the sinuous lengths of my physical gaze, it winked and turned off the motorway, heading for God knows where up a slip road. I had known this would happen and had told Enigma so. I pitied the nuclear family in darkest Midland England who would not be welcoming a father home, but the walking remains of a pile-up victim—which was worse than merely hearing that such an accident had happened. Even more pitiable, seeing that it was the small son's birthday, eagerly awaiting his Daddy's return with the best present in the world. Enigma nodded, as if he had read my thoughts.

We eventually reached South London via the vast under-ringworld. How could I abandon him short of his final destination? Just a few side-turnings (he said) from my own home and I would be able to deliver him up, without having to worry about the nature of his next pick-up. The cut-of-the-jib of lifts near the ringworld was nothing to write home about, he maintained. I nodded. He had at least kept me this side of sanity for the duration of the mindlessly long journey. It was the least I could do.

Well, there were more than just a "few" side-turnings. We wended the outer suburbs in search of the Enigma's home. He knew where it was, he kept promising me, he really did. I believed him. I still do. Eventually, I dropped him in Peak Hill: a place, he informed me, where people died, as if that was unusual. I shuddered at the approaching shadow of a tall church.

"Don't turn left on Ash Road!" he insisted, upon giving me directions back to Croydon. If he said it once, he said it a hundred times. On the face of it, this instruction could only be a minor ingredient in his diatribe of orienteering. But why was he so blatantly concerned about my not turning left on Ash Road? Amid the South London darkness, how could I ever establish being on something called Ash Road in the first place? I waved goodbye with angled thumb at arm's length: a bit like that other driver I had nearly met on the fast lane; a bit like the vertical skeleton of an old smuggler's raft waving an oar that had once been a plank in its deck. Most of Enigma's opinions voiced on the motorway had sunk into the backwater of motiveless anarchic apathy that was my mind. One day I would fish them out and use them as my own opinions—perhaps.

As I watched his back swagger into impenetrable self-feeding alley-systems, I realised that I had never really put my finger on what made the hitch-hiker tick. On the face of it, he was a materialist, but one who also believed in the fearful trappings of the universe, such as God and the Devil. If he now lived under the Shadow of Doubt, that would teach him to offer himself for a lift in a stranger's car. Finally, I tried to forget about Hitcher-Lift as I tend to call Enigma nowadays. In any event, that night, I made sure I turned right at every junction and, eventually, reached my home; hours spent where minutes should have done. There was indeed one left turn on what could well have been Ash Road. A short-cut beneath orange sodium. I managed to glance down it, upon passing its enticing maw: filled with sinister back-to-back high churches and tenebrous terraced steeples. Things with souls seemed to be loitering on the pavements like coffins of flesh, whose talk was so small, silent it was.

I dreaded with all my being that I might inadvertently drive down there, steering-wheel turning on itself in unlimited three-pointing. In the nick of time, the dashboard squeak returned; I smiled on hearing it, for a Ghost in the Machine had somehow saved me. Or was it vice versa?



“None of that has got us very far.”

“A journey is a journey whatever its destination.”

“Or starting point?”

“Yes, there are many starting-points in life, but who can ever remember the ultimate starting-point, such as the first incarnation?”

“ Ends thus mean the justification of all ones words.”

“Typographically speaking.”

“Yes. I see. I just about understood.”

“A narrow squeak.”

“Ho hum.”







CHAPTER FIVE



"Even failed memories surge back upon the tides of death." Rachel Mildeyes



The train slowly clattered past the suburban semi. In the older times, it would have been a steam one, with a high pitched whistle approaching the sootened tunnel.

Ignoring it, because she never really heard it any more, Freda looked at her husband across the parlour. Even from the distance of his wing armchair, he realised what was up. Here it was again, that strange Christmas card, always a very traditional one depicting a Dickensian snow scene with a robin redbreast or two thrown in for good measure. So why strange? It had arrived regularly for donkey's years, enscribed "To Inigo, always remembering you, Isabel." But neither Freda nor her husband knew anybody called Isabel.

"I doubt if Inigo remembers..." Freda often thought out loud after her memory started to go. If she could but know where it was going, that might have helped.

"Freda, how do we know whoever-this-Inigo-is doesn't send Isabel a card? He may do." Her husband always renewed the ritual with these words. In his case, he did not know whether his own particular memory was coming or going.

"Then, in that case, why does this Inigo never complain about not receiving one from her?"

"He may do, of course, but he's got the wrong address."

"Both of them have got the wrong address, then?"

Why Freda should expect him to have all the answers, perhaps God knew. She merely placed the card, as ever, in the prime position on the mantelpiece. Even if she didn't know Isabel, she thought she did, somehow. Perhaps, Isabel and Inigo were friends of her nephew David.

David’s friends would naturally be her friends, given the formal introduction.

This Christmas, she turned back from the mantelpiece and just stared at her husband, tears pricking her eyes.

"It only ever says Isabel," she murmured, as if this fact was someone else's afterthought.

"Her husband must have passed on,” was her own husband’s reply. He was always polite about death. He expected the courtesy of good manners when it was his turn to croak.

"But we must tell Inigo. He would want to know, after all these years, that Isabel’s on her own."

The incident, slowly coming home to her heart, was on the verge of spoiling the whole of Freda's "quiet" Christmas. It would be too easy to forsake one's duties, but surely not during the season of good will.

"How can we, dear? All these years, we've never been able to think of a way. Don't you remember me poring through the telephone directory?"

Each year, the postmark had been more or less indecipherable. Degrees of illegibility through smudging at the sorting office, gradually becoming clearer over the years, only to be counterbalanced by the onset of cataracts in the eyes. He had once guessed at Kidderminster. In any event, he was certain it began with K. Directories were not much use without the surname, though.

Freda retrieved this year’s card from the mantelpiece and studied it with reinforced concern, gently humming a theme tune she could not properly recall from the old Light Programme days. Eventually, she passed it to her husband to have a look for himself.

"Yes, I see what you mean. Her husband is not even referred to in passing. It says 'To DEAR Inigo, always remembering you, LOVE Isabel.' And an Ex, Ex, Ex."

"Oh, I didn't notice that." Freda pushed her bifocals higher up the bridge of the nose. "Do you think they were once ... sweethearts?"

"That's the obvious assumption, dear. With her husband now on the other side, perhaps Isabel wants to..."

"Don't! You're spoiling everything. Inigo is not like that. He's just a good friend of the family, I bet. Brings presents for everybody. Any children jump up at him with glee in their faces when he arrives, with a Christmas Tree under his arm. A dependable shoulder to cry on, is Inigo's. Isabel will need his support now, during her bereavement. Especially at this time of the year..."

Freda looked into the mirror over the fireplace. She dabbed a lipstick lightly in two half-hearted smears and powdered her cheeks from the small circular container of flat gold. It had a broken clasp, so she hoped her husband would replace it this Christmas. She'd dropped enough hints. She scowled as she watched him from the corner of her eye. He was not the same man she had married. His habits had worn trenches in the shag pile carpet. He was opening his silver cigarette case, all shaking fingers and thumbs, managing to extract the one Senior Service left in there from under the elasticated metal strip. He popped it in his mouth, looking around for his lighter. “We must get a message through to Inigo, as Isabel will be at the end of her tether," Freda said as she resumed her moitherings.

He tried to flick the lighter into life. He cursed the flint under his breath. The ratchet slipped. For the first time for many years, he noticed the engraving: "To I, all my love, F." An overlarge flame eventually plumed towards his face with that heady petrol smell. Over the years, he had singed countless pairs of eyebrows. At least, he had lost count. He doubted Freda had.

The cigarette was now drawing nice and evenly. It filled his lungs with a comforting cork-filtered smoke. He had never believed in the health risks. Here he was, seventy years of age next month on the 18th of January, and never a day sick in living memory.

"If Isabel's in such a state, dear, why didn't she say so in the card?" he decided to ask, more to humour Freda, than to ascertain an answer.

"She doesn't want to put Inigo out."

"Put him out? If he's such a close friend of the family, as you suggest, what are friends for?"

"Friends are not for anything. They just are."

He decided to keep quiet at that one. Freda had never been his friend, nor he hers. Husband and wife were co-travellers in a leaky, shuddering, undependable train called life. The tunnels were becoming longer these days. In the older times, the pair of them often took advantage of the sporadic darknesses.

The great miracle about it all, he thought, was that people lived as if they were immortal, but knowing at the back of their mind all the time that one day, one unexpected day, they would pass on. That was God's con trick. What made it more absurd, God would never put in an appearance to have the last laugh.

"What do you suggest we do then, dear?"

He had decided to put the onus on her. His generation of women were only too keen to pose the problems, knowing that it would be their menfolk who would have to solve them.

He squinted at her mouth. The lipstick had overlapped on to the chin. The powder flecks on the cheeks made her seem to be crying dry tears. There was only one patch of dampness under the left eye. Her glasses glinted in the light from the lacy window. He desperately wanted to kiss those lips, not through love, but unutterable pity.

He heard the roar of a train as he dipped his head finally beneath the ocean of tears, beneath that surface of consciousness whereon the living floated. Perhaps his last thought was that he had never really forgotten what his own name was.



“Life is a sorry state.”

“Death is even sorrier, given the memory.”

“Ah ha.”







CHAPTER SIX



It's so worrying me setting this chapter down in writing, I've a good mind to rub it out before I proceed any further. Needless to say, I’ve changed my mind, but not before deciding to alter certain facts, embroider here and there, make the odd saving stitch, unpick elsewhere, perhaps even cast off before I've cast on. Nobody would be any the wiser.

So, to begin almost one third through, there was this showgirl called Isabel, one of the most beautiful creatures it had been my pleasure to know. She was not one of those typical chisellers or gold-diggers whose reputation makes showgirls as unwelcome in civilised company as faggots and mash. That's not to say she didn't use her charms as wiles. She wouldn't have been human, otherwise, would she? And most of us are human, after all is said and done, despite the contrary indications.

By looking through my diary, I recall the day I met her. I was still staying at an Ashminster hotel with countless stars.

It was one of those cold autumn days which always creep up on you without warning. My gears had crashed the night before at some shindig in a pub (my diary is unclear as to which pub), so I was laid up like a tailor's dummy all stuck over with pins.

The knock on my hotel door was too gentle to suspect of anything untoward.

"Come in," I croaked.

The face which popped itself around the door was pretty if slightly worried.

"Oooops ... I think I must have the wrong room."

I sat up too suddenly, my head spinning faster than my ability to keep up with it. My muscles groaned, since my mouth was all furred inside.

Finally finding where the cat had hid my tongue, I managed to speak. "No, no, don't think anything of it."

"But I was looking for somebody else."

My diary has rubbed-out gaps for me to fill. So don't blame me if I use them as opportunities for catching up on missed chances.

"This is the right room, Miss, let me assure you."

She smiled. Such a glorious smile, I didn't recognise her as the same person I'd first seen who didn't smile. Showgirl or not, she went even further rungs up my ladder of estimation.

"And I suppose you're the SOMEBODY ELSE I'm looking for!"

"Well ... yes."

She opened the door wider so that my bleary eyes could barely make out the rest of her body. Covered in scanties, I could even have believed she was still in night clothes...

Three dots and a whole scene to reconstruct from my diary notes.

Suffice to say, Isabel and I became fast friends, if not more than that. It took only a few hours for us to be in the shopping precinct, buying up all the clothes that we could possibly wear. She chose less insubstantial drapes than those frills and fancies I'd first seen her in, although their artful positioning and preening could make her appear even less dressed and more revealing than before. For myself, I chose cuts and weaves that were far more stylish than I would have otherwise bothered with. The feathered titfer topped it all off with the merest tilt.

As we strutted back down the Wideway, we felt real toffs. She because of the clear-throated, clean-threaded silks and satins flowing around her tantalising flesh—me mainly because I was simply being seen with her in the first place...

Another three dots. Abruptly, she was gone. Upon the wings of a dawn. Never to be seen again. One night of innocent bliss, to be followed by the rest of one lifetime without Isabel.

I searched my diary in vain for signs of her presence (and still do, come to that). But days passed without me even mentioning the name Isabel in its pages. Names like Freda, Beatie, Max and other such mysteriosa litter the wrinkly pages of narrow feint lined paper. But not Isabel in any fell shape or form. I did not even appear to pine after her. She deserved at least an obsession of unrequited love from the likes of me, but she didn't even get one blotted word. It was as if I had never met her or, worse, that she had never even existed except in the earlier pages of my diary.

Weeks and weeks of buying necessaries, attending dreary business meetings, settling invoices, interspersed with odd bursts of even drearier passion with street girls. No mention of Isabel. Only false memories and nagging fears...

Then, more three dots. Several pages beyond my current compass of concentration, I picked up some misplaced concerns. It was almost as if I had opened the diary at random, plumped my thumb in and arrived at the faintest nibble...

I went to the theatre with a few business colleagues. I had chosen to wear, by chance, some of my most favourite clothes from the tertiary wardrobe. There seemed to be pleasantries in the very feel of their hang, in each stitch and crease; pleasantries I couldn't quite pinpoint, tacking against the thread of the fabric. The hat I chose with its boa sloped mischievously, causing me to grin broadly at the mirror image I provoked. My moustache set off the whole ensemble without further word from me...

My companions were surly souls with curt courtesies in the taxi. Humourless asides intended to be funny made me cringe. One was my Uncle Inigo I think (the diary is unclear). In any event, I thought he’d passed away years ago. Ages and ages ago. Someone else was there whom I'd once loved but did no longer, somehow. Yet another was silent and shadowy who made me afraid to talk out loud in case I revealed something of myself he wanted to catch. There was also a dwarfish creature, pressed up close to me on the back seat, who kept broaching unwanted topics and expecting us to comment. All of them nameless, except, of course, someone else, someone I failed to notice, calling himself Padgett Weggs...

The show took me out of myself somewhat, it seems. The Oberströps & Undergrunts ranked either side of me, with pointy faces and thin lips, faded behind me, an audience merely to itself; I the only one with eyes front. A glorious swan-like she-creature on the stage glided over tides of pink flesh between the wings. She was all clothes, nothing but pure silk, silver satin, snowy lace, frothy frills, cream-embroidered limbs of matchless shape, stitched albino cheeks...

I wept into my face...

I am glad to report that my diary seems to have a happy ending, although I haven't quite finished the reading or the rubbing. I guess there may be several chapters of it yet to be read or, even, written. Sometimes, according to the light, I can see what was written in the gaps by giving pages the merest tilt.



“Isabel or Rachel who was on the stage, we’ll probably never know.”

“Well, as the narrator himself says, much is yet to be read.” “Or written.”

“Nothing is clad in the iron of time.” “Yet.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmm.”





CHAPTER SEVEN



Back of Ashy Wood, when seas were yet to form an island of it, there lived a family that knew only of themselves.

Such self-sufficiency could usually be told only in a fairy stories, but here it was real. The Rinklings, for that was their name, had lived here for centuries within centuries. Some ethnic mischief-maker once called them Oberströps, but that is more or less hearsay and David Ogden has given us no brief to seek out hearsay or, even, looksee.

The First Father was older, he claimed, than the oldest tree he ever remembered hiding behind. Indeed, the day he first met his wife-to-be and took her back to the small wooden house in the clearing was also beyond remembering. She may have indeed been older than him.

The resultant children had, in turn, discovered mates with whom to couple outside the reach of their own memories. The First Father and Mother had simply nodded knowingly, as each of their children had eventually fallen in love with a chosen stranger. Everyone shrugged, too, at the mystery of the exponential growth, not only in the family, but in the wooden house which, as if nourished by the leaf-loam, towered higher each day, just like the trees.

The last in line, so far was Enig, who, if he had only realised, was in search of his own partner, confident that, when the day of his maturity dawned, she would be there ... emerging like a dream-child upon the sun shafts in Ashy Wood.

Enig was tall for his age and he lived in the highest attic of the wooden house. When he was due to seed his wife with his own children in the soon-to-be-forgotten future, new attics would by then have groaned into growth beyond the present roof limits. Enig's own toddlers (to be named Betamax, Prom and Ago, if time allows) would play seeky-find among the chimneystacks, while wooden slopes slowly formed new roof-contraptions above the old.

But, until then, Enig had to make do with his own company. He knew the secrets of playing seeky-find on his ownsome, since those other Rinklings last up the ratchetting ladder of generation had already outgrown such childhood games. So, Enig often dodged behind the widest, tallest tree—the one that was still the oldest beyond any memory's reach—and then dart up into the branches before he had the chance to change body. Looking down, Enig spotted Enig crouched in misspent hiding.

"Yoo hoo, found you!"

And Enig joined Enig in shrill boyish laughter: only to slope off as a single Enig, to milk the large-headed cow which only had one bent horn. Which was one too many.

One day, out of nothing, beyond sight of the wooden house's only window, Enig saw something hiding amid an incipient tree growth. It looked like a worm, with a human face, coiling around the sapling's tenuous existence.

In innocent joy, Enig called out: "You who! Found you!"

He plopped the wriggling creature into his mouth, knowing that supper would be late, if not never. It was such a delicious flavour, he dreamed of Handsome and Petal.

Later, when he told his Ma, she smiled wickedly.

"Never fear, Enig, it will harbour within you and grow limbs like yours, but shapelier—grow a face like yours, but sweeter and prettier—and it will use your own body like a glove puppet ... until the cocoon breaks and love comes."

But nobody actually said these unlikely words of enlightenment, so Enig of course did not hear them. His Ma had indeed been somewhere else all the time, no doubt coupling, as was her wont, with a creature owning a voice so hideous, it was more like tree bark than sound.

In any event, Enig had left his real self behind another tree in Ashy Wood, during one of those misbegotten, misbegodden games of endless seeky-find. So it was not Enig at all who had not heard the words that had not been spoken by his absent mother.

The real Enig was, of course, to find himself again when the time was ripe. And eventually—when the wooden house creaked in the night—the First Father died in the arms of the First Mother, pleased that indeed time was at least ripe for him. But, death being an orphan of birth, it was easy to forget how dark it could become beyond Ashy Wood.



“Yoo hoo!” “Yes?” “Time to wake up and finish David’s story.” “But we’re not halfway through.”

“How do you know what growth it’s got left to grow without seeing its end first?”

“It’s like this raft, its grows at the corners every night. Nobody sees where the stuff comes from or who does it, but, look, there is more space to move and have our being on. It’s sad to think the cruise will soon be over.”

“Boo hoo!”













CHAPTER EIGHT



David was unworried when he heard her answer to his question: that her age was "sex and a half". She piped it mischievously and scampered into the trees, leaving the innuendo to hang fire in her wake—as if she were confident that it would work more powerfully when David could no longer see her. In any event, David prided himself on a sixth sense and there was no innuendo subtle enough to by-pass it. And he dashed after the girl.

This was a summer holiday to end all such summer holidays, by virtue of being endless. Or seemingly so. And seeming so was good enough for David. If being off college on the mainland was one thing, the island’s yellow-mapped meadows and unbroken skies were quite another—and no peers to bother him. Nor aged parents. Nor, incredibly, even any sea to cast a tawdry seaside atmosphere. Yes, David was quite unworried.

His long slowly loping legs kept his eyes merely a glimpse away from the girl's flickering knee-backs, as deeper into Ashy Wood she led. He did sums at college and the twice times table was not a mile away from his capacity to count. But needlework wasn't one of his strengths, so he was rather bemused at how anyone (mother, grandmother or, even, one of the girl's male relations) could have mismanaged running up such a short hemmed skirt for a girl leggier than her apparent age warranted.

David's own family were in some far eastern land mass, on diplomatic service. Hence, his boarding-college existence and interludes of island countryside—the latter being overseen by the Oberströps, a family that possessed no real jurisdiction over him, other than by the purse-strings with which they had been entrusted by a Power of Attorney.

A Power of Attorney, David thought, was not dissimilar to the control of body-parts, one of which often played its male owner fast and loose. He laughed at his own sense of humour. In any event, the Oberströps were a family full of old people, even older than his own ancient parents who were currently on foreign gigs—so old, indeed, thought David, the Oberströp family’s replication into the future was in severe doubt. The youngest, Max Oberströp, was a simple-minded overgrown gangler of a tow-rag who was supposed to be with David now, but had absconded with some drinking pals towards a pub from which David's age would, of course, have barred him.

Guilt and gullibility went hand in hand. Despite the sixth sense. And, yes, David had caught up with the girl—and had already, whilst concerns were elsewhere, admitted his need of a soul-mate as long as the summer lasted—but not in so many words. Her immediate reaction was to grab his hand and haul him towards a place she called a "den"—except it was a "din" instead, what with her own voice that prattled a dozen to six and other voices, other girls—her friends who screeched and giggled in a woodland clearing that David and the girl had reached.

For David, it was not unlike waking up—but not a pleasurable stirring from the dreams otherwise dragging down his mind. Yet, also not an unpleasurable waking. More a bleary-eyed reminder of icy mornings when warm beds were warmer than they actually were. The sun still penetrated the branches, but its shafts were even cooler than the shadows—or so it seemed to David—despite the summer clinging on to its rightful season. The sun, too, was still cloyed by evening. As with real waking, David soon became acclimatised to it. The girl who had led him here in a wild leg chase broke the meaninglessness of feminine chatter with proper sense:

"We want you to help us, Mr...."

