UNPUBLISHED STORIES BY DF LEWIS FOLLOWED BY "NEMONYMOUS FOUR" REVIEWS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE.
A SLIMY STORY
Alan was ankle deep in something he’d’ve preferred to have avoided. But Alan, when he realised that - to reach Rhona - he needed to negotiate various spillages she’d left in her wake, decided to remove his sock and shoe with the aim of hopping towards her known whereabouts.
This wasn’t an alien land. Nor was it home. It was a cross between two worlds: the first being the sane environment of Earth where he’d been brought up and become accustomed to its logical causes and effects, the world of his earliest memories and subsequent education by similar creatures to him; and a second world, one with unpredictable motives (the motives of the environment itself, of its inhabitants, even of visitors to that world as they became gradually subsumed by the cultures infesting it). These two environments had merged in Alan’s mind and he had ceased to be aware of exactly which world he now inhabited. Was he at home or was he visiting? Rhona was common to both worlds so her presence here proved nothing.
Common sense told him that he currently inhabited the second world, the alien one, but it had gradually and imperceptibly gathered to itself characteristics of his home world, a world which he loosely called Earth. For example, he was treading over floorboards, listening to birdsong, and the wailing of wind in a chimney. Yet the floorboards were covered with a colourless slime about two inches thick. Even measurements were measured out by Alan in terrestrial terms. The substance that held his footprints intact was a gooey one, more akin to glue than slime, but slime was the nearest he could reach it with his newly restricted vocabulary. On Earth he had been a wordy soul, even been a writer of some literary note, but now, he found himself searching for the correct words for any situation. Call it slime, then. Though, back home, or fully back home, he would have called it something else. Carpet pile perhaps. Or dust. Or even rat droppings. But here, in his present predicament of place, time and perceived ownership of mind, it had to be slime. He did not even question it. The word was sacrosanct.
He could now discern Rhona at the far end of the hall. Except it may not have been a hall at all, since there was a four-poster bed somewhere along its length. She was recognisable as Rhona, since he clung on to a snapshot of her from Earth. He kept glancing at it and comparing the features there frozen of the beautiful woman with the more fluid version at the end of the hall. However, this method of identification and attempted self-assurance on Alan’s part did not allow comparison of Rhona’s respective voices. On Earth, he recalled it quite lilting and pleasant to hear, unlike some other women he had once known back home. Yet, here, he heard only slimy gutturals emerging from her mouth. Words formed in the throat or much lower and then set loose by the mouth, without any intervention of the mouth’s vocal implements.
“Alan, go away. I can’t… I am not the person you once knew. I am dangerous…”
Alan was not diverted by this perhaps autonomous disguise of her true personality. He knew it was Rhona, despite the slimy vowels and, incredibly, even slimier hard consonants of her speech.
He decided to respond vocally himself. He hadn’t attempted this before here in this hybrid world of known and unknown forces of nature. Not only did he have to dig deep for the correct words, he needed also to dig even deeper for a voice that would carry them towards Rhona. He noticed that she now lolled on the bed, beckoning him with the crook of a little finger. Fear was the most natural emotion for Alan to feel in these circumstances. But, unaccountably, he sensed a quite uncharacteristic courage building up in his loins, together with a passion and desire for the body he recalled to be Rhona’s. But first the speech, the one he owed her, to fulfil their mutual pretensions towards dialogue or conversation:-
“Rhona … I love you … I always loved you … nothing can come between us … nothing or nobody.”
There he’d said it. He sighed with relief … except the sigh was more a phlegmy wheeze than a waft of expended air. The toes of his hopping foot were now webbed with the consistency he’d once called slime. Seemed ages ago now. He needed to use his other foot to prevent unbalancing. An unblanced mind – as his surely was – needed at least the countervailing force of a firm physical stance. He placed the other foot – still shod – to the floor or ground. The sole of the shoe immediately dissolved into the same substance upon which it trod. As did the sock. But the flesh of his foot stood firm. That gave him more courage of conviction. He gave a sudden sideways look at the window in the hall. Through it he could see trees similar to those he’d seen all his life growing on Earth. And in Earth. As if life was a twofold process, outer and inner, and this applied to everything, even stone and wood.
By now – amid a further turmoil of ungrounded thoughts – Alan had reached the side of the bed, where the curtains had been pulled fully round. Rhona’s voice – still unpredictable and unrecognisable from his previous experience of hearing it – managed to thread its way through the curtains, but not without becoming tangled in further slimy appendages of tangible, visible quality. A voice that Alan could see negotiating its acoustic path towards his ears.
“We are not here at all. So go away, Alan, and nobody will know or see any difference.”
Alan scrratched his head – but felt only the slime that he assumed to be his own brain.
“Why not go away yourself, then?” Alan managed to say - despite the touch of his fingers to his own brain having managed adversely to affect the mind’s powers of thought as well as of speech. “Nobody would notice any difference.” These last words he managed to emit were more like birdsong than human vocalisation. He smiled. As he pulled the curtains of the bed aside.
And then one heard only slime gurgling, at the grinding interface of two worlds emerging through the deep throats and chimneys of untenable reality into the possibility of carnal, if not cranial, congress.
A single photograph floated to the floor.
Or through the floor.
CRIME OF PLENTY
He bowed low in deference to me – but then leant back so very far, at least as far back as he had just bowed forward, that his action eventually, in a split second, became more of a snub than a deference. His name was Count Innumerate.
I had married very young in life, amid the atmospheric eeriness of a ghost story, because the church was haunted with guests; even the priest wasn’t truly there. Just me and the bride, Angelica Braharniss. And the echoes of a stone vacuum within which christenings, weddings and funerals followed each other upon the crest of prose that served as their only vehicle towards reality.
I had met Angelica at a seaside resort, where most of the well-seasoned old-fashioned manners still prevailed, including afternoon tea dances and brass band concerts on the pier where most of the audience sat in well-behaved ranks of striped deck-chairs. Only a few uncouth holiday-makers were allowed as makeweights. We needed seasides not to be entirely perfect, for them to be seasides. Fish and chip cafes and low dive pubs with loud music were dotted about the sea front to give variety. Angelica had rescued me from one such dive, a pub called The Seventh Seal. It had a sign, that swung in the sea winds, depicting a seal clapping its flippers. She was only there by chance, that fateful day. She had been my own neighbour in the baby ward where we were both born twenty six years ago. So when I say I met Angelica at a seaside resort, it was a sort of second meeting, I suppose.
Which brings me back full circle to Count Innumerate. He was my childhood friend who blossomed from my imagination into someone who actually took on a real life and had his own thought-patterns that were not derived from my own. He grew up into a tricksy grown-up who set about telling me the facts of existence – grew up from an imaginary child-like friend into a real man with monocle, gold-topped cane and black cape, someone whose sense of humour (almost his whole reason for living) was to make fun of me with his silly bows and childish pranks. But, of course, he had always been childish. Child-like, too. As I say. He had christened himself Count Innumerate. I could not spell it. I can’t spell it now. But we are now both old enough to get the joke of the name, I guess.
Well, he told me once that if anyone murders someone else then the murderer and the victim whom he or she murdered are invariably people who were in very close proximity as small babies, so close that their encounter was tantamount to a full-blooded first meeting. Either because the mothers put the prams together somewhere, while they did some shopping, or the prams passed in the street, the babies thus catching each other’s tiny eye, or whatever. Or slept together in neighbouring cots within the same Maternity Hospital ward, as Angelica and I had done. I believed Count Innumerate. Despite, his jokiness, I knew that he never told me lies, although he may have told them to other people. And I believed, too, in his ability to know the unknowable such as the history of murderers and their victims. I trusted him. This begs the question why I then proceeded to marry Angelica Braharniss when I knew full we had ‘met’ as new-born babies. And to beg a question is a like a small seal yapping for its reward fishy biscuit.
Count Innumerate was my Best Man, of course. The church was a really old chapel on some hillside as far as possible from the nearest town as it was possible to be. But I’m jumping ahead. Angelica was no ordinary girl in her mid-twenties. She was a posh prostitute, someone with good breeding (it having been a private hospital where she was born -- and myself, too, presumably … based on the Count’s story of our mutual epoch of precise astrological harmonics -- if not based on my own memory, and, being an orphan, how else was I to know?)