"Call me David."

"Yes, we want you to help us, Mr David."

He did not bother to tell her that David was his Christian name, since the other fairies—could he really refer to them as girls any longer?—were brooking their babbles to ease his hearing of their communal message—a message voiced by the one who, after all, had enticed him to the clearing on a false pretension: a mispronunciation of her age which had meant more than its correct version.

But he had been the one who had originally spoken first, despite his inbred suspicion of strangers.

"How old are you?" he had asked.

"Sex and a half," she had answered.

Then, the scampering off, until there was no longer here.

As if continuing two conversations at once, he now asked:

"Aren't you too young to seek help from a stranger?"

There was no reply. The wood was suddenly more silent than it had been before any of them entered it. The sun was darkening the leaves greener, as great orange swathes of its light sunk into the loam. The branches were blindingly part and parcel of reality, prodding nearer to the eyeballs with every downgrade of day. He needed to feel that his position in the ambience was correct—rather than on the wood's edge whence the saucy minx had tempted him—before repeating his question with a new one:

"Yet, thinking about it, aren't strangers who shouldn't be spoken to older than the unstrange ones who speak to them?" He accidentally laughed, as he continued after a pause for silent contemplation: "As I'm a stranger who's younger than sex and a half, you can speak to me, even if I can't speak to you. Then all of us will be unafraid."

He lied, of course, by the very act of saying it. He noticed for the first time that the fairy's skirt was made up of enfolded wings of lacy bone, allowing her barely shapely legs to be glimpsed between the wing-splits. And the others, still silent, wore similar waist-belows of white—their flesh showing like slender-stretched creamy-pink piglets or calves. He hadn't lied to take advantage of their innocence, but this was tantamount to lying to himself.

"You will help us then?"

David nodded.

A double-bluff but it worked.

"We trust you, Mr David."

David nodded.

"There's a tunnel beyond the clearing's edge."

David nodded.

"And there's treasure we've lost down there."

David looked querulous.

"It's lost by us not being able to reach it."

David nodded without conviction.

"One has to have something before one can lose it, I know, Mr David—unless it was given us before we were born—promised to us as rinklings—then moved to a place we couldn't reach as soon as our reach was measured."

Whilst ‘rinklings’ was a strange word, the general logic didn't escape David—but why him?

"To thread through the tunnel and fetch it."

Yet he was bigger than them—surely it would be easier for one of the fairies to crawl along narrow places as tunnels tended to be.

"It has to be someone big and strong to face the monster."

Monster? What monster?

"A monster called Og who lives in a Den; much like you Mr David, but different. Og we cannot trust. Og guards the treasure."

David nodded and stifled a laugh. As the previous Den had turned out, in the end, to be a Din, so the tunnel, once revealed, was indeed not a tunnel—more of a natural oubliette, David thought, or, in effect, the Den which Sex-and-a-half had advertised in the first place. Yet, it did require stooping, if not crawling, and since he was led initially by a fairy with a particularly short skirt of wings, he averted his eyes from the unseemliness of her innocent legs in near horizontal motion.

The ends of twigs snagged his woollen, as he plummeted through the undergrowth, still following, if half a glance in the rear, the chosen fairy or rinkling guide. In many ways, he wished it was Sex-and-a-half who now guided him, since he had struck up a sparking-off with her, by spoken means as well as unspoken ones. Yet, this new girl was sweet enough. Her voice cooed at him, as if she felt he needed encouragement to catch up with her vanishing feet. Soon, she would let David pass on beside her, so that he could complete the journey alone. After all, their monster Og was something that it was his task to defeat for furtherance of the quest for lost treasure. Much to the detriment of her wing-skirt and skimpy top, she rolled into the bristly side of the sunken arch of brush, allowing David to wriggle towards her vicinity. She did not noticeably react when he inadvertently plumped his hand on top of her thigh, slipping bodily as he did from a section of deadfall trees. This unbalanced him as he snatched back his bunch of bee-sting fives, yet half-believing with his sixth sense that he had himself been stung by something far flatter, softer and creamier than fingernails.

"Don't worry—there's more important things than that. I shall let you touch me all over when you come back."

The words she used struck a wrong note: lacking the subtlety of Sex-and-a-half. He managed to squirm past the girl's retracted shape, without further contact. The gap-lit darkness only served to accentuate the incipient development of her svelte body ... more grown-up than her tiny smiling face did portend. Buds and tinier involuted wings.

Thankfully, she was soon left behind as David forged on through thick and thin. The girl twittered occasionally in the past as well as directly behind him, until both versions grew fainter and were merely a memory of a voice, albeit one that, at odd moments, he would hear forever. A logical outcome of David's adventure, if an outsider's neutral judgement were brought to bear, would be David's encounter with his real self upon that undignified scramble towards a trivial trove—whereupon his best half would defeat his worst in terrible combat, perhaps causing his best half to be even worse than his worst, as a result of the blood-lust the victor must always feel thereafter. Yet, such dénouement was as illogical as David's own interpretation: based upon a cool judgement that he simply dreamed. No need for recrimination or any mental wrestling in dreams. Dreams were, by nature, illogical. So why worry? But what of the supposed treasure? Would he wake before he reached it?

Abruptly, he had broken through from beneath the straggly scrumble to find himself upon a cliff-top over a vast sky-rinsed array of man-made pinnacles and redoubts. Skimming above and between the aquatints and blurs of the city were angels on splints—replicas of his fairies of the wood, transfixed by gliding crosspieces. Some wheeled higher than the cotton-bluffs, one, even, so close to David that he could have recognised Sex-and-a-half if indeed it were her, and a few spinning lazily upon turret-tops.

Either the gliding girls were buzzing or, more likely, the city's towers contained Muezzin. Or giant bees. The sun lit the whole plain, albeit from its lowest point—filling the alleys, back-doubles and rat-runs with melting cobbles of gold. Day-diluted, yet wild, honey.

But the so-called cliff where David teetered was merely a steep extension of the woody scrumble whence he had emerged—a deep sloping escarpment that he now pumped his legs against to reach the city without over-balancing. As he stumbled closer, he saw a word configured in the city by sunset's brick-framed windows of richer gold than the erstwhile cobbled by-ways. Was it indeed 'David' or a similar word easily misread?

He toppled from the escarpment and began skimming the heights and depths of the sky. There now hovered another creature, much like himself, far fouler than fairies: spreadeagled upon tumescent splints of flesh: a huge bactrian long-snouted thing screeching like a bloated gull.

Eventually, David's own six senses became similarly coiled into a hump-backed plait: crucified upon the thermals: banking and soaring. And, if there were even the smallest residue of David inside David, he'd no doubt regret that he had not risked staying with that ill-bred Max Oberströp fellow instead of playing in the sunny meadow.

Meanwhile, Sex-and-a-half and her rinkling cronies were, even now, on their way to that very pub for which David had yearned and dared not visit under-age. The saucy minxes were intent, no doubt, upon further enticements with the locals in the selfsame pub, intent upon further precocities: even unfurling wings within wings.





“Delightful dreams never end delightful...” from THE ART OF DREAMING Vol. 1 Planning and Execution by Rachel Mildeyes



“Nothing to add?”







CHAPTER NINE



The silver inner-sphere, with only one porthole, was not at all claustrophobic. At least, in that endeavour, its designer had been successful. However, the journey which Isabel had undertaken between feeder planets was long enough for its real in-built irritations to emerge—such as the amnesia ... and the ghosts.

The old-fashioned read-outs on the shipboard computer were cock-eyed, too. "Spoilt the whole ship for a smidgen of tar," Isabel mumbled to herself as she struggled with the old-fangled pyjama paper tumbling in reams from between the teeth of the printer. "At least they could have got me something better to print-out with than this damned daisy-wheel." Her voice took on the tone of frustration, knowing that the intercom was up the shoot and nobody could hear her ... except, perhaps, the ghosts.

Tussling with the paper-printed words as they emerged in such profusion from a distant world whose communications were now entirely paperless was, she supposed, worth a chuckle.

And everything was printed out in dyslexic blocks, like Chinese or Sanskrit or Hopi or, even, mirror-written Russian. Philosophy, with which discipline all pilots had to be familiar, had at least taught her that language and reality were so mutually inextricable—and that it was no wonder space-farers, such as herself, even on relatively short hops of a few centuries, were bound to become physically, as well as emotionally, disorientated. Even spiritually. That's why Ludwig Oberströp had craftily inserted such a discipline as higher linguistics into a young lady's curriculum, thus allowing her handholds on truth and existence, when the alienations eventually arrived.

She had forgotten her own name. But that did not seem to matter. The ship's cargo was not a live one, thank goodness, and the only relationship she needed to develop was the one with herself. Before this journey (the first one on her own), she had been rather snooty about her own physicality. She could do without men. After taking into account the history of erotic pleasures and bodily fulfilment, she deemed it incredible that there were still the same two sexes in humanity, and both still relatively autonomous.

Her study of various ancient religions taught her much about procreation, nuclear families, simple romance and, above all, the sensual ingredients later discovered in mathematical logic. Although the two sexes now lived entirely apart, on opposite sides of the Cosmic Chastity Belt, there was a renewal of heterosexuality and folk again yearned for periods of raunchy procreation—even to the point of becoming surreptitious stowaways on cargo ships...

Yet, when Isabel had the chance to couple with a man, she was disgusted. But, worse, the feeling stayed with her ... as if he had fallen off inside her. It took three generations of growing up and growing down and growing up again before she could employ the art of self-hypnotised innocence to rid herself of the plugged-up sensation. Now, it was simpler to use her thumb and a good old-fashioned dose of imagination. By the law of mathematical averages and rogue medians, her first solo sphere-trip needed to pass through whole fortune-wheels of triumph and disaster, simply shading off, on occasions, into the less marked realms of good and bad luck and, yes, if Fate thus favoured her, mere dreams could summon creatures of both known sexes, together with others of unknown genders, combining unfamiliar, as well as familiar, devices for her high and prolonged eroticism.

The day on which the computer broke down was, even so, one of barely sufficient disaster. She did, however, simply sit and cry her heart out. It was worse than not knowing her name was Isabel. It did not matter, really, because it was long since she had been able to comprehend anything that came from the damned contraption. But perhaps the word "disaster" was indeed apt because the last link with civilisation had now snapped in two. In truth, however, such disengagement was at least temporarily forgotten, since, with tears streaking her cosmetics into war-paint, she peered at the cabin looking-glass, for company.

Her full-length image did make her feel slightly better ... until she realised that she would soon be again reaching the optimum age. Why Ludwig Oberströp had chosen thirty years old as the pivotal epoch of age, even the Ancient Books failed to explain. Originally, she had been assured that this journey within the silver sphere was merely to endure five generations at most. But she had already been through six different childhoods. Whether it was the shuddering of the craft or a specific flaw in her own make-up, the latest childhood had been nothing short of plain dreadful, because her womanly feelings had endured even as far as the age of four. That had never been intended by Ludwig Oberströp, surely. It was so undignified remembering a different-aged version of the self riding her thumb every night before going to bed with a favourite rag doll.

So, today seemed to be a watershed. She was determined to end herself. The computer failing was the last straw.

Then, there were of course the ghosts: things that appeared at the sphere's single porthole with grisly masks. At first, she thought they were stowaways in fancy dress, intent on some sort of wild party. But, she quickly realised that there would be no point in stowing away on this forsaken craft, as each end of the particular journey was populated by those of the same gender only. Yet when she saw the stars shining through the creatures' bodies, she deemed them ghosts, a phenomenon not unknown in the annals of ancient space travel. Not at all like the fairykin whence rinklings such as Isabel had derived.

Deemed them ghosts, yes, until she actually heard them tapping on the porthole, and then she had jeered and called them "mirages". She knew that, in a desert, there were often ice-cool lakes shimmering at the edge of sight; and what was space but a black sahara of spiritual thirst? Even monsters would be preferable to no company at all.

Weighing each breast in her palm, she continued to stare into the long mirror. But her breasts were too small even at the optimum age of thirty. Pinching between finger and thumb was the best she could manage. She ran her spider hands down, via the midriff, to the briefs, where she playfully tweaked the old-fashioned elastic. She vowed not to assuage the desire, for the longer she could bear such lack of fulfilment, the more intense would be the surge of relief.

Abruptly, she saw reflected over her shoulder the image of a creature. The first time that one of the ghosts had actually managed to penetrate to the spherical living quarters. It was taller than she had imagined it to be, only having previously seen them through the architectural antique of the porthole.

Then, another appeared. And another. Three of them altogether with illingual labels like Prom, Betamax and Ago. They shambled over the corrugated metal floor, speaking to each other ... not to her. She could not hear them, feeling instinctively that the language they used remained silent to those who did not understand it. (Such a language saved a lot of frustration). She could see that the masks were real faces, though their expressions were fixed. The bodies were upholstered with lumps and coils, as if some innards had been used as cosmetic ornaments ... though everything about the creatures remained essentially human-like. Their many hanging tubes and tentacles exuded coal-black sweat, as if their whole raison d'être was such production. In her present state of sensual brinkmanship, she even yearned for such alien appendages to thread her body.

She turned from the mirror to face them. She thrilled to the core, even stirring dormant memories of childhood terrors to break the surface of her mind like silky black otters. But, the creatures had gone. Or had never been there in the first place.

The truth was that the creatures were there, but she was not there at all...

The computer started churning paper again, as the tinkering of the repair mechanic across several Light Years had at last, by chance, turned the correct groove at the most awkward part of its inner workings ... with the longest laser screw-driver in the endless universes. Rinkling further into the curved silvery looking-glass, the now truly nameless girl misremembered her name as Alice and welcomed back an everlasting childhood which she'd never hope to escape. Her favourite rag doll told her—in the philosophical way in which such cuddly toys always talked to their child charges—about the weirder parts of Wonderland that had been left unwritten ... or, if written at all, in a language that nobody understood.



“Some stars never come out.”

“How do you know they’re there then?”

“By the sprinkling of black stardust that arrives eventually in the eyes.”

“The itching tells you then?”

“Yes. Sinking from the sockets—like splinters of glass toward our juicy nethers.”

“Ooooh!”





CHAPTER TEN



David was alone in the Ashminster waiting-room. He conducted a surveying sweep, checking off each item. The china dog on the mantelpiece. The clockcase standing within the curve of a bay window, its pendulum stock still. The tiled coffee table with a full set of crockery ready positioned and a teapot that steamed slightly as it brewed, showing that someone must have placed it there before David arrived. The two easy chairs matching the upholstered couch upon which he sat, with silky antimacassars prudently laid out for the elbows and the heel of the skull. The oil painting glistening in the late afternoon light, as it hung above the fireplace with a visage which was so nondescriptly portrayed it should have been nobody at all. The old-fashioned radiogram manufactured from heavy-duty bakelite which must have been moulded in the earliest days prior to the eventual mass-marketing of plastic. Each item no doubt had its story.

A woman entered the waiting-room. She pondered over a magazine rack, the only item which David had left unnoticed. She raised her eyebrows to see him but, without saying a word, buried herself in what must have been an enthralling article or piece of fiction. Not that she was unattractive, he mused, but she had a cold look about her. David did not notice the serviceable frock: it was so much part and parcel of her persona, it could not be differentiated from the whole. The next to breach the room's doorway was a boy in short trousers, dragging a kite that was larger than himself. He sat on the couch, leaving a space in the middle between him and David. The kite leaned against the radiogram. The tableau was completed by the grand entrance of another lady with a coarse-grained net, veiling her face as it hung from the hat-pinned fascinater upon the head. Her frock was noticeable, since it revealed rather more of her wrinkled bosom than was seemly. She was, he somehow knew, Aunt Freda; she had wielded an out-of-character unseemliness following the bereavement.

David now knew instinctively that the world was as it should be. The gathering had been pre-ordained; the coming of Freda was the positioning of the last piece of the jigsaw. He did not want to pre-empt fate, so he began to fulfil the rôle that had been settled for him since time immemorial. He would be mother, he vowed, as he set out the cups upon the bone china saucers, poured the milk in dashes from the jug that had been concealed from view by the teapot, placed the strainer upon the nearest open-mouthed cup and proceeded to pour the golden liquid through the close-knit denier of the shapely curved strainer. The gurgle of sparkling amber, as he filled each cup, delighted the senses: an art form in every respect. Each innuendo of the process was accounted for.

But, of course, nobody had pre-ordained the wasp.

As David parted his lips to sample a sip from the fine edge of the smoothly burnished surface of sweetest liquid infusion which he failed to remember sugaring, the wasp flew straight in ... and down. He could sense it darting about his insides like a dollop of fizzing acid. He kept pointing to his mouth in dumbfounded sudden horror—whilst memories half-skirted his mind ... until, with a flourish, coverings were flung off as if he were a stripper. Except real strippers didn't usually get as far as the bones. Nor did they generally peel realities from each other—and, in one of them, he rose from a sick bed with splayed legs, wandered over to a tallboy and pulled out suitable apparel for a grand divestment. He poised a needle upon the inlet groove of an operatic disc, one he'd liked since childhood. Its heroic tale would weave the bed-sit into something akin to wonder and myth.

Tugging long striped socks until they reached above his grubby knees, he abruptly realised that it would be the devil's own job to accomplish his life's ambition, which was death. He feared he'd be inside his head for ever more. The morning air given off by the frozen butter sun brought him to premature, if bleary-eyed, wakefulness. An early wasp irritated itself, without noticing what effect it had on David. The human early-goers were evidently firing on all drives from some internal white heat engendered by the promise of the day. He did not know exactly what he wanted to do and why he wanted to do it. It was too early for a pub.

Life was one long launching of a makeshift kite. But whatever he did, there would be no going back, he was sure. To Isabel—who was watching—David did not act confused. He did not see her lurking behind the unemptied dustbins outside the tower flats. God forbid that she would ever need to use that as her reconnaissance spot again because, even in dreams, the smells returned. She lost track of him down by the Fast Canal, where the Bell-House gave her the impression that some architect must once have played a real blinder, since it made the surrounding urban sprawl seem even sprawlier.

He first followed his nose by the Fast Canal's stagnant waters—which at that time in the morning still bore a veneer of scummy ice—and simply gave his amnesia full rein losing himself in the no man's land of the outer inner city. As he would have been the first to admit, he was indeed no man and thus felt at home there, amid the wasps, nettles and coke. Isabel? Well, she returned to the bed-sit where ghosts of David's aches and agues still lingered. She decided to dedicate the rest of her life to his memory. She followed the aches around hoping that they would attach themselves to her bones. Even in here you could smell the dustbins outside.

The black disc was still revolving with the needle unable to spool off the wide-placed grooves towards its centre. It had been scratching a living all day—whilst David's own bitter-sweet memories of Isabel were always woven into his dreams—when she played hopscotch and tugged kites into the orange-rind waspless twilights of that now untenable countryside called the past. Sometimes, during those long far-off days when they would rather kiss than talk, he could well imagine that they were one person. He could barely recall what she looked like. "Looking like" implies that she could be compared with something, but that was arrant nonsense, of course. She was a paragon and David her paramour. At least for a time. Too young to have been older than him, he wondered how she had ever been given charge of him.

The girly games she played as a child had left sparkles in her older eyes. David often sat into the early mornings, listening to her tell of the various playground activities: skipping under spherical-quick loops in tune to rhymes and unreason; playing mothers and fathers, doctors and nurses, masters and servants; that wondrous hopscotch game again with girls’ frocks tucked into navy-blue knickers for optimum white-thighed freedom; heaving down kites that didn't want to stop flying through the mosquito-lit sky; and watching the boys through the railings that divided the two playgrounds. The games the boys played were even stranger than those of the girls, more arcane, involving glinting marbles, shiny conkers, out-staring eyes, flicking ciggie cards and "guessing-the-strangest-item-in-my-trouser-pocket". Those boys, well, they did not dare watch the girls through the same railings, except perhaps surreptitiously after their own games had grown sour with the interminable chant of "fight, fight, fight, fight" ending in bloody noses, scraped shins and spider-webbed specs.

But Isabel telling of such matters was so much more vivid than David's. He wishes he could recall the actual words she used. There was one occasion he tried to tease back into existence, the implications of which were still lost on him. It was nearly Christmas Day at his parents' house and they had on a Nat King Cole LP. Probably, "These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You" or "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes", but no matter. They sat, gently resting against each other, on the settee. His parents had gone to bed a trifle early, diplomatically leaving them alone. He supposed the Nat King Cole was merely a needle's run-off following their departure up the wooden hills, neither of the youngsters caring to get up and turn it off.

Although most of their peers had TV sets in the family parlours, his parents did not care to own one. Father said it squared the eyes and pulped the brain. Mother agreed with him, not knowing too well what one was in any event. David eventually knew that she must have seen everything through the blur of senility, but she did recall somehow those grey screens flickering the Coronation in Evans' shop window. The reception had been so bad in the area, it was no good trying to discern even the rudiments of a logical image. Father had indeed bought a TV aerial—he said it set off the chimneystack a real treat. (David suspects Father did not want others to know he did not own a TV set). The aerial lead dangled into the parlour, unattached.