But why a high-class hooker like her would want to visit The Seventh Seal pub in the mixed-fortune suburb of a seaside resort on the East Coast of England was something that only chance and fortune could possibly answer, and that only a particularly non-average case of the law of averages could possibly take forward…
I began to call her my Countess Immaculate. Angelica was not her real name, anyway; it was probably Susan or Joan, I forget which. When you live fast like me it’s easy to forget things. In the rat-race you only recall the dripping snouts. We had left the pub together, with my offer of sexual employment having been accepted all too readily by the beautiful woman, because, otherwise, how could I possibly have credited our love with love? The same word for two different things. Those seasoned in the arts of love will understand exactly what I mean, I’m sure. We had so much going for each other, the singular locking together (of our two as yet unquenched bodies) being unconnected with the supply and demand of its ignition. Equally with the scales of our erotic economies. A crime of plenty.
The only common denominator neither of us suspected were our roots in two babies’ chance meetings (over twenty years before) in a cottage hospital where our two mothers had met during their respective confinements. Why the doctors or midwives had decided, in their wisdom, to place our two cots together was probably due to the almost immediately consecutive timing of our arrival in the world through the fleshy tunnels of our mothers’ making. There was perhaps some connection between the proximity of the temporarily messy front vents of matriarchal flesh pointed up towards the receiving hands of human gods: placental birth-beds leading to the inevitable natural more bloody death-beds of our future witherings of departure: catalysts towards the enforced premature death-bed of one us in the future as caused by the other through an uncontrollable chemical reaction of mind as well as echoes or hauntings of that erstwhile messy flesh. An uncanny cause and effect masquerading as synchronicity.
“Scrap the words!” shouted someone at the window of my mind. This onlooker’s greasy locks and bent nose were doubled up by the strange refraction of the glass. Angles of incidence convoluted beyond any ratchet of reflection. It was doubtless Count Innumerate (in disguise?) paying a another surprise visit from the childhood dens of the past. Once my Best Man (on his last visit) twenty years ago, now a vagabond varlet girning faces just for the sake of ridiculing my wordiness.
“Where’s your cape, cane and monocle?” I shouted back, if minds can indeed shout. I suddenly descended my gaze towards my hands which I found burrowing into the neck of my wife. Sweethearts soon lose their gloss with the onset of wrinkles. But her skin was smoothing out, even now, like clay, under my moulding hands. Or like shirt-collars under the flat-iron. Suffocation or strangulation made a household art form. A domestic, as the critics would say, if not the police. With only one eye-witness: a real visitor from my imaginary childhood, or an imaginary visitor from my real childhood, it little mattered: his testimony would not hold water in any trial, unless it was held at a courtroom from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which case all bets were definitely off. His cane might indeed have been the wand that conjured decapitations and false memories…
I bowed down, as if I were on a stage. Only to hinge right back as Angelica Braharniss took advantage of this momentary lack of concentration on my part, with a huge upsurge of energy from the pits of her many stomachs. Cowntess Immaculate milked me so dry that I found myself back in that original cot (or imagined I did) where I once yearned so desperately for a mother’s ripened nipple. Arching my baby’s back and neck so that the lips of my toothless mouth coned up for the feed that wasn’t there. Wet-nurses were few and far between those days. And the doctor who thought he so kindly suffocated me had a monocle and black cape, except everything was in negative, and the cape was as deceptively white as an angel’s in Heaven. But he also croaked and clapped like a seaside circus act.
SUN, SEA & SORROW
Arthur felt inhibited. He decided to take a holiday by the seaside where, he was told, Bridget, his half-sister, had once lost all her inhibitions … and returned home with a baby in tow after a trip that took in all the local hostels as well as the hospital.
Arthur frowned. That child was now his.
Abandoned by Bridget, the child knew that Arthur wasn’t his real Dad … being a half-sister’s brat who was conceived one rainy night on a closed pier – to the sound of gurgling.
Waves.
Arthur found it difficult to shed his inhibitions … with a brat in tow. Most of the women wanted clean-cut flings without such appurtenances as a half-sister’s off-load.
Arthur used a bench to sit on the promenade – between two showers – watching the sun set over the sea. Or was it rising? He had lost all sense of timing. Bridget’s boy sat beside him pretending to cast imaginary fishing-lines towards the distant horizon.