Suddenly, thoughts of his absent parents were disrupted. Isabel was unrolling her stockings from the legs one by one, a process which had started with high heels being kicked off and a fumbling up her own skirt, followed by the mysterious sound of what David later gathered to be the unpopping of suspenders. The seams scribbled the top of each stocking pile as it was carelessly strewn upon the carpet at her feet. He peered quizzically at these hastily thrown together artefacts, as if they were precursors of dog-muck puddles on the floor of the Tate Gallery. And, indeed, as a drowsy winter wasp landed upon one of them, it was difficult to detach his present self from those events, overlaying them as he did with the false perspective of experience and maturity. It was obviously a mating-dance of some kind, but one that he failed to understand as much as it excited him.

She kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then he kissed her lightly back. This was something he did understand. He had often seen older boys and girls than themselves kissing in the dark cinema. It was the kissing that counted. The harder the better. Only the kissing. What else could there have been?

He was eager to ask more about her childhood, for he had not been one of those boys in the divided playground. Was the hopscotch game one that merely ended with the number ten, or was it one of those rarer versions that snakes around the whole chalk-marked schoolyard, an endless hokey-cokey of occult memories? She shrugged. Took off her blouse, quickly. Not lovingly, nor teasingly. As if she were getting ready for netball. Only enough time to gasp at the sight of her lacy bra. It was cut so that it merely concealed the nipples downwards, leaving a blinding décolletage of cloven downy flesh above.

Abruptly, she burst into tears and disappeared up the stairs in a trice, where David's parents had allotted her his single room for the duration of the Christmas period she was to spend with them. That room had been the scene of his boyhood, reaching back forever into the beginnings of time itself. As well as resenting her, he wondered how she could cope with the islanded dreams that inhabited it.

He was to sleep on the settee in the parlour ... where he was now feeling so utterly lonely. The muffled movements of her clambering into his own bed upstairs made it seem even lonelier. He stared at the crumpled stockings she had left on the floor. They were his companions of the night. He held them to himself as he settled into the prodding springs of the settee, under the makeshift covers. Desperately trying to reach into those dreams of hers with which he hoped to share, he felt his own soft flesh shapefully ballooning those gossamer vessels of tight-knit denier sheen.

He has not seen Isabel now for twenty odd years. That particular Christmas was effectively their last allegiance. Hastily snatched pecks on the cheek were not David's idea of sex acts. And he did not know how heavy the petting was meant to be before it became full penetration. His parents said it was a shame—she was such a nice girl. However, they did not know half of it. Nor will anyone else for that matter.

His mother died when he was still no more than a pucker-arsed, bristly-chinned kid. His father dawdled after. These days, David plays Nat King Cole on his audio stack, watching the numbers click by on the counter—after 999 they start again at nought. His TV is switched on without the sound. He owns no aerial, so it is all snowstorm. He can hear kids outside playing amid the chalk marks he has left for them on the pavements. He eventually became as old as his parents were that Christmas.

Isabel tried to forget David. She ached to wear the vestments of a different memory, a different cover of reality. For her, the trip to the south coast with, for mysterious reasons, a man who liked being called Enigma, had all the promise of a honeymoon, with none of the bother of going through a wedding. Equally, the expression "dirty weekend" was only meant for other people. The memories she would lay down in the cellar of her mind to mature like bottles of dark red wine were hopefully to last for the rest of her life. Such words she used spoke volumes for her own maturity at such a tender age.

She knew, soon after meeting Enigma, that he was not so much in love with her as a person, but with the idea of the love he thought he experienced. Not that it seemed to matter, for she considered it important to be escorted by a man who was sufficiently self-respecting as to be worthy of her reciprocation. They loved each other for their own selves.

She had always felt at a loose end without a male arm to put her own arm through. So, the idea of a better half being an ill-kempt churl was not even to be contemplated. She wanted no half measures, and Enigma seemed squarely to fit the bill. She saw straightaway that he was not without his quirks. She had always prided herself on understanding people—this, despite one or two bad experiences with boy friends. However, none of his idiosyncrasies (during that now legendary party at Beatie's flat where she first met him) were significant enough to allow her to indulge cold-shouldering his advances. If she made a mistake at all, it would be condoning, by her silence, the single-mindedness of one particular facet of his make-up. And that facet was the apparent need to wear outlandish clothes, such as highly coloured silk scarves, decorative nugget rings, over polished patent leather shoes with high heels, shoulder pads, dress shirts and, on one especially memorable occasion, a wide bright red cummerbund around his waist not much smaller than her own mini skirt. These were affectations, she soon realised, with which she could live, since they seemed to be the bolster of his personality, his raison d'être almost. In fact, some of his items of jewellery suited her fingers, toes and ear-lobes better than his.

She needed a man with pride and there was no harm (was there?) in Enigma deriving his from what he chose to wear. All that she really needed was the end result, and she did indeed feel good in his company; basking in reflected glory; both of them mutually refined; each for the other a shoulder to cry on and a body to hide behind.

The seaside resort was in two main parts. The old town was full of quaint antique shops, mysterious pubs and narrow winding streets. And then there was the new town, rather over-stocked with department stores. Between the two, a hill-cliff reared with pleasant views of both towns and the sea, where kids regularly heaved on massive kites. One could reach the top either by climbing the steep, seemingly endless steps or by a "Train" lift pulled on a chain by a stationary steam engine.

Having arrived late on a Saturday afternoon, they decided to take the trip to the top. It seemed the natural thing to do: to take in the whole place in one fresh gulp, as it were, before getting down to the nitty gritty of exploring each nook and cranny of the place. They looked out to sea, as darkness settled upon them from the sky. The lights of the old town were sparkling between the cliff and the empty horizon like the jewels of which they were both so fond. As she put her arm around his shoulder, he said something that she later found very difficult to put out of her mind, although she could not recall his precise words.

"Each one of those lights hides a thousand mysteries, don't you think? Whenever I see windows lit up, I suppose there must be a reason for the curtains to be closed? Why else close them?"

"Everybody likes their privacy, Enigma. Most people can't bear being watched. After all, we're always needing to wear our public faces, aren't we? Curtains provide some relief, a chance to recuperate, to reconstitute."

She surprised herself at her own wordiness, but Enigma made this come out in her. In hindsight, she realised her own makeshift maturity at that time completely concealed an even deeper immaturity. They sat down, legs hanging over the cliff-edge, like puppets. She brushed away a peculiarly insistent night-wasp and a light sea-breeze riffled her hair. He looked straight at her. She did not question how they could see each other in the darkness but, trying to look back at it all through the random effectiveness of human memory, she supposed the glow from the street-lighting far below was rising like heat ... perhaps leaving the lower roads darker than ever.

"Clothes are curtains, in a way..."

"Don't be damned silly, Enigma, how many people have you seen wearing masks? And, in this country, you've got to wear clothes because it's so bloody cold half the time..."

Another thing he brought out in her was swearing. She supposed it was herself trying to match his egoism, like a reflection in a funfair hall of mirrors.

"So, if all their purpose is utility, as you say, why aren't all clothes just plain sacking and such-like. I think clothes have to be symbols of the wearer..."

"You're arguing against yourself, Enigma. One moment you say clothes are the same as curtains, the next that people reveal their own inner selves through the clothes they wear."

It was no victory to defeat him with words. Words were blunt instruments—so what use subtlety?

Before he could reply, she smothered his mouth with a girlish kiss. She had always seemed to take the initiative in their relationship, and it was only at this point that she questioned the whole affair. The air off the sea had cleared her head.

"Your own clothes, Enigma, are not exactly demure."

She spoke to fill the awkward silence, seeing the outline of his face, but not the eyes which had sunk back into the darkness. She took his hand. It felt cold. Or the relative warmth of hers made his appear cold. She knew she had broached a subject that had previously been out of bounds, ever since first meeting him at Beatie's party.

The moon fleetingly made an appearance, like a stage star taking a curtain call between the shifting clouds. Its light, reflected off the sea, glowed softly upon him, and she saw that he was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. And she realised that she could only ever truly love such a creature.

She burst into tears of anger. "Fuck you!" she screeched, her voice seeming to echo across the distant rooftops of the old town like a witch on a broomstick...

They spent the rest of what the clouds turned into a wet weekend at arm's length. Polite, yes. Even partners in bed, but never unnecessarily intimate.

There was still a residue of yearning inside her, but nothing she could rationalise. She suspected the pall of full-blooded maturity had already settled upon her. She eventually had a proper boy friend who took her places, treated her like a real lady. She basked in his handsome sparkling smiles. His sharp-creased suits.

Notwithstanding this, she thinks she will always have a soft spot for that Enigma who disappeared for good behind the selective curtains of memory. She heard a vague rumour that he was living with Beatie ... and his name wasn't Enigma, but David.

Thus, she had left him in the waiting-room of memories. His screeches echoed on and on. The little boy hesitated at the door for a last glance but, seeing his own older face upon a face of someone else who waited, he forgot to take his kite...

And woke up.

Aunt Freda snored beside him, probably embroiled in a dream of her own. Knowing her, she was therein decked with the pretty frock which she wanted for next Christmas. His little son stirred in the next bedroom, impatient for ambitions to form.

But what son? There was no son of course. The silently shuttling kite-winged stork had indeed failed to bless him with the son for whom he had always yearned. Nephews were nothing but nuisances.

And, indeed, who else? The snores had, of course, been his alone.

The shimmering gold of dawn seeped into the bedroom curtains like oriental tea, as he rose to look at himself in the dressing-table mirror. The features were crow-footed over with the cobwebby nets of residue night. He opened the toothless mouth—and used it to scream with.

Out flew the wasp.



“Sadness is growing.”

“Of course. But, I’m not sure whether sadness actually belongs to anybody, it being more of a thing-in-itself which exists like a disease, infecting people via flying insects and so forth, contagious between generations as well as contiguous.”

“That would explain why it’s been catching on. I reckon people will use space travel eventually to deny each other the risk of contact...” “Yes, especially as happiness is an emotion that people feel naturally from within their island minds. Pure loneliness is, I believe, the only way to preserve any hard-earned happiness, whilst, as we say, sadness attacks from without, using words like bombs to blast the sea-walls...”

“Boom Boom.”







CHAPTER ELEVEN



He called her Fred, as a gratuitously eccentric shortening for Freda. He was Enigma. Always had been. In full.

Enigma was more oriental than he looked. He and Fred were not necessarily a match made in Heaven, yet fair enough for two lonely strangers who both admitted they needed somebody. Their single attempt at love-making proper had been a clumsy exercise, neither of the participants earning flying colours for their efforts. They didn't really get near enough to each other. They were probably scared of the final penetration: a fact left unsaid.

After that, by tacit mutual consent, they never indulged a blatantly physical approach again. Going to the cinema, making big talk and small kisses, the ritual holding of hands, walking in parks ... these activities were surely sufficient for people like them, because (as Fred thought) "spirit rode the flesh like aura".

They also played childish games unchildishly. They played them in Enigma's place, games such as Ludo and Draughts—and, even, despite the size of the flat, hide-and-seek.

Inevitably, affairs of innocent convenience wind down and, today, Fred was bluntly determined to cut Enigma from her life before she became too enmeshed—not because the relationship was particularly claustrophobic, but simply because she was scared of a dream.

“I’m scared of it, I’m truly scared of the dream,” she rehearsed saying, this time for real.

"A dream you've dreamed?" asked Enigma, genuinely puzzled at her sudden mention by of dreaming. They had just returned from a concert where a little known jazz combo called Erich Zann had given a desultory performance on vibes, flute and zither. Now, she had chosen this moment in Enigma's flat to make a prepared statement, one she had seemingly practised in front of her wardrobe mirror.

"It's not a dream I've really dreamed, as such—it's strange, I can't explain it."

Enigma had started the evening hating the music. Now he was more confused than irritated—an uncommon feeling with him. Usually confident about life in general (if not with girls in the shape of Fred), tonight's disorientation was difficult to fathom. He had already felt vague indications of being unbalanced on previous dates, but nothing quite like now. Surely she was not going a roundabout way to ditching him. His pride, as far as the opposite sex was concerned, seemed fragile enough, already. For one peculiar moment, he felt these thoughts were not his, but Fred's. Osmosis? A twinning of auras?

"It was the edge of a dream, Enigma. I could see the dream in my bedroom, as if it had a transparent cover. Not really a bubble nor a balloon. Just a shapeless watery skin. Inside were all the nightmares I knew should have been in my sleep. I was awake, watching an independent dream that nobody was dreaming. There were glowing things that walked about. One of them I later saw was you, Enigma. Or someone who looked like you."

Fred coughed. She had tried to make it all sound natural, but Enigma was fully aware that she was reciting something she had learned parrot fashion. It almost felt as if he were dreaming. And the recital was silent.

"One looked like me? What are you trying to say?"

He had the uncanny sense that he was also reciting something, learned without having remembered learning it.

"It was you, Enigma. You were inside the body of another body, trying, I think, to yank yourself out, using the shoulders as a lever."

There was a silence, broken by more silence, only this time it was a silence deeper and more frightening. Enigma's flat was always a quiet place at the top of a tall building. Tonight, there were no lonely aeroplanes droning over the sky from Heathrow. Nor the distant thud of terrorists.

In many ways, she didn't need to say the words. Enigma's new-found faith in the phenomenon of osmosis was nurtured by the silence, as she sprayed further implications and he allowed his inferences to burgeon. But, then, of course, her words would spill out autonomously, more visible than audible.

"I could see the host body's neck tightening," she continued, "bursting at the seams, as you tried to clamber out, except the seams were knotted veins rather than rows of stitches. Other creatures gathered at your feet—wrinkling things I couldn't recognise, let alone describe. Some just a mass of wriggling tentacles. Others with more head than body. Tails and teeth. All chanting bits from an invented religion. To describe things in a dream makes remembering them more easy. The words and the names of the things seemed the most natural parts although, afterwards, they were the strangest. God knows how they were spelt. A good job, perhaps, that one can't remember every dream. But this dream was different, being one I was viewing from the bed, whilst still awake. It was growing in size, too. The dream's wobbly skin getting nearer and nearer, as it filled with more and more nightmares. Can't you see, Enigma, how I've been worried? I didn't know how to tell you. Nor if I should tell you at all."

"Do you want a drink?" Enigma asked, thinking that a psychologist would probably call this a nervous breakdown. She needed humouring, not scolding. He still couldn't shake off, however, the suspicion of a sting in the tail. Fred wanted to chuck him. That was bloody obvious, if nothing else was. In the meantime, though, she needed help.

"A drink? Yes, why not? A coffee, perhaps. Make it with milk if you've got plenty."

She heard him pottering about in the kitchen, as men did. Enigma imagined her hearing him—the chink of cups easing the silence more efficiently than the earlier exchange of words had done. Words were not really sounds, when they meant so much. Meanings were there whether one said them out loud or not. Words didn’t need to explode to hurt. Words connected with words were the strangest words of all. She shook her head to release the meaning. Or so Enigma inferred. How could she be thinking such thoughts? Thoughts were words injected straight into the vein. Surely she had intended to tell him of the host body in the dream with its skull splitting, tilting sideways from his own skull which was inside it. Bone within bone. The brain slid down his face like porridge, hair brylcreemed with blood. It was strange she could describe things aloud, better than describing them silently to herself. Osmosis was telling him too much of what she thought.

He returned with the cups of coffee and placed then upon the small table between them.

"Are you feeling any better?"

He bit his tongue, without knowing why.

"All depends from what standard you are judging 'better'. I've never felt better, Enigma. It's as if I've never really been myself before. I was once a girl living in a dream. Now, I'm awake and I can see myself for what I am. No illusions. Just a dead-end girl who'll never be 'better' than average. You see, I was in that dream, too—eventually. Not one of the creatures slithering on their backsides. I was a finned figure that emerged from the shadows, soon after the body you once inhabited had disappeared. We didn't recognise each other, since we were both somewhat different than in real life. Older, wrinklier. Then, I saw myself in bed, peering through the skin of the dream, from the outside of the dream, yes, peering at me in the dream."

"Fred, it was just a nightmare. You shouldn't take it so seriously. Everybody has at least one godawful dream in their lives—one that sticks with them."

He smiled. Was he on the point of ditching her?

"No, I told you, Enigma, I was not dreaming. I was awake. I was that girl in the bed. Fully conscious. Knowing exactly what I was seeing. And then you put one of your hands through the skin."

She screamed. A short sharp laugh that she had intended to come out as a full-blooded scream.

"Then your whole arm poked through as the skin rumpled," she continued. "You were reaching out for me with fingers that were webbed with some backward evolution. I screamed in real life, then—dreading that a dream without a dreamer could actually hurt more than just mentally."

Enigma sipped his coffee, sorry that he could not hear one of those droning aeroplanes. Or dull drums of political violence. It must have been the fog that had cut off the sound of the Earl's Court traffic down below. He decided to let Fred have her head. No further point in interrupting or even commenting at natural breaks.

"Enigma, believe me, when I tell you, I was scared. So rotten scared, I closed my eyes, to blot out the dream."

"I bet you still saw the dream, though."

This time Enigma bit his tongue with the full foreknowledge of so doing. He had contravened his own rules of engagement.

"No, it was black inside my head. Not even a glimmer showing through the eyelids. The dream was not throwing out any light of its own. My bedroom was indeed as dark as it should have been, with the lamp off. That seemed to prove beyond all shadow of doubt it was a dream I'd been watching, not a dream I'd been dreaming. This must all sound so incredibly crazy to you—but when I felt the kiss upon my cheek and the strange words in my ear..."

"You became a Sleeping Beauty reversed, never to wake again!"

Enigma laughed at his own non sequitur. Humouring Fred had got him nowhere, so mockery had to be his next ploy. She reddened and simply stared through him into space. Having finished his coffee, he got up to look outside through the window. Not a glint. Not even a hint of anything beyond his gaze. Silence met silence through the glass. Eventually, with his neck aching, he turned back to face out Fred. It was about time she came to the point. And if she didn't, he would. At least one of them would have to cut the other from his or her life. But the vibes were all wrong. Enigma Variations on tuneless harps. And what he saw was the most horrific creature in the whole of the cosmos.

Nobody.

The Nobody who was ever the essence of loneliness.

The milky coffee he'd prepared for Fred was untouched, left stirlessly to a look of barely lukewarm and growing a meniscus skin.

Near to bursting with a passion he had never previously experienced, Enigma headed for the kitchen. He sought the bread knife or orange scissors or, preferably, something slightly more surgical than domestic—simply to lance the boil that his whole body had become. Playing hide-and-seek didn't allow the hidden one to squat, thumb-plugged, inside the searcher, did it?

Enigma returned with emptiness in his grasp, planted his face in the grail of his own webbed fingers. He later sipped the piping hot coffee to the sound of droning skycraft. Eventually, he heard a needle enter the deepest groove of all—and to the silence of Zann's zany zithers playing 'Nethermost Blight', he felt abysmally sad for someone he'd never find because it was himself. His eyes poured out their sorrow. A rich redness bubbling from the centre of Infinity.



“Truth dosses around, despairing of ever finding a roof for its head.”

“Lies live in luxury, then? “Indeed.” “Tut tut.”







CHAPTER TWELVE



There were children crawling like insects up the side of the craft called Babel: involved, not so much with a war game nor with one, even, of pistol-packing cowboys and lollipop-whooping Indians, but rather, but rather...

Ashmint had become a Raft City, one of chimneyed candlelit huts that was laid out below them in the dusk like a spilled jewel-box, the glittering studs the priceless evidence of souls and the broken-off lid the side of night that was too dark to be called anything but black—whilst the children did not even think of the word black to describe it; they used a word far too poetic for grown-ups, yet retaining a resonance of black. But could colours have sounds, if black was indeed a colour, in the first place? The girls used different sounds to boys. Their wars were different, too—with, strangely, being such creatures, no talk of blood. Their skirts were too short for their legs, as they made their undignified scramble towards deck’s edge, so that they could view the raftered city, before darkness finally covered everything with night's apparent weather-system of fine soot. Their knees scraped. Faces smudged with tears of dirt. Knicker-white shown more by purpose than accident, before it was knicker-grey, or another colour more worthy of the word colour.

One girl was dressed as a boy. She thought she would enjoy being a boy, since boys' wars were jollier, if more serious. Her real name was Beatie, but the boys called her Max.

"Beatie, come down!" shouted Promise, who was Beatie's best friend. Promise had not managed to climb the slope to the ridge. Her legs, like the other girls, were already badly scraped, despite girls having more layers of flesh than boys. And the soot was stinging.

"No, you come up here, Prom, it's lovely." Beatie, alias Max, waved at her erstwhile soul-mate. She wanted to prove herself as a boy and she had nearly accomplished it. First one up. Except, of course, for a real boy who called himself Ago.

"Don't worry about her," jeered Ago, as Max began to feel guilty about leaving Promise behind. Boys' clothes, Max realised, did not strip off the heartfelt loyalty towards her own endemic girlishness. She would always be saddled with sentiment, unless...