“Trying to catch the sun, son?” Arthur asked.
The boy nodded. He had Bridget’s nose.
Unknown to both – an electric ice-cream van had drawn up beside the kerb. Raspberry rippling and magnums making melted chocolate sculptures between the two cones of the gurgling lady with the wafers.
Eventually … “Want an ice or a lolly?” she called to the large silhouette and to the small silhouette - from both of which silhouettes upon the promenade bench the sinking sun retreated with timely abandon.
One silhouette turned towards the voice – whilst the other silhouette merged into the darkness that gradually subsumed them together, sucking both towards its single heart.
“I’ll have a Melon Mivvi,” said the voice that emerged as a cross between a deep filling and a icy pipe … as if two throats spoke with one tongue-like ladle.
The ice-cream lady only had sorrow to keep her company; and, with no customers, she took a Lyon’s Maid from the deepest fridge of all … from the frozen core that knew no love … and Bridget waited for the sun to rise upon the uncrowded bench by the sea..
Waves.
TEN SECONDS TO LIFT OFF
Mistral, Sirocco and Simoom were three of a kind, lately unsure of their proclivities to other genders, yet certain about their need for love. At first, they tried living together menage à trois style, then – after several arguments concerning clothes-pegs – they resided in conjoined granny flats manufactured from old army billets, brought to one site like portakabins; and now, more recently, bivouacked betweeen the two Plateaux of Jullipbar where the serendipities of wind and breeze held sway.
Indeed, the three of them today flourished and had their being amid the gusts of life that thrived at the interface of two separate and quite different configuations of Jullipbar geography, although both these flattened-out swirls of contour and geomancy were each called by the single name Plateau … in the way that ordnance mapmakers talked those days about their terrestrial discipline of direction and status quo. Indeed, the esoteric art of cartography was easier, and the diagrammatic drawings relatively simple when the various terminologies of landname were kept to the minimum.
The very essence and personality of Mistral, Simoom and Sirocco – as well as their physique – were determined by the nature of the movement in the air they breathed and floated upon or, during their more human moments, walked through like stately society duchesses in a novel by Marcel Proust. The valley betwn the two Plateaux (one Plateau hot and salty, the other Plateau cold, wet and sandy) was where they sported their social graces, sometimes six feet above the ground like tea-cutter balloons, at other times rooted firmly in the ground like cos lettuces, and, yet, rarely, but certainly on occasions, striding along dressed in the expensive frills, embroidered fabrics and lace-trimmed veils of late 19th century France – albeit such finery was really sail-cloth disguised as high fashion.
One cold, yet intermittently hot, day in March, the endemic winds were literally damped into a neutral gear by the sodden down-draughts of air that could hardly be called wind at all. Mistral was preening herself, ready to speak out against the other two, of whom she was jealous: mainly because they were canoodling amid the fast stagnating atmosphere. The other two stared back at Mistral with scorn, as she was still able to float above the ground, whilst they, Sirocco and Simoom, felt their feet planting themselves like a late crop for mere peasants to reap. They were all on their way, as it happened, to their triangular bivouac near the cusp of the Pan-handle of Jullipbar … where further canoodling was promised, if they could but reach such privacy, away from any damp swirls of disease and dead lung that threatened to prevail in Jullipbar. Whatever the case, Mistral simply knew, in her frantic whirlwinds of heartache, that she was due to be ostracised. She was not flavour of the month. And whilst two’s company, three is definitely a cloud. She simply knew.
Smiling, and pulling her puff-tweed petticoats to knee-length, with the result of an exciting glimpse of her nicely turned ankle, Mistral strode on towards the welcome arms of the bivouac where she would pleasure herself for a while, to the sounds of regathering breezes threatening to turn the tornado of her emotions from taken-as-red to go-go-go-go-green. Whilst two’s company, one’s certainly never far away from a perfect paradise of equilibrium and meditation, amid the purring perfumed wafts of balm and peace that managed to thread the portakabin’s costly Venetian blinds.
The crazy geographers looked on at Mistral – with the pungent contours of age wrinkling their strange, yet quirkily pleasant faces, their watchful expressions out-racing the very landscape by more than a head and a mere nose.