But there was insufficient time for the luxury of self-discipline. A wordless explosion in the city, creating a patch of the jewels more akin to glimmer than glitter, provided evidence that this was not a game, but a real war. Ago whistled—at first, in fear, then, in mock relaxation, as he lounged back against the deck slope, ignoring the splinters, even relishing them. Max wondered if being a boy was like seeing things for real. By the time the other girls reached the ridge in their frocks and frills, there would be nothing to show for the explosion, except things not being there that they did not know had been there in the first place. She could pretend to Promise that the sound of explosion had been simply the sound of black: the box-lid of night finally slamming shut. That would appeal to the poetry of a girl's soul. The suspicious gap in the city's lights where the explosion had doused them—well, how about pretending that the boys had puffed them out with their breath from the towering deck-sloped of Babel? Boys could do such things, when girls were not around to watch. Yeh, why not? And, as sweet Promise followed the high-pitched giggles to the lip of the wooden ridge, Max vowed to make it as believable as the best possible ghost story.

Breathless, but excited, if a little over-awed at what they had deemed to sound like an explosion, Promise and the other girls reached the top and collapsed into piles of twos and threes. Most tugged down the hem-lines of their blackened skirts for decorum's sake, but some did it to tantalise the boys, a few to hide ugly weals and surface veins, and one who thought irrationally of a lascivious Father Christmas. This act of decorum had, of course, very little point, with the darkness being the most effective passion-killer of all, especially when more than two participants were involved. Meanwhile, Max pointed to the area of the city where the patch of non-light was growing like a cancerous blob...

Yet, if it had been a real explosion, where were the flames blazing through the affected houses? She turned to Ago. He was conferring with a few of his sidekicks who were, unlike Max, real boys. She dreaded losing face in front of her female peers. Her glance of appeal, however, was ignored by Ago. In fact, he was lighting a torch—a recognition that the box was finally shut, with all the children locked like potential fireflies within. The last jewel in the city below flickered out with a finality of a world's first beginning.

The boys soon had a number of torches blazing as they ran in Ago's wake, down the now forward sloping deck, towards the blind panorama of once lit souls. They whooped with joy, as well as warpaint, mixed with a fright which they felt in themselves and, equally, wanted to give to others. Max was in two minds, as she watched the down-scattering flames of boys, the other girls splay-limbed around her on the ridge. She knew she was the only girl with such a dilemma. Her foolish cross-dressing was now paying her back in kind. Still, she did prefer the company of girls, didn't she? And the odd whickering torch had by now sprung up among them veneered their faces with pulsing oriental masks. In spite of the girlishness which was conveyed both by the intrinsic lightness of age and the bouts of mass feckless hysteria, their faces seemed as beautiful as those of beautiful women. Creatures of artful self-consciousness, they still maintained the sweet innocence that now made them forget the height of their hem-lines.

"Stay with us, Beatie," appealed Promise, the gap in her front teeth paradoxically causing her beauty to flicker more strongly. Momentarily, Max wondered to whom the name Beatie referred. Then, shedding her nom de guerre, she indeed resumed her Beatie mode, despite the trousers she wore and the hair that had earlier been cropped by Ago's snicking scissors—and squinted wistfully towards the vanishing torches of the shock-haired boys. Promise gave her a light kiss on the cheek which sealed the decision she had already made by the means of inertia. Then, one of the torches swelled in return, growing into a huge inflamed iritic eye that should have been wielded by a goggling God, rather than a boy or, even, a man.

"Come on, Max!" It was Ago, extending his hand towards Beatie's recumbent shape. He was panting with the thought of a further descent on top of the one he had just neutralised by his ascent, accentuated by the still resonating trauma of emotion that he had undergone when suddenly discovering that Max was missing upon the original descent.

Beatie smiled, as Promise's new-sprung torch redoubled the beauty of whatever face it shone against. She realised that Ago's selfless return had expunged the boyness earlier given to her by the hair-cropping and the coarse clothes. Puppy love worked both ways. She stood up and transferred Promise's light kiss to Ago's own soft cheek.

"You go. I must stay with the girls." And she began to unbuckle the belt of her vestigial trousers, revealing that she still wore the more natural unbifurcated skirt underneath. She began to unbutton the thick shirt, until she recalled she was not sporting her young girl's brassiere. Not that she really needed one. Although there was a decided lack of real light, the makeshift variety thrown up by the self-ignited torches' unsteady fountaining caused her to feel self-conscious of her barely incipient departure from childhood, although she bore little more than a chest that a plump boy might have had.

Ago stood stock still. A flashing aircraft circled over the blacked-out city, its droning engine enhancing the silence, rather than diminishing it.

"Let me see," he whispered, "just one more time."

With the trousers by now clumsily removed from off the ends of her legs, she bashfully raised her skirt...

Ago took one look, lingered with a hand extended but with no real contact, and ran off to catch up with his mates.

"Let me have a look, too," said Promise amid the thickening of saliva. Beatie turned to her friend, the skirt still raised, like a tablecloth briefly offered to a gourmand God. Promise touched briefly and then kissed Beatie's knobbly knee—diluting the sooty smears. The other girls hooted with delight. They extinguished their few torches and made themselves at home with silence and with the weatherlessness of near non-existence.





"Chimneys are too narrow to allow anything but children's small ghosts to flee like smoke the built-up zones of war. Yet, they often retain many of the characteristics of their original bodies, as long as the soul-fire retains its colour and sound; even to the extent that most of a particular leaning yearn to prove their brinkmanship, when they would otherwise have had the opportunity to stay and play, perhaps forever, upon Elfin slopes of shipwrecked puberty. Most of those of the other leaning, however, wait for what they hope to be a special festive season—when chimneys are funnels and, therefore, longer, wider and more welcoming—at which time they intend to accept the gift of death."

Rachel Mildeyes (AN ACADEMIC STUDY OF THE NATURE OF GHOSTS)



“Ago is short for Agonistes, I guess.”

“Or Agonise!”

“Nuff said.”

“Okky dokky.”







CHAPTER THIRTEEN



The II King snoozes on his tall throne after surveying the dark river that spreads a slowly rippling black flag streamer wider and wider between the hulks of his once island city. It only seems like yesterday when the place was swarming with green, the uniforms of the Ocean Police. Now, even they have debunked, along with all the ordinary citizens.

It is good to feel in complete control, if only of himself and nothing else, the only fear of revolution and counter-revolution being between the splinters of his own personality. With his iron-shod hand poised to strike (fresh from the city foundry), even his schizophrenia takes a back seat, waiting for events to unfold—like that benighted river sluggishly flowing to forgotten ports upon unknowable thermal seas.

Suddenly, the merest movement at the edge of the city's dream takes on a fancy dress of fear: a rearguard action or, perhaps, patrols disguised as moving trees (or, even, as vegetatively bloated rafts), some with their limbs knotted and gnarled like barks upon another river. In many ways, it is good that he sleeps like a child.

But his greatest enemy is indeed the dream. His mind populates the river with creaking multicellular wood barges, mustering a steam-driven panoply amid the spider-webbed side-channels. He hears their iron paddle-wheels reluctantly take purchase upon thin tides ... and the Undergrunts of simmering mutiny speak of colour-blind nightmares yet to be slept through.

I am Odgod, the II King's jester, and I live on alone in the highest Palace attic—my only task to speak his thoughts. As transcriber of moods, taster of titbits, keeper of the royal mind's eye, nurturer of jokes, I will soon descend—so as to remove his frilly body from the window, as he babbles of green stained red and then black.

But I fear I, too, am a splinter of his dreams and memories. And, within them, I sought an unknown (dark, but friendly) pub, which swung a sign in the creaking wind, its rusty grate speaking to me of things and things. The stars brightened in the sky as if a cosmic battery had been recharged. I had forgotten how easy it was to lose myself in London, testing back-doubles with which even seasoned citizens were unaware. The last known landmark was the Christian Science church and, then, a window full of toy soldiers still on duty ... and a shoe repair shop where the cobbler's model was hammering out its residues of clockwork.

The instructions I was following petered out and still no sign of my destination. The moon danced between the chimney pots like a perfect circle of blindingly white cloud which had become lost from its customary tour of daylight. I shivered, notwithstanding the closeness of the night, tugging my two stiffened shirt collars together. The street lamps had long since been extinguished, another surprising matter out of place with modernity. A number of people, or shadows, had been down to their vehicles to switch on the parking lights, making me feel watched by the wide-set eyes of various clans of beast.

As soon as I realised all sense of direction had deserted me, I ripped apart the II King's instructions, as a symbol of my purpose. No point depending on them. They would only take me round in circles forever or, at least, until dawn's glow seeped into the sky fresh from the back burner of the Far East. I soon forgot I was ever following a set path. The cast iron chairs and tables of a pub (not the one I sought, I hasten to add) were stacked against a warehouse-type wall, too heavy for thieves; they were like the skeletons of animals, snouts pressed against the grates for warmth, so stock still only imagination made them seem huge stick insects out of season.

Suddenly, a light, the first unnatural one I had seen above ground level, filled the window in an attic flat, so near to the base of an overgrown chimney stack I wondered if the inhabitants lived with smoke as spinsters lived with ghosts of non-existent dead husbands. A shape fluttered across the skimpy brown paper blind, moving it to and fro against the glass so vigorously I could even hear the rattle from where I was below. I thought of bats. I thought of black widows ... and oriental icons come to life. I did not know why I also thought of cacodemons for surely they belonged nearer to ground level. This must be the haven I sought, after all.

I again vaguely recalled the instructions speaking of signals. Real clouds must now have extinguished the stars and moon; and the vehicles shifted nearer, no engines humming. Followed by jerks, I shrugged: and moved towards the only door I could find. Knocking would be no good, since there was nowhere for my knuckles to fit amongst the intricate iron ornaments—eastern dogsheads, in the main, from the II King's palace. And old gargoyles I recognised from church trips. Open-jawed creatures that would bite me. I called instead, my voice echoing like that of the wraith I now truly felt myself to be. "Sire, Sire, please let me in..."

I stood back in the road to gauge whether the window was still alight. Yes, but dimmer, less certain. The blind was up. A wrinkled face peered tentatively from in front of a shaking candle. Yes, it was him. No mistaking those dear familiar features turned female and ill-defined. I spreadeagled myself against the wall, allowing the brickwork to feed past me. At least, I would soon be out of the reach of the watching creatures. Then, stock still. Frozen into position by dawn's fitful overtures, I actually believed myself to be another cast iron trellis for pot plants in an area that thrived on such ornamentation. Was I one of those ghosts that, by the cold light of day, became nameless foundry hardware?

"Despite what you expected, it's turning out very predictable."

The II King just sat and began to stare me out. There was no answer possible, especially in the context of light and shade. His pub flat made me feel as if I were in a black and white film. The pierrot make-up caused him to look more a clown in a dream than a ghost in a real memory. Why was he called the II King, a name that was not in any way suitable? One of his associates called Enigma, who could usually be found in his dark wake, shiftily told me that it stemmed from early days at school where all the boys boasted names beginning "the"—a preening trend of manliness, which even 'the' Headmaster followed.

But the occasion of my first meeting with him was just after I had been under my push bike, changing the oil. My hands were covered with an archipelago of apartheid. Rubbing these on my canvas smock, I offered one of them tentatively for shaking. He shook his head, instead. He was a businessman and he was here for business, not trifles, not pretend games, nor even a rôle to play.

Had I got a model suitable for his needs? Sizing him up, I nodded.

"I think this one would be most suitable for a man such as you."

He picked it up from the counter and studied its contours closely, putting his ear to one end as if it were a conch shell and testing his fingertip on his tongue to see if it tasted of anything.

"Yes, I'll take this one. But the price better be right."

With a certain amount of aplomb, I quoted a price cut to the bone.

He scowled. But he immediately took out a cheque book and scrawled in the requisite figures together with the most outlandish signature I had ever seen, covering most of the cheque. Almost oriental in its characters. I seemed to have seen similar hieroglyphics when peering over the shoulder of a Chinese woman, once, in Soho Square.

"Have you a cheque card?" I asked with a whimper.

Again he scowled. This time, far more violently. Each part of his face moved in a different direction from the rest. He evidently didn't trust me. So, I immediately mimed retraction of my request and popped the cheque, without a further look, into the squeaky till drawer.

Our next meeting was at a fancy dress party arranged by my Aunt Freda. She told me that it was her fiftieth birthday and I was to foot the bill for the catering. I had no other option than to agree, being a good nephew. But I did explain that my hardware shop was not doing too well, especially as my best ever sale had recently been based on the false premise of an honourable cheque. Her sympathy was heartfelt, if only with half her heart.

I barely recognised him in his fancy dress across the smoke-filled room. He was chatting up my ex-girl friend, Isabel, as it happened. That Enigma chap with the know-what, if not the know-how, who later told me that his master called himself the II King, leaned against the flock wallpaper nearby, politely not eavesdropping. I was quite angry (for me), especially as the II King, my erstwhile client, was now artfully sporting, not only a half harlequin mask, but the item he had earlier "purchased" from my emporium on false pretences (if pretences can be anything but false): an iron codpiece under his diaphanous fancy dress ... and I was enraged to see my ex-girl's eyes fixated upon it. It would have looked much better on me, I was certain.

I ambled over, to see if he recognised me ... to test the water of his shame concerning the cheque card matter. At least, on this one occasion, I vowed to act very big.

"Oi!" I suddenly realised I could have probably used the name on the cheque. They usually show the name of the person whose account it is in neat pre-printed letters. He turned like a circus act on a one-wheeler, his lips beneath the mask curling along the mouth.

He thanked me for the good fit, cut to the very bone, he said.

Thus disarmed, I was later invited on my own to his pub flat, where (once I’d found it) the revolving white light cast iron-grey spokes around the room ... making me feel even more giddy.

Isabel had gone off with Enigma.

The II King says he may give me back the natty codpiece (manufactured in my foundry) when he sees if I am a very very good boy. What is unpredictable, though, is how important it is to the II King for me to be either good or a boy.

And when we at last retired, I dreamed a dream within his dream. Black Haven was the pub sign, if anything could be as simple as that. It stood at the top of a steep alley-way, generously chimney-stacked and with blind bays. Darkness appeared to be cast into the gun-metal night by the very bricks of the building, rather than vice versa. The locals in the pub spoke in a peculiar dialect—one in particular seemed like a sergeant major shouting out arrant nonsense. They told me that an oriental gentleman who called himself the II King used to live at Black Haven. One of them in the smoking room had to write it all down before I could even begin to understand, and even then despite the mis-spellings and the intricate curlicue illumination of the letters.

Meanwhile, the dart-players dug deeper into the cork with each throw.

"He is now a ghost?" I queried as I tried to decipher the characters on the paper. I was indeed bringing the conversation (if that was what it could be called) to its inevitable climax, because I simply knew that this was what they were driving at. Why else would the chief among them be talking behind his hand with bloodshot eyes rolling in their sockets?

He nodded vigorously to my question, as he wrote the answer. "Ghost ... yes ... full-blooded ghost ... tripping the light fantastic down those ornate iron-balustraded stairways." The sense followed itself down the paper more or less in some semblance of order. The other locals, though, brayed and snorted more with voices than words.

I wrote down my response and showed it to the one who could write. He shook his head pointing at one word in my text, as if it held the whole meaning of the universe around us. I looked quizzically, for the word he indicated was one I myself now failed to understand. It was as if my own signature had exploded. I had supposedly written it as an after-thought.

They decided to show me round Black Haven at the dead of night, like wicked Estate Agents. A whole gaggle of them, steeped to the gills. This room is where the II King was murdered. This where his murderer killed himself. And this the smallest room. Many relieved themselves upon the wall, missing the double in the bowl by a long chalk. Finally, they showed me the attic, where old toys still furnished the past. Sack dolls. Cuckoo grandfather clocks. Jacks-in-the-box gone sudden hidey-seek. Rocking-horses now at rest, having thrown ghostly children into dark corners (where did tilt henges of nameless paraphernalia having once served as the best regalia of the household). There was also a large glass jug. Deceptively empty.

Downstairs, there were several oval photographs of a lady in various stages of age and dress. One spoke volumes. It became obvious that it was the II King in drag.

"That's just before he was murdered by his murderer," the lead local said. He spoke easier now as if, having become accustomed to a visitor, the tongue had grown looser.

"How do you know he was murdered?" I asked, more as a matter of small talk than real curiosity.

"Well, it's written down in a book, so it must be true."

"What book? This one?" I pointed to the one he simultaneously pointed at: Miscreant In Moonstream."

"By Rachel Mildeyes," the local proudly stated, as if that capped everything. And he showed me a photograph of the author on the back of the dust-wrapper. It was one of those oval photographs of the II King.

I decided I would not buy Black Haven, after all, at any price and left them to lock up. After all, I had no money in someone else's dream.

I eventually found myself back in my cockpit at the palace, yawning like a monster about to eat itself. Soon be time to deal with the II King. But, he evidently snoozed onward. I believed myself to be as innocent as the day I was born. But each day was turning out to be as corrupt as the next. And I found myself following a young lady in high heels between the rising flats of down town London. Could it be Isabel herself? Not long out of Gerrard Street, the night sky had lapsed into the half-hearted tones of an old black and white minstrel television show, its reception flaky and as insubstantial as when unicorns used to roost upon the transmitters.

I was only following because she happened to be using the same route I would otherwise have traced myself. It is not a clandestine pursuit, in any sense, merely that her seamed lengths of shapely stocking are intermittently freeze-framing ... with only a short pause between the choked snowstorms of the airways for me to catch up. And, despite a stitch searing blindingly into my side, I found it almost impossible not to follow. It was as if she drew me along with the invisible threads unravelled by my mentally undressing her knitted dress. Her arms swung like furled sails.

It was a warmish night, despite the fuzzy flakes between my sight and her neat behind. I was due to turn left at the next junction to meet the II King, confident that the young lady would carry straight on towards Earl's Court. The Wideway was the only healthy path from tube station to tube station. Only men of dubious intent would take the off-shoots. Each pub I passed was the next pub I wanted to find.

My consternation was great, when she turned left in front of me. I hugged nearer in the wake of her lengthening shadow. I felt paranoiac following someone who I knew would doubtlessly fear me if she but swivelled on her stilettos and peered at the low life in my ill-lit dosser’s face. I could only attempt to hang back as the blind alleys we passed barred our path with extensions of their darknesses. Now, we were on a lesser road than the Wideway, its turnings turning narrower, blacker, lonelier, more or less inviting.

I held my renal area whence the stitch had laddered along the ribs. The blood moved sluggishly against the pulse. My breaths shortened, as her pace quickened. Her legs, like erect dervishing snakes of silky gold, magnetised my eyes.

Earlier in the evening, I pored over the A to Z, plumbing the maze of city byways. I had to reach a certain Crescent by the time the Chinaman's moustache said eight o'clock ... and, by counting out the alternate houses, find the parade of unlet shops and pubs leading at a curved right angle between the only odd and even numbered houses that were otherwise next door to each other. The Sunset Strip, it was called, after some long forgotten television programme. The arteries, veins, tubes, nodules of my innards would have been easier to map...

My consternation increased as she turned into this very Crescent ... with myself in cool pursuit. She waved a finger at the anonymous curtains that flickered a lugubrious discotheque of channel-hopping. She was either counting down the houses one by one or making a school-mistressly attempt to bring churlish children to heel from the colour-blind screens ... or, at worst, a reaper's way of bringing the dead to book.

She abruptly darted between two towering Victorian blocks with iron trellises, where the respective artists' garrets blinked as if from a giant squatter's blind eye-holes. I felt cold sweat upon the back of my neck. I too was followed.

Then she with whom I followed fate unwrapped her sleeves of gossamer wings and soared like a veil ... towards the sparse embroidery of the stars upon the rood screen of night. I awaited the next following thermal to the II King's Palace ... but none came. She had been the last to be admitted to his real dreams.

""Tthe wwords hhave ttwo mmany lletters IIn tthem.""

I studied the unaccountable slip of paper. It had been palmed off on me like a court summons by a shoddily dressed shadow who quickly skittered off on nailheads. Stranger, if only because I was in a part of London I had no reason to be ... other than I was lost, after following that floosie who looked less and less like Isabel the more that she did look like her, if that’s not Double Dutch. The dark lines of tall ornate blocks either side met at the confluence of perspective and the very point of sunset. I really felt fated. And, not only that, I had a migraine headache coming on.

One particular oblong block did not sit very well between two others, with an iron twisted fire escape twining round its corner tower. An awkward chimney tottered on the edge of the roof, built taller by some mathematical whim of an architect now long dead ... perhaps because of a phobia about smoke.

I discarded the message which, after all, had become but a scrap of paper with Oriental as well as English characters upon it. Then, abruptly turning into a paranoiac as the new moon shoved one of its peaks above the ill-positioned chimney stack, I kept my weather eye open for those who might brand me litterbug (or was it jitterbug, I wasn't sure).

Who had ever heard of stuttering in writing? The whole thing was ludicrous. But it was then I saw the furry shadows clambering down the fire escape or, rather, heard their clattering and clanging or, even, their feeble mating calls. Not only was I lost in the straightforward geographical sense but also, it seemed, in the more transitive mode of actually losing something. Perhaps the iron in my soul. More likely my reason. Even both.

There was indeed smoke spouting from the tall chimney, stained with the remnants of the blood-stripped sunset. It was settling downwards, hugging the dark pavements like dry ice. I shivered, pulled my shirt collars together, which inadvertently opened a gap further down where the buttons hung loose. I gaped. My belly was missing, leaving merely the cauterised slashes where blood was seeping to the very tatter-ends. A furry bundle of animal motion sprang from behind a tilted dustbin and squatted within my belly gap, its jump-leads and suckers quiver-keen for circuits to complete.

Clutching my sagging balls tightly to me, I stumbled up the metal treads of the fire escape ... only to hear the clipclop of nailheads above, heading down. I prayed that the creature, whatever it was, would not discover that I incubated two brains inside my skull. David’s and Padgett Weggs’.

Hhe wwas tto bbe llost uupon tthe eendless rraftered rroofs oof llakeland Llondon——fforever,, tterrified oof bbeing ffollowed.. Aat lleast,, hhe nno llonger hhad aan eexcruciating ppiss-ssparking mmigraine.. Oonly the ddouble vvision..

I wake to hear the II King's call.

I stumble down the Palace's concertina fold-down loft ladders, clanking and ratchetting all around me and I end up back in the highest attic, led here by the iron ladders' mis-geometry. I have beaten Escher at his own game, only to find myself snoozing on the job.

Through the storm slates, I can view another dawn which is perhaps the last red sunset, as its endless shafts seem to light up the green and peaceful land that the city has become. But there will be no floating thermals between here and that Heaven's forgotten dream. That, at least, is certain,

II, tthe Eenigma, amm llifting mmy iiron ccodpiece tto ffind Bblack Hhaven, iinstead.



“Funny name for it, Black Haven.”

“Black Haven is a euphemism.”

“For what?”

“For twat.”

“What?”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN



The island’s sea was deep with mist. There slipped boats with stunted sails and lines of oar-slaves, at least a dozen craft, I could discern, their rowing's rhythm guided simply by silence.

"I knew they were coming today at precisely at this moment," I said pointing to the place in the sky where I imagined the sun to be. The sweet girl with a vaguely boyish face looked half-wistfully, half-facetiously towards me. So I merely added; "Amazing how punctual they can be, sliding across the waves in such clumsy wooden raft-huts."

She had raised her sights from the sandcastle she had been carving since first light. With a teasing smile, she sprung sveltely towards the sea's edge. The large arm-holes of her drab smock gave a tantalising glimpse of her recent breasts.

As I joined her, my toes tingling in the sodden spume, I could see that the first boat was trenching the beach. The words of its name, 'Miscreant', were picked out in fresh dawn lemon upon the blackened hull. The slaves lifted their oars to half mast, and just stared, waiting for the next command. A stately woman in sumptuous purple drapes stepped gracefully from the raft’s up-pointed end, down a wood-knotted ramp which seemed to grow as she moved her feet down it.

"Hello, David, I hope time finds you well." She was as distant as two of my body lengths and more, but the purring of her voice carried effortlessly to my ears like silky poetry.

The girl had by now joined the woman, thus united on the grounds of gender, holding the elder's hand within her large purple sleeve. They both moved their bare feet luxuriously through the loose shingle like sea-serpents. The girl was destined to leave me, of course. I had always known that. How could a westerner of my advanced years be able to look after a foreign girl who grows into ripeness—with all the instincts to which a western man is prone.

"If Love is the Province of the Young, I shall die there an ancient dosser, if needs must." I recited these words under my breath. I could not recall where I had first read them. My books had long since grown to wood-pulp. The oar-slaves abruptly took up crooning. Their shanties made me hide my eyes for fear of tears showing. These were songs of the soon to depart. To the knowing, each stanza told of the route and even the destination.

I shuffled forward to kiss the girl's warm salty cheek. She did not respond, but merely skipped into the vessel, her white-thighed abandon reminding me of playing hopscotch, a game she used to share with me on rosy evenings at the beach, where I had carefully scored the numbered grid in the shifting sands. I then recalled the sinking sun in streaks of screaming red and orange oils along the curved white-capped horizon.

"Do not fret, David, the girl will be well cared for," the woman said, as she adjusted the mauve cascades at her shoulders, momentarily revealing dunes of fleshy gold.

"Go back to your books," I heard said from somewhere behind me. Nobody there, when I turned. I had thrown by own ironic voice, a ventriloquist trick of talking to myself with which I had often amused the girl.

The boat, and its escorts, reslid slowly into the mist. Nobody had not even waved. They had vanished below decks—no doubt eager for a board game or other feminine dalliances which had really been intended for later in the voyage. However, the woman had called to me with a voice raised above the usual soughing sigh: "We shall send her back perhaps in ten years to see if you are still alive, David."

The sun suddenly revealed its blinding eye, about half-an-hour away from where I had previously pin-pointed. It accentuated the curves of the woman's shape through magic weaves and billowing gossamer. The waves of the sea were fire-coloured, if not flames themselves. The 'Miscreant' remelted, with its topmost rafter being the final woodglint shimmer of its existence.



"I spot an old man lying on the beach,

A residue of someone else's dreams;

Whilst his bones stand, the rest can't reach:

His flesh between like rosy streams,"

intoned a voice from behind my nude scarecrow shape.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN



David lived someone else's life. Not that he made a drama out of an identity crisis. Or so he thought. Or was it that someone else thought it? In any event, David convinced himself that he could not really be the individual who, on the face of it, he seemed to have become—working in an office factory in London from 9ish to 5ish: surely it was not possible for him to be a run-of-the-mill routine-toady, especially with a name like David, a name which incidentally had to be real since it could never have been invented.

He religiously followed the channels of destiny which were laid out before him, with glances to neither side. Blinkered by bathos. Dulled by a dire dearth of flair. Cramped by a strait-jacket of uncharisma. His wife, Freda, told him that she loved him—yet how could anyone love a souped-down zombie in the midst of living out a black situation comedy? It wouldn't have stood up to reason, if reason he had managed to apply to it.

Then a dose of doubt dawned on David—causing him to sense within himself the proper person he instinctively realised he truly was. David lived someone else’s wife. So, one night he fell asleep, after having bashed his head seven times on the pillow—a trick that worked better than an alarm clock set for seven next morning. However, that was the very last routine David carried out as the erstwhile self. Indeed, waking up had always been a struggle into renewed existence at the best of times—via the bleary regions of brainache, the blinking yellowmanker custard in his eyes and generous yawnfuls of sour spittle. But this particular morning, it was somewhat different. Everything seemed fresh, effervescent, renascent...

He failed to recognise Freda, since she now lived as someone else's wife. Mind you, she did not recognise him either and, what was more, overnight, her name had changed to Isabel. After the initial shock, they made love, as if it were the start of an illicit affair. Their kisses were searching, their foreplay an extended version of teenage exploration (with the backwash of sweet prurient froth upon the roof of the mouth), ending not in premature ejaculation but in a mutually stunning slowmo orgasm that lasted even beyond the fuel that fed it. The breakfast she then cooked was a feast fit for a banquet: jacket potatoes that had been gently simmering in the oven from the previous evening, providing melt-in-the-mouth flakiness and knobbed off with a generous dollop of fresh-churn butter; rare gammon steaks upon a bed of artfully under-coddled free-range eggs; toasted doorstops of granary bread smarmed with a marmalade so thick with peel it was tantamount to a whole-orange bob game at the fair; and, finally, a breakfast birthday cake where the candles seemed to burn upon the seeping fuel of the rich cake mixture itself—a mixture which was constituted of jumbo currants, molasses, long- and shortbread, oodles of rum &c.).

David did not understand why there were so many candles on the cake. Surely this was the first day of his life. A ready-born ... not tarnished from having emerged via the channels of a woman's body. But there was something very diminishing about not being able to blow out one's own birthday candles. So, he went to work ... but found his desk occupied by someone not called David, but Inigo, plugging away at routine tasks, the simplest of which would in any event be beyond him. He then lost himself in the city, where he would never find himself again. Freda-or-Isabel did not even bother to look for him, in any event, because she did not know he was lost. And never again did she rustle up bumper reward breakfasts for David.

Westerners, westerners, David hated those damnable westerners. The way they inveigled themselves into his little group, selling bottles of what they called "Titanic" water, it made his blood really boil. One in particular was a nasty piece of work: a westerner who came from a township that was further west than anyone could possibly go. The accent was so broad, it sounded as if the westerner had a wagon wheel wedged in his mouth. He picked David from the crowd, knowing simply from the cut of his face that David was not a pure westerner but from where west and east meet and thus an all-round character actor. But it was drawn stares at high noon.

The crowd faded into the background—and they became, for both David and the westerner, the Undergrunts who claimed that the sun always rose and set in exactly the same place upon the squeezed orange horizon. David, since his days with Freda, had become a professional character, open for offers to appear in plays, novels, poems, operas, bar mitzvahs—even avant garde prose. But his big ambition was to go into the army, since that was the life for a real man...

David, older and, hopefully, realler, had left the army with stars and sunrise in his eyes, to appear in stories, but really his heart was not in them, as he wanted to kill someone for some cause or other. He was not a greenhorn private, being a Captain who had pensioned himself out—well respected, too—they were sorry to see him ride off into the horizon. The only regret was that there were no proper wars about when he was in service. His regiment was also the most respected of them: the Third Royal Mercenary Hussar Reserves. Surprising that they sent them so far west.

The wizened old man—whom David found himself to have become—finally ceased his incessant chatter and looked the westerner straight in the eyes from below his drooping eyelids—one of which twitched uncontrollably like a wounded moth. He told the westerner that his name was David Ogden, a character out for what work he could get. But his continued whining to the westerner was almost imperceptible—a war-monger obviously off his rocker ... and he soon fell asleep like a wrinkled babe in dream's arms, only to be followed by a sleep slower than death. His heart was not in the story, but in the battles upon distant sun-streaked islands which continued within the dreams, until the last glimmer.

Any developments that occur—please tell David straightaway. He is fed up with making idle threats, so the next one will not be idle, he can promise you. By the way, do you like his new wild honeyed look? He has done his hair specially to entice you, but if you snub him again, by God, he'll make it very very painful for you. Hey! Are you listening? David's losing his patience. OK, OK, he has got you to look as if you're listening. That's half the battle. What do you think? Is he pretty? The way he has just raised his voice accentuates the blusher, don't you think? They do say that a woman is far more eye-opening when dressed, complete with suspender-belts and artfully positioned garters and frills, than a bare one. These things turn you on, I know they do. You can't fool David. Like you, David is nothing without his wardrobe. Nor without a westerner like you to hear his caterwauling. But your attention is drifting again—is David that boring? What's going on in your little head? He made you promise to keep him abreast of all developments. What! What! You're leaving him—to disappear into the sunset! You're fed up with him! Good God, David owns your brain, dear wrinkled rinkled westerner, and you'll never get away! You've simply have to keep him fully sweet and fully informed of developments or how else do you think an old man like David can function?

David could tell you thousands of jobs he has had as a character, but he has chosen this one because it happens to be true. Once upon a time, David was a child and, having been a child, one can more readily appreciate his predicament. He knew he was to become an adult and there was very little he could do about it. The necessity of quitting humanity and entering such a state of grown-up disgrace was a nightmare that dogged the heels of puberty. Not that there was a sharp dividing-line. But he does recall waking up one morning a slightly different person to what he then thought he was. Over a few months he became the westerner he is today, a pretty soulless, unimaginative, money-grabbing, moralistic individual with nothing to recommend him except the traces of nostalgia for his earlier state. But can one actually be "nostalgic" for something never experienced? For, then, David was another person. It eased the killing, if nothing else. It all has a happy ending in a way, because he is now in those very early days as a child setting up means to remind a later self of whom he may once have been. Can you credit the joy that gives him? Forever and ever, horizons apart. Yet, dreams come in two forms. Ones you know are dreams when you're dreaming them and the others that seem so real only waking can turn them back into dreams. Most of David's dreams used to fall into the former category but, more and more frequently these days, he experiences large doses of the latter—so much so, he is not at all sure whether he is dreaming now or not. He is pretty sure he is not. But equally he is pretty sure he is mistaken in being so confident about the existence of the current reality around him. And the "you" he addresses is out there somewhere, so simply make yourself known to him: it may help you both.

One day—David witnessed a soldier being gutted by another soldier, and they were both in the same uniform—and in broad daylight in a suburban street. And nobody seemed to bother, nobody went to intervene but merely passed by as if nothing were happening. He couldn't believe his eyes. It made him sick to the pit of his stomach watching a man's intestines being harvested from his innards like a weird bouquet of sexual organs. To think the world had come to this. Nothing but Undergrunts. He put it all down to dreaming—and when he wakes up eventually, he will try to find that dead soldier, to explain why he ignored his plight. But, on second thoughts, if he does wake up, where will that leave you? As the famous quotation goes: "Further west than you can possibly imagine, there's a bed-roll and a pan of piping hot beans—and tomorrow at sunbreak you'll be able to cross that last horizon to the last pattern of islands."

"I've never heard that said before. Anyway, want your usual?"

"No, make it a large one."

David thought he had just suffered a shock. Not that there could be much doubt about having a shock, except he felt as if this shock was self-inflicted, rather than deriving from an external force which could be assumed as the proximate cause. What was more, shocks in general rarely allowed their victims thus dispassionately to speculate about their nature.

"You do look a bit pale."

The westerner, who was not typical of that breed, bore a broad smile across his chops, as if he could not believe his own words. Indeed, after decades of seeking every pub for the innermost pub, he had learned that there was very little said in pubs that could be believed—if any of it.

"I've just had a bit of a fright—that's all."

David felt his cheeks, as if that would allow him to gauge their degree of purported paleness without an element of narrative collusion. As if, as if, as if, all was irritatingly as if. That's all. That's all. That's all. Frights were not exactly run-of-the-mill, were they? David sensed that he had belittled something that had been very big indeed. From now on in, he needed to overblow everything, to bring it all back into kilter. He took a second gulp at his neat rum and said:

"Yes, I was coming my usual way, you know, across Ashy Wood. Done it for donkey's years."

The rinkled westerner nodded, knowing full well that his head, given its head, would rather shake dissent, heads having more integrity than the people inside them.

"Well," David continued, "you know the bit between the field and the road-fence?"

"Yes, it's got barbed wire, hasn't it?"

The westerner had just proved he didn't know, despite David peppering his explanation with the odd "you know" or two. At the end of the day, the sad thing was simply nobody knew.

"Well, sort of," answered David. "Anyway, the sun being hot and real bright, I was surprised I couldn't see beyond the edge of trees—and there was a loud sneeze as if a full-blooded buffalo type of creature had a bad cold coming from it."

Coming from it? Coming from what? There was more meaning in the words than either could countenance or give credit for. Or equally no meaning at all. Nevertheless, David's tongue had escaped his teeth:

"There followed a snarl, or rather a roar, louder and snortier, even doggier, than anything heard from a bull-ring."

There was colour in David's words, like rum so red it was darker than any blackcurrant. Fruit-picking in Ashy Wood was an activity which older and older people pursued these days, he thought. Some of them, really old, with lungs that had become toughened leather as a result of careless burrow-smokes and even earlier youthful solvent abuse. Indeed, the act of scrumping engorged eye-bulbs from the scrawny head-rows was no longer simply the holiday past-time of schoolfolk. David shrugged as best he could without narrative force. There was now no need of such nonsensical words to further the fright or scare or shock or whatever he cared to call it. It just was.

He sucked the drink as if it were part and parcel of his breathing process and winked a loud "you know". But nobody received such collaboration of the cheek-muscles, since the westerner had been called across to a fresh bevy of snorting snifters, a clique of clients who, David inferred, had drained their ankle-socks, yonks ago. One of them looked like someone he once knew as Freda.

And there David's story would end, with emptiness gored upon the narrative vacuum of a story-tellers's ultimate shock in discovering that he was none other than its purely fictitious hero David. An implosion of meaning: an inverted snort: pub talk. Emptiness is tantamount to non-existence. But then Freda breezed back into David's life with very little warning. A confirmed bachelor, being accosted in a shop by a winsome, pointy-faced girl, he suddenly rediscovered a concupiscence he didn't know he had lost. And that was how they met again, even if neither could remember meeting before. She told him that she had become a confirmed spinster. He claimed it was more complicated than that—which was later borne out by the facts—but, at the time, complexity was the last thing on his mind. He was smitten, physically stirred, fighting back an unseemly lust and, quaintly, subsumed by a spiritual adoration, too. What more could a lad like David have wanted? In fact, the whole thing would have been better with less.

They had several dates, before she elaborated upon their encounter. She had been following him for days, she said, a behaviour which, even now, she could not reconcile with her more customary demureness: as if she had been possessed by a third party, one who wanted to follow David but had no body with which to accomplish this. He looked askance. Was Freda quite mad? Doubts bred new doubts, and then back to the initial doubts, in an increasingly vicious circle. She then gave him one of her sweetest kisses which calmed all such tail-chasing: a kiss with no tongue and, even, very little of the lips, but one that tasted of old-fashioned childhood confectionery.

Gradually, without David noticing, in fact, they became affianced: not officially, but as if that autonomous third party, in whom he now believed as much as her, had rubber-stamped their romance: with greater, more significant rites and dalliances waiting in the wings.

"You remember that shop where we met?"

How could I have forgotten? It was a mere month back. Her voice was mellifluous, with a barely perceptible underbuzz created by vocal valves foreign to the rest of us. Indeed, David had begun to see Freda as almost inhuman—not in the cruel sense of that word, but more in its other-worldliness. He believed it was his imagination. But simple imagination could not really account for a permeating feeling of otherness, an otherness truly bestowed by someone other, unseen, yet ever attentive. A westerner with eastern eyes.

"Yes, how could I forget?"

His voice, in turn, was nondescript, as far as he could tell, from within the body that owned it.

"Well, I was going to buy something—before I saw you."

"I thought you had been following me."

"Well, I had for days and days, but it was quite accidental in the shop—I had in fact given up following you—I had lost the compulsion—then I saw you amongst the cosmetic counters—and I knew it had all been leading up to that optimum moment."

David frowned, or at least he thought he did, without a mirror being close at hand. She had earlier given him quite a different impression with regard to the circumstances surrounding their encounter. He was still in the metaphorical boat, but he had lost one oar. His greatest fear was now of sinking.

"What was the something you intended to buy?" he asked.

Without changing the subject completely, he was steering the conversation away from the white water, even if that meant drifting into a dark island-lagoon of misunderstanding and increasing recrimination.

"A present for... SSSSSsorry."

She was interrupted by the stage-swags opening upon the drama which they had come to see. The audience shushed. The lights dimmed. David's and Freda's heads turned front. His mind was fevered. Her mind was—well, how could he tell? He wasn't omniscient. He was merely a spear-carrier: an oar-packer: a cipher. The play was passable: a typical three-acter, with fewer parts: so Pinteresque David knew he and Freda would leave the theatre repeating inconsequences to each other, carefully preserving the printed programme for what he called posterity's nostalgia.

"A present for who—who was the present for?"

"The present?"

"Yes, that present you mentioned—who were you going to buy it for?

"Someone you don't know."

"Try me."

"Well, it was someone I once knew—before you."

"But you once said..."

"Yes, I know, but once saying something is not everything."

"Not everything?"

The two voices, one under-laid, the other over-, disappeared into the glistening darkness, leaving a dosser called Padgett Weggs with his empty hand outstretched. David would never see Freda again, unless he forgot the earlier meetings.

"When you fall asleep and whilst your mind's far away in dark desert and dream, your real thoughts are dead still, thus allowing the Dream Tracer to renew the templates of your soul."

David said this without thinking, seemingly as pretentious as ever.

"There is only one real way to prove whether you're alive or not: take a deep breath, as deep as you can go, and don't release it till you're dead sure," said the westerner, laughing at his own attempts to beat David at his own game.

"But deep dreaming, as well as death,

Can slow the lungs and blunt the breath."

David's reply in rhyme marked the end of their game of outwitting each other—except the following night ... he dreams he is Scimitar. He slices through the earth as if it were merely scum. He meets the whetstone mornings with a hearty heave-o to the female who has this night been his sheath. There is one, though, by the name of Enigma who thinks he cuts a finer figure than David. Thus, David pledges his future to teaching Enigma lessons of which the past has been sadly lacking. Enigma's latest female is a living animal and, so as to punish him, David decides to steal her from under Enigma's chopper. David crawls beneath the bottom edge of Enigma's wigwam, the sharp side of David's underblade slipping through the surface of the hard desert like a shark's fin. His oaken haft follows behind like the guiding-handle of a plough. There they are, Enigma and Isabel (the latter being the name Enigma calls the female animal). David recognises her ... and a teardrop slowly wells at the tip of his silver curved tongue. Lining up for their turn are several young blades sharpening edge against edge, sparking off. David cringes at the sheer crudity. Enigma does not need David's help to catch a dose of rust. David will leave him to his own devices, to a cruel fate David cannot encourage more than by merely letting it take its course. David will simply forge his own lonely furrow, slide away, unnoticed. He does not fancy blunt marital aids nor animal hide upon his brightness. The only regret is that Isabel once was his sweetheart.