Sirocco and Simoom, back on the Pan-handle, became entwined like runner has-beens. Ten seconds to lift off.
SWEET TEA
Perry was in quest of a flower, a flower as rare and as difficult to germinate as the Black Tulip. He lived monotonously in a land of mountains disguised as valleys. His fellow inhabitants loved flowers as they all enjoyed staring into buds, dreaming forth the potential petals in a spray of colour … in keeping with their idea of waking from sleep.
Sleep was thought to be black but possessing many colours that remained hidden till waking arrived. Only in hindsight, Perry knew, was sleep truly and unutterably black.
In the land where mountains were disguised as valleys, he sought the single flower that would be precisely symbolic of the very moment of waking from sleep, when its imputed blackness became its own backward fountain of colours, unfurling like fingerstall blooms.
Indeed, one day, the flower was there. Perry invented it. He awoke and spotted the flower as real as any real tulip in the vase beside his bed would have been … except this invented flower possessed colours he had never seen before. Being the inventor, so to speak, of this inscrutable flower – this flower with brand new colours, having unfurled itself like a fount of feathers in the land where mounts were vales – Perry realised that it lacked something. It lacked independent eye-witnesses. It also lacked a name. A name gave provenance. Every invention needed a name; needed a patent or label to grant it reference in the same way as mountains hereabouts were referred valleys, and veils piques.
He was now fully awake in the scheme of things – and he was a Perry as distant from sleep as to be impossible any longer to imagine its blackness … and he sipped the hot drink that his nameless companion had brought him in bed.
Ah, he thought, I’ll Christen the flower Sweet Tea.
“But that’s your drink’s name,” quibbled the nameless companion with sunken nose.
“But it’s also a good calling for my invention, isn’t it, my sweet?”
And he planted the stalk of the extraordinarily shaded flower-head into his drink and the follicles of bloom grew like rat-tails, much like unto his nameless companion’s hairstyle.
He stared at it and smirked – as ensued the gentle suckling noise of stalk’s raw end upon its own created teat of sweet tea.
Perry gazed from his bedroom window and saw a mountain rise like a moon with sunken seas, except this particular moon wasn’t yellow or white, but of unutterable black. In truth (if truth can be spoken in the same breath as fantasy), Perry had failed to invent a flower called Sweet Tea but had evidently invented an eclipse of man by a black tulip. He fretted and frowned at the thought of missed fulfilments.
“Now, now,” said his nameless big-chested companion with some fellow feeling, while stirring his tea with a finger-thin finger.
Man or moon, Perry felt becalmed upon a land-locked sea of sleep again.
THE SIX MUSKETEERS
OVERTURE I watched two of them mate, thus multiplying almost instantaneously. How many times this must have happened when I wasn’t watching is now impossible to discover. Not mosquitos, but similar, both in sound and look. I heard one of my French colleagues call them mousquets, spelt ‘mousquet’. Sometimes mousquetaire. Spelt ‘mousquetaire’, Not to get mixed up with mosque or musk, both with standard spellings.
FIRST MOVEMENT They shot from the hip, my partner told me, in a moment of drunkenness. Her drunkenness, not the mousquetaires! Drunk on duty was a sin, but in view of what we had to endure, excusable. I didn’t understand the expression ‘shot from the hip’. A proboscis or something I imagine ought to be called a proboscis, spelt as one would expect the dictionary to spell it, and whether I got the meaning of the word quite right adds another layer of doubt – but whatever-it-was stabbed out and impregnated another of its kind with a rapier-like motion or as if wielding a freshly rifled bayonet fixed with a blade. And, straightaway, a gummy scum stretched between the two creatures, followed by another smaller creature emerging through it as if taking an audience call via gluey curtains towards some stage of life.
This was a dream yet not a dream. Such dreams are spells cast by some confused magic of the mind. My partner in real life never gets drunk, for a start. But it was one of those dreams that you know is a dream at heart but you can’t wake up from it and if you did you are deadly afraid that you will not find it a dream at all but a real life that you cannot avoid.