The second dream that night was not unrelated to the first, but only with the benefit of the foresight that hindsight granted. The fire in his throat had raged for a good few hours. But he plugged on westward, regardless, knowing that waiting at the end of the desert was one whom he would love with a love that could not be topped, nor even equalled. Beneath the bloodshot sun, he prayed for the mercy of night. He yearned, too, for slaking of his torrid tongue. He begged that at least a vision of the woman he was to love would be granted him ... in case he should die before reaching the real thing. Then, Eternity's eye would be assured of focusing on beauty. He stumbled, just as the sun lurched from its height. How was he to know, with his eyes riveted upon the curved silver mirage of the horizon, that there was a corpse waylaid to trip him. Least of all did he recognise the corpse as his own remains which twitched as he parcelled himself within that dried-out husk, like a snail to its shell.

She sat at the very edge of the desert, where sand became grass. She was grinding a blade against a whetstone. The relentless noise hypnotised her, as she dreamed of the one who had promised to arrive today for her love. She ground on forever beneath the eye of Eternity.

"There is as much to be done as has already been done, the one difference being the timescale. The past is always finite, if you consider the present as a permanent way station."

The speaker was a wizened old man with a terribly long beard. As David pondered his words deeply, he half believed the old man was God. In the meantime, he seemed surprised or, rather, perturbed at David's lack of response. An interim smile would have at least eased his concerns ... and David's also, perhaps. A smile can often help the smiler even more than the smiled at. But, from either point of view, a smile is worth its weight in gold. So, somewhat belatedly, David made a scimitar smile. But the old man, David’s future self, was already a corpse, breathless as the day before he was born. His voice undergrunted on within his chest, despite the lack of breath to sound it: "When the Dream Tracer delivers the templates of your soul to God, He proceeds to hone His teeth on them." Dead, but pretentious as ever.

And when Freda told David she was going to a place called Moat City, he believed her. Now as old as the oldest dream, David imagined a place with such a name being beyond even the back of beyond. Except for Freda, he had nobody. To be abandoned as an old man was tantamount to suicide by another's hand. Yet he held his peace. Stayed silent. His eyes speaking volumes.

"Aren't you going to wish me luck?" she asked, reading David's eyes better than he could see with them.

"Yes, of course, dear. But where is Moat City? And am I going with you?"

He tried to level out his expression into one of neutrality. But he had forgotten—was he her dog or her husband or her uncle or her father or, even, her son or nephew? He lived someone else’s wife. David was so senile now, he could not even remember whether Freda was married, divorced or a life-time spinster. Or even what his own name was (or had become).

"Moat City? Yes, it's abroad. Too far for you to go, I'm afraid."

She gave a look which was a cross between embarrassment and bereavement.

"Oh, I see. Where abroad exactly?"

His mind combined feebleness and astuteness—a wonderful way to hide shrewdness with silliness. The voice revealed neither.

"It's hard to say. I've got a job there. All I know is an address."

"An address? So you know where it is, then. Way out west?"

"Sort of. No, not west, really. Further than west. It's hard to explain. It's sort of ... in the past.”

East, west, past—north, south, death.

"Time travel, eh?" He had evidently hit the nail on the head, since she reddened in silence. "I did not know," he resumed, "that time travel had been invented yet." He added the word 'yet' against his better judgement, but he decided that he would humour her. "I suppose this Moat City has a drawbridge."

She perked up. "No, it hasn't got a drawbridge. I've seen a photo of the place and its name doesn't derive from there being a moat actually surrounding the place but because the city itself straggles round a huge lake of sea, like an enormous complete circle of buildings, and 'moat' is a sort of metaphor for the actual shape of the city itself."

Her description was painstaking. David did not have the same educational background as Freda, since, like all people generations apart, you try to better yourselves in the shape of your posterity, don't you? And it is true to say that he hadn't stinted at all in giving to Freda all that he could. He even gave up having cooked breakfasts to pay for her pet dog to have obedience classes. A Dad’s duty after all. One that he doesn't regret nor resent. So, some of Freda's words went straight over his head. Hence his question:

"What's a metaphor?"

"It's a sort of shorthand for things."

"Oh, I see."

But he didn't. His question had reminded him of that old joke: what's the difference between a daggafor and a pub? What's a daggafor? What's a dagger for, you ask, well, it's for cutting your tail off! Yet, looking back on it all, after his lobotomy, Moat City did become a metaphor of sorts. A metaphor for life. Body and soul. Mind and matter. Blood and flesh. Moat and meat. Just the right philosophical jump start he needed. Spirit-diluted or flesh-corrupted reality—it depended on how you looked at it.

Freda didn't emigrate after all. And following her accident with a knife, it was discovered that she was a registered brain donor. Very useful to David, as it turned out, and there's nothing like your own blood and flesh coming back to you, is there?. He is glad he got her such a good education, even though originally it was self-evidently not for selfish reasons. Whatever the brain, however, there's, no high-faluting globetrotting for the likes of David. Too long in the tooth for that sort of malarkey. The further west you go, the further east you are. Meantime, his dear old mongrel Enigma keeps him company: the wag he takes walkies to the pub for talk and more talk. A retired office worker like David has got to make up for lost time somehow, hasn't he? Got to cut right through the matter to what it's really for. In the war against time and madness. He lived someone’s else knife.

Sometimes David thinks it is him who is taken out walkies to Ashy Wood. Barks like knife-twists in the trunk. As if. Sort of. You know.



“Politicians during elections go round the cities pressing flesh.”

“I hope they wash their hands, then.”

“Only the one they shake with.”

“Ah ha.”







CHAPTER SIXTEEN



We're in trouble, real trouble. The storm's brewing. The sea, just a moment ago, was a mill-pond. I look at her and she looks back—and I point to a bill of land which seems as if it is just within struggling distance.

"We'll turn bow over stern, if we don't balance each other out," I shouted, against the wind.

I wriggled myself away from her, whilst she crawled piecemeal along the raft’s deck in the opposite direction—and, if I was not too much mistaken, our only other companion abseilled down the central mast; one of those lung-fish that, in these waters, are more mischievous to the raft’s rigging than the winds themselves.

As the noise of the elements grew, we had no option but to lip-read instructions to each other. But when the foaming wreck-fish chased each other around the deck, even that became impossible, causing us to live off our mutual instinct, as far as we were able.

I left a dream which, from the manner it released my waking self with a skirmish of dark and light, must have been within a sleep as heavy as the rich hangings being drawn from around the four-poster where I lay.

I squinted up. She smiled and went to the side of the room where she had evidently left the breakfast tray. She brought it over and I breathed in the fragrance of rose-hip and hibiscus tea—on which floated blossoms—and delighted in the plateful of steaming rashers that—she told me—hid shy eggs beneath. A hunk of lightly toasted bread, with a skewer in its centre bearing black olives, floated like a full-masted raft in a basin of warm milk that was gradually growing a skin so cultured that it looked like the top of an angel's head.

I tucked in with enthusiasm, for my stomach told me I must have slept at least an age.

She sat on the edge of the bed and watched, with the confidence of one who knew full well that the art of cooking is in the eating. Until I slipped back upon the raft of dream within a moonstream of sleep.

But we had beached together and spent hours of fitful sleep sheltered by each other's body.

Flotsam nudged against us intermittently in the night, driven by the sporadic waves. I would wake for a moment, to push whatever it was away, never thinking, never realising, that it was probably another living creature seeking to join in the warmth of our togetherness.

We would utter words to each other, only to be forgotten in a renewed bout of sleeping, but I am sure she was attempting to describe things such as the angel-fish from the deeper reaches, coming in to spy out the consistency of human flesh such as ours. I vaguely recall describing, in my turn, beings like us stripped of all flesh and shape by the propellers and paddle-wheels of ghost ships.

Dawn was butchered red with the storm quickly ribboning to nothing. The panting of fish in my ears woke me with a start ... finding myself alone on the island and bereft of most senses, except that of waking again.

When I'd finished breakfast, she thanked me for eating it so nicely.

"I'll get up now," I said, wondering if that was the right thing to say in the circumstances.

"No hurry—the sun has only just put in an appearance above the Ashywood hills... You look as warm as toast in there..."

And she put her hand in the bed, as near my body as she dared, to test how warm I really was.

Instinctively, I grabbed her hand and placed it upon my swelling privates. Pulling gently away, she smiled again and took my hand to her breast which I found unsupported beneath the georgette blouse. She then placed her other hand tinglingly behind my neck and teased my head forward to take suck of the nipple that had begun to poke out as a result of her manoeuvre.

I now knew whence the warm milk in the basin had originated. And I drifted off again, within a core of ecstasy.

I fumbled, mindlessly, amid the sea's trappings on the beach.

I remember it all now with clarity but, at that time, it was all too unreal to believe. Parts of the craft were scattered around like deformed baby rafts, with breathing, glistening suppurations twined within the creaking wooden joints. Hangings of curdled jelly-fish shrouded the rocks and, between each strand of it, I glimpsed the beady eye-holes belonging to the now twice dead captains of ghost ships. And, worst of all, she with whom I had spent the stormy night lay writhing at the sea's edge, her thumb up inside herself, blowing green bubbles from between her lips. The shock stirred me yet again.

And when I had dressed, she took me into the garden. It was a summer's day to be believed, full of haystacks and laughing children in tree-houses. She pointed to an empty see-saw—and, without thought, I ran towards one end of it, beckoning her to take the other.

Up and down, as I imagined the sea to be, we went at it all day long, not pausing even for lunch or tea. A number of folk legends and fairy rinklings, whom I had earlier mistaken for children, ventured out from the nearby woodland and stood astride the central part of the see-saw, playfully making faces towards us at either end; but, as dusk took us all by surprise, the real fairies amongst them soon clambered down in haste and scarpered into the wild edges of the reconnoitring night.

Hand in hand, she and I left the residual rhythms of the still vibrant see-saw, and returned to the large house at the other end of the neatly manicured lawn. All seemed more forbidding and echoey in the lower chambers since morning but, nevertheless, a cheery log fire built up in several tiers by our fairy retainers, welcomed us into the dining-hall, where the long trestle tables were weighed down with overfresh salads and the dripping succulence of fairy steaks that still twitched as we cut into them, despite the cooking.

Across the candle-light, we romanced the evening away in idle conversations, dalliances and premonitions of another night of ocean-drenched dreams...

I wriggled across the beach towards her, to see if I could breathe life back into her lungs. But her eyes were empty save for the storm that still whirled amid the iris. I kissed the green flecks of foam from her lips and worried away at the nipples to test their ability to harden despite belonging to a corpse.

Then, on raising my sights, the distant horizon revealed the silhouette of a full-rigged spice schooner, bearing down upon what I now considered to be our beach-head isle. The mast was taller than the length of its hull, reaching out to the screaming gulls, necklaced with the heads of rat-fish.

With my sharp spine trenching the sand, I back-crawled towards the sea's edge; I recalled that, many centuries ago, I did sail in that schooner as it trawled the waters of Innsmouth Gully. I knew it had now returned for one of its truant native crew.

Once I'm back on board, I shall seek out its lowest holds for the barrels of rare devil-fish and pick the choicest of its soft roe for the centrepiece in a breakfast ... for, I admit, it's my turn to get up early in the morning to prepare it and hers to lay in till noon. Such a delicacy trawled from dream would also give an extra day alive for those battery fairies for whom she feels so much pity...



"The common acceptance of humanity is of a race divided into two species—the living and the dead. Little is known of those rare few among us who pass from dream to dream, never waking, except one to the other and, perhaps, back again."

Rachel Mildeyes (UPON THE VARIOUS HUMAN SPECIES)



“Rachel has life in various nutshells.”

“Is Mildeyes her real post-Christian name?” “No—she changed it from Oberströp during the Vichysoisse.”

“Oh.”





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN



Beatrix was blind. But a bubbly girl who had life coursing through her veins. The members of the commune would sit idly chatting to her, most believing they should make her sleep when it was dark. With firelit darkness settling upon her own waking darkness, she'd go mad or, worse, send them mad. But daytime was her worst while for waking.

"Beatie, are you OK? We can get you some Raspberryade. We’ve got a huge glass jugful of it, still sparkling."

Primrose who spoke was as attractive as the blind girl, but she was more vain about her appearance, of course. She was always peering into the log flames to seek out her reflection, since the Dinner Man would allow no mirrors in the enclave. Raspberryade was a euphemism, as if blindness extended to taste.

"I'm OK, Prim, honestly."

Beatie usually knew who had spoken to her, even if they tried to disguise their voices. This was in spite of there being more than enough people in the commune to confuse her; some she never knew existed. Twilight often summoned stragglers from their late-lyings, who subsisted simply because they'd forgotten to die. Beatie's memory, however, had no such drawbacks.

The Dinner Man himself often teased Beatie with his ventriloquist skills (which bordered on mind-throwing ones), to such a degree that she had fallen in love with a wicker chair. This, Beatie was told, had been handicrafted by a member of the commune who had been blind, deaf, dumb and amputated; he had died only last spring, just after completing it, the night they all had thought a police raid was afoot.

"Why do we call you Dinner Man, Dinner Man?" Beatie asked, almost with the breath rather than the voice—or, perhaps, with an inconsistent consistency of saliva she incubated within the throat walls.

She had never thought to pose the question before, but this evening she had a devil inside. It seemed, in fact, that significant stirrings in the flatland of fate were impending. The Dinner Man put his arm round Beatie's shoulders and, ensuring that he avoided disturbing the pins in her hair, took a peck at her petal-soft cheek. He decided that silence was the only possible reply to her question. The whole matter was far too complicated for mere words to suffice. But another commune member who had come to sit nearby mimicked a reply, much to the Dinner Man's irritation:

"My face resembles what once was slopped on school canteen plates."

This voice sounded as if it were formed by the muscles of the stomach not by those of the throat, mouth and tongue.

"Who answered? I know it's not really you Dinner Man."

"Enigo."

Beatie remembered it was Enigo who had originally warned about the police raid a few months ago. He had heard it from a two-way grass. The law didn't like late risers.

"Enigo, can I hold your hand? It's so long since you last spoke up in the group."

Enigo shuffled on his knees towards Beatie. She herself felt the warmth of his body even before it lightly touched her own. She tasted the slightly sickly, heady and, of course, fizzy Raspberryade upon her tongue as someone fed her like a baby. She had no doubt it was Primrose, who was a nice girl, far too good for the likes of the Dinner Man.

"Can you see anything tonight, Beatie?" asked Enigo, rhetorically. Since he had earlier broken his voice fast, he needed to take it round the block a time or two with unanswerable small talk. Curiously, it was as is he were trying to make her slow down the consumption of the Raspberryade.

"I've never seen anything, Enigo. But I can imagine..."

"Can you visualise the words you speak?"

She did not reply. She did see them, as each word popped open and revealed its innards.

"What do I look like, Beatie?"

She hesitated.

"You are handsome, Enigo. Far more handsome than Dinner Man."

She giggled sweetly. There came a snort of indignation from the background. Other voices squabbled in the distance, nothing too serious, but annoying all the same. A cold draught came from somewhere. Outside the disused farmhouse, Winter was preparing the ground—for snow? Beatie was glad to be in the warm, although her original earth was warmer than most. Gratefully, she took the proffered Raspberryade again, as it was sluggishly tipped along the trough of her tongue. It was with the tongue that she saw. Her ears were mere appendages, but her tongue was almost a second soul. She even could taste with the ends of her teeth. She never relished sounds, voices, music. They were always too random by half. The only thing she really liked was talking. It was as if the truest reality was within herself, which it was her duty to release, for the benefit of others. In return, they gave her the sweet distillations of themselves.

"Yes, I'm sure you're handsome, Enigo," she announced between sucks.

Her next favourite outlet was touch. She felt his hand like a loveable pet slightly squirming inside her own.

"What else can you see, Beatie?"

"I can see that Primrose is pretty, far prettier than me. With nicer, straighter, pearlier teeth."

A lighter snort of indignation echoed from the kitchen.

Beatie continued, determined not to be interrupted:

"I know there are old people here. Communes are usually by nature young. But I have imagined a couple of old people here, who stay here with silent faces."

The others scoffed.

"One is a white-haired woman called Freda," she continued, "who often walks with her face stretched out above her chest, pointed like a wrinkled vixen, intent, serious, wicker shopping-basket on either arm, forging along, trying to make others ignore her. The other is her husband David. He never goes out and his face is even more wrinkled than hers, oh so bitter-lined and weather-beaten. His eyes are at the same time alive and dead. I feel I could dig my nails into his face and unfurl the rubbery bark..."

It felt as if it were not her talking at all, but the tongue had got carried away—or someone else was taking it for a joy-ride, talking through the medium of her vocal apparatus. But now she was spent.

Enigo gently kissed her mouth, taking a few drops of Raspberryade into his own. Or, perhaps, supplementing it with something he incubated further down. By now, a few others had gathered round. There had been news earlier in the day of a possible police raid, but the scaremonger responsible for this who looked like Smike or Uriah Heep or (was it?) Silas Wegg (or even Padgett?) had been relegated to the furthest corner of the room, ostensibly standing guard but, in truth, simply an outcast. Enigo had in fact denied the rumour: he was sure to know because he kept his ear to the ground. Two shadows slouched from the kitchen, ancient shadows, grey-threaded shadows, despite the shadows of the other commune members being pitchy black. These two shadows had ghostly eyes that spoke volumes of tears for their daughter...

Much later, the Dinner Man resorted to the wicker chair, his eyes skinned for any sign of intrusion, however unlikely. Suddenly, Beatie stumbled to the window, her face reflecting the pulsing blue outside. She opened her mouth to speak in tongues, but bursting pods of red-riddled spit gunned out. When the black uniforms marched in, they quickly discovered the evidence they required. Beatie's long-dead body gave the game away.

Enigo could not bear to watch, as the whole commune was taken away except himself. But he did see the Dinner Man had managed to leave a smile in his wake, as if he had known all along. At least, Beatie would not be afraid of the darkness of her sentence. She was already dead. That comforted Enigo somewhat, eased the guilt of having earlier betrayed them all. The love he felt for Beatie was, even now, still growing, as he bunched his fingers like ancient wickerwork and cracked them in the silence. Only he and Beatie knew that blood in great long draughts could taste fizzy. And that ghosts could mourn.



“Some say that Beatie was not born blind.” “But it was in the family. Her brother Max was blind, too, some say..”

“Nope, their father gouged both their pairs of eyes out with skewers.”

“Ugh.”







CHAPTER EIGHTEEN



The waitresses were generously supplied, almost one for each table.

The tea-room was very swish, plenty of smooth freshly laundered white linen, silver napkin rings embossed with antlered deer and penitent youths, sturdy chunky heavy-duty yet good quality cutlery ... and large bowls of fresh flowers pricked out in bright colours and still drenched in dew.

David ordered a tier of cakes, licking his lips at the thought of the custard slices, cream cones, coconut pyramids, battenburgs topped with whipped almond, spicy bread-and-butter pudding baked to a rich brown crust, waffles dripping in wild honey...

The particular waitress attending to his needs, no older than his own daughter Beatie, was the prettiest of the whole bunch, he thought. She wore a uniform which, rather than hiding her figure, accentuated its more sensuous angles, as if an artist had finished off an otherwise boring portrait with the subtle pastel striptease of water-colour.

The skirt-length was below her knees, but the slender calves and dimpled ankles were all the more enticing for that. The stockings were of such denier, they took nothing from the flesh.

The tea infused him, like a heady drug. The blends reached to the back of his throat, even before he lifted the bone china to his lips. And he stared dreamily across the tea-room, as his favourite waitress turned her back to fetch from the display counter further cakes he had ordered. Her rear proportions were slight enough to retain the integrity of the skirt-length, but womanly enough to produce folds, pleats, flares and a long sculptured quarter-moon down each side ... that made him want to touch, if only fleetingly.

The other waitresses were nothing in comparison: mere bodies holding up their uniforms like clothes-horses for airing. One even had a face that reminded him of his nightmares ... and she had the temerity to scold his favourite waitress for picking up the cakes with her fingers rather than with the tongs.

He half rose from his chair, as if to remonstrate: he could not wish for anything better than to have the comestibles handled by his waitress, to produce a new flavour, whether imaginary or not, that would backwash the roof of his mouth with the froth of love...

He thought better of it. The tongs would have to do. The winsome one returned with the second tier of cakes, smiling fit to take sunshine into the dreariest late afternoon.

Her skirt-length lightly brushed his arm, inadvertently, and he bit his tongue painfully to stop himself from...

She had gone far too quick. Evidently the end of her duty, disappearing into the kitchen, with not even a backward glance for her erstwhile loyal loving customer.

His teeth entered an angel cake, leaving daubs of red where his injured tongue had probed its texture...

He cursed and decided a pub would be far more forgetful a place than a back street tea-room. He left the tea-room, paying the nightmare waitress; she worked the old-fashioned cash register as if she were issuing tickets for a dubious show in that other part of the city he sometimes frequented. Being in so much of a hurry, he even forgot to retrieve the large gratuity he had left under the bone china saucer: it had been intended of course for the waitress with the sunny smile who, like him, had taken such a sudden departure into the gloom of dusk.



“Ox-tail soup was on the menu, I hear.”

“And oodles of melted artichoke.”

“Aunt Freda loved the place.”

“But she forgot it (didn’t she?) when her memory faded and she stayed at home with her companion and nephew who cooked her favourite poached egg and og-tail soup.”

“Ooops.”







CHAPTER NINETEEN



The garden was an island. Isabel’s Island.

That was what she called it, if in different words, because small girls tended to see things as larger than they actually were. She never questioned the garden's walls. They simply existed as a boundary. As simply as she.

As simply as her friends the roses.

There was a possible drawback, however—the other girls who lived in the garden. Little urchins, all of them, with nowhere better to live than ... yes, in Isabel's rose garden. But there was something comforting about the tall walls—so tall they seemed to have jagged ice along their top edges. Enough inhabitants here without having to invite more. Isabel shrugged. How did those other girls get in, anyway? They didn't have anything to say for themselves more than chatter. Never really answered Isabel's silent questions.

Isabel looked at her own skirt, like wings down-folded, too short to reach the knees. Far better to spend her gazes elsewhere, she guessed. The roses were always beautiful, since she had not lived long enough to see them die. They hung their heads; they knew that pride came before a fall. The involutions of petal in pink, yellow and white were startling because each flower had a little of each colour—tinged at the heart with crimson.

The ivy creepers that cushioned the inner garden walls towards the icy peaks of their towering horizon—these were choked with blossoms too, hybrid blooms that ivy, in normal circumstances, could not possibly bear. Blooms with black hearts or havens. Ashy blossoms. Black tulips. Silvery leaves. Here, anything could grow alongside anything else that grew. Even the girls were, surely, hybrids.

Except Isabel knew no such words. Her world. Their world. Too simple for words. Even words brimming with meanings. Meanings yearning to escape in one fell puff of pollen.

Shelter was, however, a matter of concern—since the garden suffered weather, perhaps more than most. There were dens amid bowers of branches, where trees stood without fruit or flower. Beneath such interwoven hides, the girls, Isabel included, clustered—chattering, if not gossiping—for what was there to gossip about? Indeed, why chatter? Isabel supposed that young girls, such as herself, needed to chatter, even when there was nothing to chatter about. Little did she realise that, one day, there would indeed be something—an item of intensest gossip to last a thousand years of chattering.

But, first, Isabel wondered why none of them needed to eat. Perhaps, God had put such girls here on purpose—ones who were radiantly beautiful in their prettiness, with breasts on the brink of showing off their buds—ones who demonstrated a perfection which did not warrant alimentary canals to thread them from top to bottom. Isabel did not question how she knew that none of the girls needed to eat, without having ever eaten nor seen the word nor understood even the nearest concept.

Until one day of rain. Such rain as never had been seen, prefiguring a season that none had guessed or, even now, could visualise. So they didn't worry about the slats of sleet that the rain eventually became.

Other than the fact that Isabel grew sick.

Her limbs no longer worked, except in short sluggish bursts of stretching her skirt of wings wider than they had been intended to stretch. The wings, indeed, shrivelled. Her face took on the crimson from the heart of the rose. And the roses, in empathy, drooped. In rosy respect.

The girlish chatter grew louder than the splatters that fell from the sodden uplands of the tree-dens. The girls, thankfully, did not see this as the start of a rot.

One girl ill did not make a million.

Isabel would recover and the sun would return. The blooms would lift and take back the crimson as truly the régime of roses.

Yet Isabel knew better. Or worse. Inside. Deeper inside than it was possible to go in a girl so small. How deep could one delve in shallow shapes of flesh, blood and bone? Till the discovery of a heart more feathery than, if as beautiful as, an enfolded head of red-stained petals.

The sleet split asunder into a myriad flakes of silence: disguised as white noise. And the chatter became undercurrents of gossip and concern, instead of its pretty-eyed version, when rumour was nothing but excited renewal of interest. Now, rumour was scandal, as insidious as the avalanches of crumbly ice-frost that dollopped from walltop as well as from knotted branch.

Until one girl found a locked door in the tall wall: one that had earlier been concealed by the everlasting ivy, now stripped to its waist of bare whitened bones.

But no key.

Isabel pointed at herself and spoke for the very first time: "Chickens have wishbones."

Chickens, like other accepted facts of life, were mysterious archetypes that the girls knew as instinctively as being alive. Deep-seated collectivities of unconsciousness were far more powerful than real memories. Yet they didn't know that chickens could be eaten, except perhaps at Christmas. But what was meant by Christmas? And did Easter eggs come first?

"Painting is like taking somebody's face and putting it on a white canvas," Isabel continued.

The other girls looked at the now blinding landscape of snow that the garden had flattened itself out into—and realised exactly what Isabel meant by a white canvas.

Nobody suspected the delirium of illness or of Isabelness as the perpetrator of words about wishbones and canvases. The same Nobody did not take such words literally.

Isabel opened her legs a little wider to one of the smallest girls with the slenderest, yet longest, fingers: a girl, albeit so small, bearing breasts full enough to bedeck a near woman beneath her skimpy sheen of modesty—a covering that could not protect her from the cutting snow-wind of winter. This girl prodded a finger inside Isabel's body—whilst Isabel stopped herself thinking by thinking of the warm sunshine and the bosomy blossoms and the thymy paths of her erstwhile life in the garden. The girl's finger eventually withdrew from Isabel a key-shaped bone.

And everyone wished.

But before they tried it in the lock of the door, they waited for Isabel's face to grow as pale as death's liliness. Her breath was fainter than a fairy's. The girls took the spittle from a mulchy mound of plucked roses they had piled up for provender in the shelter—without knowing what provender was or even how to suck its juices for their veins. With this, they stick-lipped Isabel's mouth and rouged her soft cheeks.

They eventually abandoned Isabel there—a painting, if not a picture, of health and everlasting beauty. And, chatting about the expectation of wondrous story-books to be found inside the Secret House, they hastened from the Secret Garden.



“The rich texture of reality hides the emptiness behind.” “A bit gloomy, that.”

“Emptiness is white, not black.” “Not like being blind, then?” “Supposedly.” “Emptiness is cold, too, not hot.”

“Brrrrr.”







CHAPTER TWENTY





A pity the war was so short, having represented the best part of his life.

His wife Freda was now dead, last heard singing folk songs along with her favourite long-play of Kathleen Ferrier. The place still echoed in fact with her murmurs of housework. Even the old wireless, still sitting in the corner of the parlour, its taut tuning-wire long since bereft of any power to differentiate between stations, seemed to break out into fitful life, re-broadcasting seasoned Home Service and Light Programme favourites. It was peculiar, though, the wireless having been unplugged for all this time. You would think it would know better.

Inigo plumped down in the armchair. Soon, this very house, to which he had been wedded, child, chap and chairbound, for so long, would become more a burden than a home.

His eyes shone in the late afternoon, its sunlight studiously maintaining the integrity of its shafting beams with the complicity of the net curtains.

It turned too quickly from day to night. Conveniently forgetting to switch on the flashing strip, Inigo had ample time to ferment the memories. The people he had once known passed by his inner gaze like the bowed strangers who would one day follow his funeral cortège. But most were long dead themselves, moved by busy-body worms into more than a corpse's area, buried deeper than the dungeons he had forgotten to dust: the hoover seemed to clog up on bones, anyway.

Years before, he had come out into the garden, expecting the sunshine to jolly him up with its contrast to the gloomy parlour—the birdsong airiness, the perfectly green lawn, the clean-living sheets gently sailing upon the washing-line, the near unbroken ceiling of blue sparsely sown with tufts of angel's breath. Then, the sudden spluttering into life of a lawn-mower ... curse it, this country could not boast of many such peaceful days, and one of Inigo's clownish neighbours had decided to crop his grass-blades. Inigo mentally threatened to go round and barber the clown's green fingers for him. Indeed, Inigo had escaped outside, there being a decided atmosphere within the house...

Yes, congregated in the various rooms were all the relations who had arrived for next day's funeral. Ensconced in the kitchen were the culinary busy-bodies, the various aunts who had taken upon themselves the catering. The whole place teetered with stacked plates interleaved with serviettes. Darting from bedroom to bedroom were the hide-and-seek gang, some too old to be imprisoned in prams and others too young to sit quietly whilst practising the novelty act of balancing a cup-and-saucer on the knee and nibbling a manicured cucumber sandwich. In the dining-room, were the loud faced uncles launching jokes in various shades of blue upon the surface of their beers. In the parlour, were Freda and her mother hatching plots with heroines but no heroes.

There goes that lawn mower again. Inigo had failed to notice that it had stopped momentarily, so the resumption was a double blow. Funerals were usually sad affairs at the best of times, but burying one's own child (who had just been old enough to call Inigo "Daddy") was so sad, it actually ceased to be a real emotion. It was grief multiplied by no known human factor. He could not allow himself the normal outlet of crying because, if he started, he knew he would never be able to stop till he died himself.

Returning to the present day of old age, the sun had just given up its ghost to the moon. Freda appeared to sit in the corner, where the wireless had once glowed. She spoke with static in her throat and mis-tuning in her luminous eyes: bearing old news to her widowed husband who thought he was hearing it for the first time.

"Churchill says the war will end in two weeks...", the speaker by the wireless crackled.

Many old people usually did hold conversations with the media, complaining volubly at the newspapers, answering back the soap operas, debating turns of phrase with the politicians who would one day know better how to stutter. But Inigo was talking to his dead wife. She to him. Belief is everything, if nothing else.

"It'll go on till you think it'll never end," was his studied response, "and then it'll surely end."

Memories of that day in the garden seeped back. He was much younger then, of course. He tried to concentrate on the birdsong rather than the backfiring of the underhauled lawn mower engine. It was like trying to remember only the good things in life: the love he once felt for his mother, the arrival of the Beano Comic every Thursday when he was endlessly five years old and his eventual success at riding a two-wheeler. Such things were to expunge his last memory of his small daughter: holding her tiny feet as he playfully cart-wheeled her around in this very garden. She liked nothing better than mucking about in the tool shed, so none of it was perhaps surprising...

Inigo entered the dim and dusty shed, grabbed the old shears and looked for the large garden fork—but suddenly realised that the latter had now been removed from where it had been carelessly left standing on its handle in the shed's darkest corner.

Without telling anybody where he was going, he walked into the street and towards the sound of the mower. The blades would drink the gardener's blood, he vowed.

Meanwhile, the blades of Inigo's own expanse of grass grew patches as tall as a toddler's knees.

After his wife had died, Inigo fell in love with a niece.

One day, he looked at her sitting in the kitchen, mixing tea. Freda's sister's girl, Isabel. She had only come to absolve her guilt of not coming. She had brought her best friend with her to blunt the atmosphere. Tentative glances. Angles of blame. Misgiven glitter from the pots and pans. Talk that meant very little to Inigo. About a person whose name sounded like Cankerous Mildeyes. Whose brother went under the name Odgod. Was his niece or her friend going to marry Odgod? It seemed so. If it were to be his niece's friend, Inigo would not mind. She might as well marry somebody as anybody. But as to his niece (whose face spoke of nun's weeds), he could not bear the thought. She was too innocent, reminded him of his daughter who had not lasted beyond a half decade. He wanted to take his niece's hand and kiss it, tell her not to marry. Especially not to someone called Odgod.

The two girls, the niece and her friend, giggled. Made the gas stove turn itself on. He did not notice anyone turning the knobs. All four burners, like spirits, spirted. The only way to heat the kitchen. How many times had his niece urged him to have central heating fitted to this old house, and how many times had he refused, knowing the open fire made the parlour snugger than any damn radiators? The snow splattered the window, as if someone had had a cold time of it crying. No sun today: one day less without God's naked light.

Cankerous Mildeyes was apparently known to both girls from her relationship with one of their teachers. A scandal had brought things to light. The Head had said Mr Ash was leaving on a personal matter. The assembly of girls, in their straw hats, had nodded rhythmically to the hymn that ensued, as the day wore its course towards first lesson: embroidery with Miss Primrose: then Preparation For Adult Life with Mr Mint: Biology was always just before lunch, for a reason too obvious to fathom. And why they always studied weeds in Botany, rather than beautiful flowers, was quite beyond them. Until Scripture and Scruples made it clear. The girls' nonsense almost made sense.

Inigo's kitchen was emptier following their gabbled departure. He'd never understand what they were going on about. Tears filled his head. He heard the distant self-tuning of the wireless as a picture ghosted across the screen of its wicker speaker. He would have wished he were Odgod, if he had not told his niece not to marry Odgod.

The ancient memories now flooded back, having broken the gates of misery: the senseless clatter from the kitchen, the secret voices in the unlit hall, the unrecognisable faces on the landing, the acrimonious whispers at the back of the parlour's darkness, the jolly screams in the top attic ... it was too nice a day to be indoors.

Inigo discovered his tiny daughter in the tool shed leaning quite peacefully upon the upside-down garden fork.

The neighbour's lawn-mower started up, as if its blades were thirsty: jealous at the fork's spokes.

It was an odd God who allowed such things to happen.



“I think it is time to stop talking.” “Why?”

“Because of tiredness.” “I don’t feel tired.” “No, the people of whom we are talking are the ones getting tired, not us.” “Ah.”









CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE



Wild honey was said to grow over the flanks of those hills. At first, he thought it was a joke more suitable for April Fool's Day than Christmas Eve.

The snow, having spent itself, it seemed, he decided to leave the hotel and make a foray, with lunchbox and binoculars, into the higher reaches of the hills. But the question remained, would he take Isabel? She had been obstreperous for the last few days: understandable, he supposed, in this period leading up to the festive season.

He took breakfast in his own room, as he didn't want to face her quite yet; the food, itself, was one of the main reasons this particular hotel was chosen and he lingered over the curly toast which he dipped liberally into the golden curds of wild honey. His belly still worked upon the coddled eggs interleaved with rashers that had already gone down. The leaf infusions lodged at the back of his nose as well as coating his insides with a sunny morning sheen.

Eventually, he walked to the window and saw that the sun, having been in the sky for at least two hours, was indeed brightly echoed by the snow it was slowly melting. The hills looked so inviting that he jabbed his legs up and down in boyish rehearsal.

Ah, there was Isabel, loitering by the outside swimming pool, looking desultorily into the water. There would no doubt still be the thinnest veneer of night ice. She'd probably not bothered with breakfast and was kicking her heels till he came down.

He had known her since she was a mite. She was one of those girls who never really grew up, but he had watched her body actually becoming bigger, the hips widening, the bosom pushing out—he laughed, she was still at the age when she would self-consciously look down at her chest from time to time, to see if it was still getting bigger or maybe to ascertain that her incomprehensible T-shirt was not rucking up.

At first, he had been treated like an uncle, for after all the difference in their ages indicated that this would have been the easiest one-to-one relationship into which to slip. But, indeed, he’d rather consider her as a daughter, even though he had no recollection of her babyhood. To be a real father, one needed to have dealt out smacks and changed the nappies: that certainly would have given some natural bond. Not having got his hands dirty, as it were, he felt a fraud...

He then went to disrupt the bathroom (the state of which would later cause the hotel chambermaid to shake her head), pulled on his cricket slacks without thought and, later, without remembering. That's life, he supposed, events and processes which just went by without touching the sides.

He needed an abrupt urination which, in cricket slacks, was a precarious business.

Isabel was by now lounging within one of the huge easy chairs that the hotel had seen fit to scatter around the foyer. Her legs were stretched out, skirt hitched to the upper thighs in an unladylike fashion, but he admired, without really being seen to be looking, their shapely but slender length. She was flirting with everybody who happened to be passing, just by means of her sulky pose, he thought. Her hair had been let out since last night's dinner, for then he had enjoyed the severe, but sophisticated, way she had carved a head of hair worthy of a Fine Art museum; the butterflies that decorated it seemed to give off smoky breath, that was indeed the fine waspish wisps that the clips had not succeeded in holding back. Now, her hair, newly shampooed, would smell of herb complexes and was undulating down upon her shoulders with a fullness through which he yearned to run his fingers.

"Isabel, I'm going for a walk this morning. Will you be OK on your own?"

She nodded, got up immediately, snatched her straw boater from another chair and walked into the hotel gardens, without a word. He followed, because he had to go that way to reach an annexe of the hotel where he could order his lunchbox. He looked up into the sky; the sun was still shining, true, but there were some ominous looking clouds already mustering along the hilltops. He shivered, for there was a cruel edge to the light wind, despite the sun. Perhaps he should not undertake such an ambitious walk after all.

Isabel was flopped out in a deckchair, the boater over her face, as if she were sunbathing in hot climes further south. She had fastened her fur buskin, which he could not recall seeing her put on in the first place, for in the hotel foyer she was only dressed in T-shirt and skirt.

"Isabel, are you really OK?"

She raised the boater and buzzed loudly, a cross between a hiss and a hum. It was as if she wanted to speak, but the words would not come. The sound was almost like a drill; she evidently wanted to irritate him; unaccountably, after all the good things he had heaped upon her ... including this holiday itself.

He lowered himself into a nearby deckchair (tentatively, since he suffered lower back pain). He buzzed back. If that were the game she was at, two could play just as easily as one. If any of the other hotel guests had passed by, they would have wondered.

Later, she took off her T-shirt in front of the bedroom mirror. The brassiere, which he had bought her only two weeks ago, was now too tight. On removing it, she winced at the red weal that the strap had made. Her breasts were fine, just what she'd hoped they be when she dreamed of having them as a small girl: still pert but with sufficient pear-shape to give the angle of hang which she supposed most men would admire. They were lightly aureoled without too many of those sickly goosepimples, and she stared to see if the "elves' thumbs" would come out harder.

On lowering her skirt, she decided she didn't like the briefs he had bought her, either. They showed a dark stain of pubic hair at the crotch, which she felt was unseemly. She lowered them and ran her fingers through the brushfire and, then, turned to view the outcrop of buttocks, round and pushy, which had given her figure-hugging evening dress (which she did like, even though he had bought it) just the right turn-on.

She walked, naked, to the window and saw her benefactor ambling away towards the distant hills, his lunchbox and binoculars hanging from his shoulder. He was off to discover whether the wild honey was legend or not. The sun, more like honey itself now, was already threatening to play fast and loose with some clouds scuttling like beetles across their version of late morning.

Ah, there was the knock on the door she was expecting. That enigmatic young man who had exchanged glances with her last night from another dinner-table... He knew, she knew, the meaning, without words. The assignation was arranged without even a further glance. Now that dinner man would see her with her hair down, she thought, as she released the catch.

She hummed with delight at the thought of this late breakfast. And tomorrow ... would be Christmas Day.

Meanwhile, the mountain slopes themselves became positively less steep the higher he went into the rarefied air. The sun had sunk low, close on two o'clock, behind vast rearing neighbouring slopes, but he was convinced he could see the vague outline of the burning orb through their translucent rocks. He put it down to an aging imagination.

Isabel was for the first time that day far from his thoughts. As a boy, he mused, he had actually wanted to be a girl himself and now, to all intents and purposes, he yearned to undergo menstruation. With no emotion other than the involuntary act of wincing, he noticed that the stain on his slacks was not red but golden...

Isabel laid back on the bed in her room. Her visitor had long since departed, for dusk was closing in from the surrounding hills, and he had only stayed with her for lunch. Not only lunch had they fed upon: he had made her feel so damned innocent with his talk of "at the fountain of love" and suchlike. But he was innocent, too.

She yearned for the return of her guardian from the hills: they were indeed hills when he had set out soon after breakfast, but now, doubtless, the encroaching night made them look steeper, wilder. Would he be home for the evening meal? She anticipated the pleasure of slipping into her new dress and being escorted into the huge dining area as the ordained centre of everybody's attention.

The dress itself she had put on a hanger in front of the wardrobe mirror, each pleat with its independent colour. The bodice, without its breast-filling, was tantamount to obscene in the way it rucked flabbily. The bows and tucks appeared clumsily positioned without the swing of the body to set off each against another.

She continued to wear nudity, after the departure of the visitor, as a wilful penance. The night chill permeated the window, and the icy tatting of pins-and-needles spiralled down from chirpy breasts to curling feet.

They found him after six days, search parties merely finding other search parties for the first five. The lunchbox was missing, but he was still clasping the binoculars. Yellow slime stretched in strands between his limbs like cheesy treacle being scooped from pizza pan to mouth.

"He was muttering about sweet angels when they found him," said the maître d'hotel to Isabel, as he escorted her to the departing carriage.

"His head was always in the clouds," she thought, but did not say. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted her erstwhile lunchtime visitor lolling in the hotel pool, the strange golden light making him appear to be a fleshy spider self-correcting its limbs in unclarified brine. Or meat adulterating clear vichysoisse. He did not even wave goodbye to her.

Her benefactor, who now seemed more like an old man than a father figure, already ensconced at the back of the carriage, had the wherewithal to smile as she got in: slowly, rhythmically, he circled his hand in the window as the horses pulled away. As the shrinking hills closed ranks behind them, he stiffened his back for the journey, his eyes flashing with the passing of sun-mingled trees.

She gently kissed his cheek like a stingless bee and said "SSSSSSorry".



“I can hardly keep their eyes open.” “Not far to go yet.” “How do you know how much bigger the story’s growth has yet to become?” “How about omniscience?” “No such thing. You’ve got the Intentional Fallacy, by the sound of it.” “Blimey!”











CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO



The magic times always seemed to be saved for a Sunday, when Father took us for views. His old jalopy took the steep winding roads in its stride. Up a Welsh hill, with our breath snatched away, we gazed awestruck at the way God was able to make things so really big and high, as if He were showing off for the benefit of us small fry.

Sometimes, Father took us to the caves instead, but on those trips Aunt Freda had to come, too, because she disliked heights—or so she maintained. The fact she preferred dark places below ground to wide airy spaces mystified us underlings. I suspected Father was rather fond of Aunt Freda. Mother did not have any say as to who came on those outings, usually sitting in the back of the car knitting shawls. It had been quite a while since she filled the front passenger-seat and map-read us through the valleys. Something to do with safety-belts.

One Sunday in particular, Aunt Freda was away in South Wales for the duration, undertaking one of her famous excursions along the Gower Coast. They were famous to us little ones, in any event, if not to anybody beyond our circle. She spoke about little else to us small tots. During her absence this time, we took the opportunity to visit one of the least accessible viewpoints, where one could often look down at light aircraft following the valley below. The road merely took Father's jalopy three-quarters of the way up. The rest was on foot. Mother stayed in the back seat, wielding her crochet hook as if she wanted eyes for bait. But that was Father's turn of phrase. Not mine. He was a strange cove, if that is not an even stranger expression to use about one's Dad. From him I inherited the everpresent search for the exact words to describe things. Language for him was the placing of idiosyncratic and little used words upon a potter's wheel and moulding them beyond their meanings. Or blowing them up until they burst in a capricious cascade of meanings. Only hindsight and maturity has given me that angle upon my own father. He could have summed it up much better himself, however.

In many ways, this was his story, with more bearing on him than on the likes of us next generation. I merely tried to follow his ways of thinking and of expressing himself, inevitably mixed with my own clumsinesses and false perspectives. But, there was little I could do about that, even if it was important to scry the smoke that choked memories of those of us too young to care. Through a filial filter faintly.

Yet how could I speak for so many? Several tongues into one—only Red Indians with their finger-lollipop whooping and pow-wows and smoke signals could untangle the mixed messages. And when we reached the viewpoint that particular Sunday, out of breath and excited, we tried to read the thousand chimneys of the town below us. There, an old lady scrimping on the fuel, the smoke so thin. Here, a fat man puffing on his pipe. There, a rich man browning ten bob notes upon the forking tongues of flame. Here, a musician belching strings of black notes from his smokestack for the crows to croak and screech. An airful of hieroglyphics. There, a bonfire on the allotments—with the war-dance of tiny people around its conflagration.

Father laughed at us little ones’ amateurish attempts to create sense out of randomness. Then he stated: "People think they're sane—but seen from this distance, you know the truth of it." His voice, with a tantalising lilt, was far-away, as if he were talking to himself. Though, he knew we listened.

Aunt Freda, if she had been present, would have said something cutting in reply. We kept dumb and continued to scry the smoke.

We did not always visit natural attractions, however. Yet no tourist gathering-spots (ancient or otherwise) seemed to carry the same enjoyment as our hill journeys. The untidy crowds of ordinary folk at official “sights” were ever eager for information that they didn't know they wanted; the surly admission lady who doled out endless spools of tickets from behind a bevy of pot plants; other peoples' children who started off interested but ended up fractious: all conspired against my love of mystery. Except, of course, on that day when we visited St David's Cathedral.

I had managed to shake off my companions, having spotted an interesting gargoyle from what seemed a mile off—and, indeed, there were some inscrutable specimens of gargoyle on various corners which, I was convinced, none of the tourists proper could even see, least of all appreciate. One had real tears. Then I actually saw figures emerging from previously empty walls, with stone bones, but not really stone at all. Small and impish and, yes, demonic. A few with vestiges of wings on their heads where hair should have been. They gaped and mouthed silently at individuals that they seemed to have picked out from the oblivious tourists. Somewhat like holograms, too. Holograms of grey stone. Eventually, a childish, or rather elfin, simian-like creature hopped up to me. It smiled slowly, whilst wrinkling its face, as if it knew smiles were attractive to small people like me, giving the impression that it had never formed a smile before—forcing out a grunt which sounded more obscene than anything I had ever heard then (or since). It lingered in my vicinity for a few extra seconds when the others of its kind had vanished. I realised that it had fallen in love with me: I could actually watch the beat of its bleeding heart, the only thing which was not stone nor hologram-like. When my companions (Dad and some lesser known family members) emerged from their dose of history, they scratched their heads, trying to find one of their party whom they fleetingly believed they were about to leave behind. A young girl among them shed real tears as the others broke faith and ambled off into the blinding daylight. I made a painstaking smile and forthwith melted back into the stone—waiting to shed unfathomability upon another unsuspecting clutch of visitors.

All part of my confused sub-teenage thinking, no doubt: believing I was someone else. Through a two-way mirror looking-glassly.

Whatever the case, I have forgotten to tell about Olga Oberströp, Engine, Max, Prod and Agog—creatures Aunt Freda and Mother knew, although Mother never let their names pass her lips. There was a difference between being mealy-mouthed and forgetful, and Mother was the latter. Aunt Freda simply referred to them in passing, as if it were her duty to give an airing to skeletons in her cupboard rather than allow them to moulder and fester with their flesh grown back on like corpses.

We did meet Engine, at least once. He said he was a businessman from London—except the pent-up tone of his name, the glint in his eyes and the slope of his nose made us youngsters see him more as an itinerant salesman of romany mien than a big shot who lorded it about in an office. Aunt Freda allowed his arm to slither round her shoulder, whilst Mother winced and tut-tutted. Father scowled. We children laughed, more in an act of defiance at the grown-ups' seriousness than there being anything at which to laugh. We knew there would be no excursions that weekend, high or low.

We once met Olga Oberströp, too, although we did not know it was her at the time. She did a Variety act with balloons and even dressed in stage sequins on quite ordinary evenings. When she bustled into the room one Christmas Eve, armed with presents for people she had not met before, I noticed that Engine (who was as surprised at her abrupt arrival as anyone) withdrew into himself like a tortoise, making undergrunts instead of the outrageous statements that were usually his wont. Her dress was brilliant, more showy than the Christmas decorations and I found her gushing manner overbearing. Still, the presents were quite nice. How she knew I wanted a model lorry that carried logs was a mystery. I had told no one. Apparently, Agog was the parrot that she used in her act. Her stage name was Primrose Brighteyes, but we were told to call her Aunt Someone-or-other. But whose sister she was to warrant the epithet Aunt was again a mystery. Before balloons, she performed an act, she told us, with smoke: sculpting it into ephemeral shapes that made audiences gasp. Of course, such Variety turns became old hat. It was good to know that I was involved with people active at the closing edge of such an era of showmanship. Made me feel more loyalty to the past that to the present.

The future was indeed a no man's land for most of us, in any event. The wars intervened. Nobody predicted the outcome, of course. I was the only one among us left to remember Mother and Father, Aunt Freda, Olga Oberströp &c. We never met Max and Prod. Who they were and where they fitted in were more mysteries. With all the various mysteries, my whole childhood seemed one long mystery. But that was far from the case. Life was relatively straightforward, everything, that was, except the matters of which I have spoken.

Max and Prod were indeed mysteries. Yet they were known by both Engine and Olga Oberströp—and went on to be reasonably important in the television industry.

Television was then a phenomenon of the future, so should not have come within the ambit of my memoirs. How I knew all this, I have forgotten. And mysteries were really memories that had gone wrong. Not mysteries at all, really. Simply fallibility. Through a mental muslin dimly.

And as the years stretched on into war, we continued to scry the smoke where we were able.

That Christmas, we all played Blindman's Buff in the parlour. I say "all", but Engine stayed upstairs where his grunting and mechanical churning noises made it sound as if he were playing Blindman's Buff on his own, barging into furniture and floundering from wall to wall lie a cyborg berserker (not my words). Mother and Father did not play, either, but watched the rest of us, Aunt Freda and Olga Oberströp included, playing the fool as we dressed each other in blindfolds and mimicked ancient mummers that were said to haunt the ground floor. Sometimes we garbed each other in fancy-dress, despite the embarrassments. Mother clicked her knitting-needles. Father called out encouragements and sometimes assisted us younger ones with calls of "hot" and "cold" when we were seeking things in the room or upon each other's persons.

One Easter, some of us nippers had grown up and left home. However, there were sufficient left for there to be giggles and sobs, shouts and whinges, throughout the day. Mother had now been accepted by all and sundry as congenitally senile. If this fact had been realised years before, it would have saved a lot of unnecessary heartache. Engine had not visited us for ages, so it was a great surprise when Beatie (one of us younger set) claimed to have spotted his face at the kitchen window. There one second, gone the next, I think was the trite expression she employed. But being one of the youngest, nobody believed Beatie, least of all criticised her use of English.

Aunt Freda was said to be away in Ashminster with a fellow with the crazy name of Padgett Weggs, although I myself suspected she was in the small aeroplane that buzzed our house every Sunday morning. However, Father had intimated to those of us teenagers able to understand him that Aunt Freda had forgotten about our family altogether. She had evidently also forgotten about Agog the parrot who now had pride of place in our parlour (left by her on one of her last visits—as a final keepsake, as it turned out). There was not much call for Variety acts in her vein any more. Most of the newer breed of artist were soon to appear on black and white television (under the aegis of Max and Prod, no doubt).

In our parlour, there was a log-burning stove: made of black metal, with a raised Celtic design on the front depicting a deer and penitent male youth entwined with foliage. There were knobs, twiddles, rods and hinged openings on the side which amused me to think were the valves of a musical instrument, the medium of smoke pre-empting that of sound. Agog often made squawking noises when people did prod and poke at the stove, as if he were annoyed with either the irritating racket or the surplus smoke in the parlour thus engendered. But, today, he was screeching fit to raise his great grandfather from his resting-place amid the Pieces of Eight, buried beneath the silky sands of some Pacific Island. I followed the angle of what I took to be Agog's gaze towards the net-choked window, where the street lamp was still weaker than the seeping light of dusk. There I made out the muzzy outline of a head. It could have been anybody, but it could not be Aunt Freda nor was it Mother as I knew she was safely ensconced in her truckle in the master bedroom. But since my mind was racing with what Beatie had told the rest of us striplings earlier, I convinced myself it was Engine—complete with bow-tie and shifty dusky face. The face grimaced and mouthed a message, as if it were initiating a romantic liaison with me or conducting pre-elopement arrangements. I tossed my head in a haughty manner and scuttled from the parlour amid the flurry of my skirts.

Mother had knocked on the ceiling: a massive pounding that betokened a need for company or cough medicine. So I took the opportunity to scurry up the steep stairs and, hearing a wireless in another room giving forth with the shipping forecast, I was thankful that at least our family had eschewed television and were satisfied with the small mercies of sound without pictures. The trouble was that the announcer sounded tipsy. That was quite tasteless, especially in view of him warning of force-niners. But why was a wireless a wireless. It had nothing but wires, it seemed to me.

I found Mother covered in something from which selective memory thankfully later protected me. Probably one of a new lot of little ones trying to cuddle her.

As years went by, Beatie grew up into a beautiful woman—whilst I was put out to pasture, not exactly a spinster, more a mother without children or wife without husband. Yet they were all there, despite being less than ghosts. I read somewhere in a newspaper of Olga Oberströp. She became an impresario. Mother died, of course. In subsequent nightmares of mine, she had climbed to the roof, choked on chimney smoke and skewered herself on the TV aerial—as a goggled pilot tried to rescue her by chopper. Aunt Freda married that person called Padgett Weggs and later transferred to an old people’s home when she forgot about him amid all the other wrinkles. Perhaps, he had never existed. Father eventually went to join Aunt Freda. Various siblings and cousins of mine fought in the odd continental war—and I burnt unread newspapers on bonfires in the back garden of our home. In that way, I could never follow the trends of such wars nor hear about the deaths of people I loved. Yet I did try to scry, I really did try to scry, through a TV smokescreen squarely or, since the excursions of Aunt Freda were to be emulated, if not believed, a Phileas Fogg roundly.

But, now, amid my curdled thoughts that age has brought me, I often wonder whether what I saw that day in Mother’s bedroom covering her was not a child, indeed, no small fry at all. A dark spirit floating down ... or an evil gargoylic hologram stiffening back to stone ... or a new variety trick? In hindsight, her dear sweet head, beginning with the mouth, did doubtless strain to blow the first pink party balloon, a long vein-knotted one. The first of many. Through a medusa wirelessly.



“I cannot pretend to know whether we’ve now reached the end.” “It sounds like it.”

“But I feel another chapter rising to my lips.” “Chatter chatter chatter.”







CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE



At last, I found the pub I’d spent my life finding. The chimney-corner within which I guessed the drunk locals lolled was much more than the expression usually embraced. Such normal corners were full of smoke and senseless pub talk; at least those that people invented by Charles Dickens may have frequented. But this one was tantamount to a separate room: a snug for midgets, walled-up within the elbow of the chimney-breast.

I was accustomed to visiting that hostelry quite regularly, stepping out through the clammy London smog like a fine gentleman, only too pleased to reach the bar counter and rub shoulders with the low life forms that were propped up thereabouts. I did wonder at the mystery of the snug built into the corner—I imagined the raging log fire in the adjacent hearth must've made it hotter than a pig-oven in there. The steamy goggle-eyed glass in the small hatch of a door gave no hint as to the likes of the hard regulars ensconced within.

One day, with the smog slowly settling upon the river, but leaving the streets relatively clearer for once, I decided that this day would be one for discoveries. If a new-born babe could master such thoughts, I could easily imagine its nativity being such a day. There! The public house was called Black Haven—its sign swung slowly in the renascent breeze, blurred but, for once, discernible. Once inside the saloon, I was astonished to find it full of complete strangers: no hide nor hair of locals. Perhaps the usual topers were all squashed swigging in the chimney-corner, I thought; except, upon looking, there was no fireplace in view: indeed no chimney, not even a sooty stain on the floorboards. The nearest to an alcove was on the other side of the saloon, the dark shapes heaving within it I guessed being loving couples on the snog.

Leaving the Black Haven in my cups, I discovered that the city was no clearer to my eyes—even though a new-born sun was sparkling off the river waters. I sang a song about snogging and swigging jugs in the snug, but that soon died to a whimper on my lips when I saw Charles Dickens himself swaggering by.



“Now we have a real writer on the scene, no need for us.” “One more chapter, perhaps, and then we can leave it to others to round everything off.”

“It’s coming, rising to the gorge...” “Hiccup!”







CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR



They all had names, but none knew any but his own. So, when one of them was accidentally lost in the dark, the others wondered what to call out.

And the lost one wondered whether to answer. It happened after one of those early frosts that often took sun-worshippers by surprise.

There was a summer which childhood made endless, when shafts of sunshine slanted across the island like the golden eye-sight of Ancient Gods. But this particular summer became accused of issuing a false promise akin to everlasting youth—until one among the disporters, called Enig, said that he knew all along that such sunny days could never have lasted, despite their seeming endlessness.

The questions with which Enig was consequently faced came thick and fast. Why had he not warned the others, if he knew? Surely, the unexpected frost had taken him by equal surprise? No, he maintained, since he had not considered it necessary to taint their holiday in the bright warm sun. Would they have otherwise raced between the makeshift see-saws and the prehistoric elfin hidey-holes, with such care free spirit? Would they, indeed, have been able to make their laughter heard above the tree-tops? The sky could never be blue, Enig maintained, unless it had thermals of real laughter to feed upon and help it clear the clouds. And he laughed, as if to prove that he at least could still raise such laughter.

The others stared back at him, victims of their own hopes ... until, from within, as it were, they reacted to the burgeoning need to work their joints, not in play, but in labour. Shelter was the byword, but none of them actually knew the implications of its meaning. They possessed some inkling that they needed to study the ramshackle hidey-holes which had previously been simple ingredients of their adventure playground. They clustered chatterless within the leaning shadows of cross-section chimneystacks which, for some odd reason, had originally been built taller than the trees. Many pointed and gesticulated—but none knew the reason for their own excitement. It was merely a component of their thought patterns which everyone accepted without the one obvious next step of asking ... why?

Then Enig, who had known all the time that this would happen, started to scale the nearest chimneystack, adopting a courage which should become a legend if any were left to remember it. The brickwork groaned as he neared the bright orange pots ranked along the rim of the stack, the climber's actions reminding many of the onlookers about games which they had once played amid the branches of the trees. His shape cast a lengthening shadow across the meadow. Once aloft, he straddled the pots and called out his own name ... as if nobody had heard it before. The others called back and received only echoes for their pains. They wondered if he could see the sea around their island.

The stars were reborn in a still clear blue sky—but it was a darkening blue: a navy blue without the sailor's uniform.

The frost's colour, instead of depleting with the light, had seemed to grow whiter in desiccations of daisies. The grass crackled underfoot, as some of the onlookers heaved bricks from the prehistoric hidey-holes (except it was now known that "hidey-hole" was not the word to describe them) to another part of the meadow, to build their own—and Enig, who overmastered the campaign, still sat upon the smokestack which teetered further from true the more its foundations were unplumbed by the others. He knew, all knew, that, by night (and many now felt in their bones what was meant by the word "night") he was to die, death being the only real way he could obtain forgiveness for deception.

But he called loudly: How was he to have known they had wanted to be told? They had not asked him to tell.

But they had not known that there was indeed anything to be told that they could have asked him to tell, the others returned in answer.

If he had told, he shouted, they would have been miserable and not gambolled amid the sunbeams.

But at least they would have known (they retorted), and not wasted their precious time in false, longing dreams.

At that moment, the stack began to topple. As did the other stacks.

Many were crushed by the masonry as they rushed to catch Enig—which carnage was Nature's only sure way of allowing the new hidey-holes to have sufficient room inside for shelter.

By this time, the sky had become a shade this side of indelible inky blue-black and the survivors crouched within their newly created ruins ... shivers of cold thankfully masking the more insidious ones of fear.

Enig, who had laughed and climbed, could no longer be blamed nor even praised, simply because he was the only character in the legend who was fictitious. They had even forgotten his name, along with their own. But they remembered the island’s name. Ashmint.

Thus, they who thought themselves elves (or was it selves?) did not of course expect him to be holed up with them in the basements they burrowed—and indeed he wasn't. They made a few fitful forays into the cold wilderness in search of a nameless one who was lost, but they soon forgot the reason for their desultory quest; they thought it was purely for the stories that could be told later in the benighted huddlecot.

The new season felt both seamless and eternal.

But, wait—that had also been said of the previous season!

One day, the absurdity of it all might make them laugh out loud. But, by then, they would have forgotten what laughter might accomplish.



“The name was Isabel Menshu; she lived and told tales about Olga & co; about me, about you; about a man who could never have sex because whoever he chose in the world it would have been sinful incest, if not onanism; about the chattering island that is our soul; and about the sea that is salted to prevent us discovering its alcoholic potential.” Rachel Mildeyes (from and about MISCREANT IN MOONSTREAM)



“That’s not what it’s all about at all, Ogface!” “You don’t know what’s it about either, Hitcher-Lift!”

“Well, I can assure you that the story’s enigma is going to stay unsolved, even though I myself do sense its meaning or, in actual fact, its cascade of meanings...”

“GIMME GIMME GIMME.”

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz....”







EPILOGUE



All land was west of us.

The moon was low in the sky. We had more than enough wind to fill the raft’s makeshift sail. And we would soon chop more wood for use in extending our raft to cope with the increasing crew.

My wife was expecting our twenty-fifth little rinkling. The previous one so recent it was still in the glass jug. We were fleeing a plague...

And, yes, of course, there was also a man calling himself Oberon who had not joined us at the beginning of the shipwreck. He arrived out of nowhere, as it were, waking to find us around him.

He told us we would make land sooner or later, not west as we originally expected, but east of us. There was no need to change direction as, apparently, we had done so already before his arrival. He built rudder-tiller contraptions at the four corners of the raft which gave the rinklings much joy vying with each other to steer.

Oberon stropped our orange scissors upon his leather apron, then gouged knots from the wooden deck to let the sea breathe beneath us—or so he told us with an enigmatic air.

He told us, too, that this trip was for my wife to make a visit somewhere, after ten years of absence...

(If it had not been for the storm, I believe we would have made land eventually. Instead, we made wood for what seemed (at least to me) the rest of eternity. The man calling himself Oberammergau left us as suddenly as he had arrived, eyes blinking as he woke to nothing but endless sky overhead, instead of our beaming faces.)


TTHE EEND