Many mousquetaires, with filmy wings, were now coupling across the floor of my dream. One of my French colleagues was pointing silently at the geometrical progression of the sliding bodies as their appendages spurted - and layers of infolding curtains erupted like textured lava to reveal yet more of their kind. An insect swarm, an insect spawn, a thick honey river of sex and softly batting wings. Why I needed colleagues at all, let alone French ones, to accompany the action in my dream like a background music of crossed tongues and double entendres was not within the comprehension of my dream self. I used my eyes to appeal to my partner to see if she could solve the situation, so that she could wake me up and then I could be in bed with her again where we had both started the night.
SECOND MOVEMENT And it happened just like that. Imagine the surge of relief as I opened my eyes on the familiarities of our bedroom scene. My partner snored beside me – perhaps still involved with rescuing me from my dream, or from her dream, or from our shared dream. The room was floodlit with the moon. One of those clear skies which come once in a Winter season, when the snowclouds disperse fleetingly and leave a gap of mock daylight in the night. I gazed at the bodies on the floor. Four of them. Dead bodies by the appearance of the wounds they sported but, nevertheless, bodies that appeared to move. Almost lovingly upon and among each other. Only four of them, however, dressed in some historic garb that reminded me of a swashbuckler by Alexandre Dumas. How I could rationalise all this with real life was beyond me, though rationalise it I did. How I reconciled all this with the context of our bedroom was impossible, though reconcile I did. It was like a spell. Three musketeers had become four. Come to think of it, there had always been four musketeers, if you counted D’Artagnon as well as Athos, Porthos and Aramis. A mistitled novel. A mistitled story.
THIRD MOVEMENT “It doesn’t sound plausible.”
“What?”
“Your dream.”
“Dreams are never plausible.”
“No, I mean not plausible enough to be real life.”
“What, you mean this real life?”
“You said the title was wrong. Real life doesn’t worry about titles. Only make-believe needs a title. Make-believe needs a label to make it real. A suspension of disbelief that is called a story that people read and believe is real life. They expect it to have a title”
I looked at her as she spoke. She was talking to me and – on the face of it – I was talking to her. My partner in real life. She meant well.
FOURTH MOVEMENT Dreamtime came before I could even give this version of my partner a reality check.
I had by now left behind the four men on the floor – those corpses that coupled with each other. It was a scene far too nasty for me to countenance, especially to consider as my own dream. If they were representatives of real life, then at least I wouldn’t be responsible for their existence on my bedroom carpet. Only if they appeared in a dream that I was dreaming would it be possible for me to take the blame: that would mean they came from my head: or been given to my head by an external force to dream about. But it was still inside my head.
If they existed outside my head – as they seemed to do (on the carpet) – then I was absolved.
Such a puzzle or predicament of the realities and dreams that I tried to fathom and compartmentalise was soon in the past – as I returned to the dream where my French colleagues smiled as they picked through the remains of the mousquetaires (same spelling as before) as if they were a scientists dissecting specimens. My partner – fresh from a conversation we had just had about plausibilities – was also there with me in the same dream. But she looked inscrutable. I could not predict what she was going to say. I couldn’t predict anything about her in real life, come to think of it. So the dream was just a layer too far beyond any understanding of her intentions. We had been together for years, but never married. We were a good couple, though - made for each other. But I was at a loss most of the time. As with women in general I was ever in a pea-souper of a fog about what made them tick, especially her.
My French colleagues ignored us and our predicament. They were assured that this was their real life at least and not a dream at all – and they proceeded with the intensive care they were now administering to the mousquetaires, believing them to be, I assumed, a rare species of terrestrial life that needed preserving. Dream or not, Natural selection was in full sway, and these scientists were determined to defeat Natural Selection by salvaging any remnants of life in the sex-exhausted creatures, bringing them back to life, even at the cost of bending the rules of biology and good sense. Then, I suddenly realised – the mousquetaires were not land life at all, but sea-creatures, beached in our reality, dry-docked as it were: and the mating process in which they had just finished indulging had ended up almost killing them because they had not possessed their natural habitat wherein to conduct it. The sea no doubt acted as a lubricant for any frictions involved. Perhaps it was a different sea to the one I knew. A more oily, thick and turgid sea, where refinery-rigs stirred rather than dredged or dug.
The Scientists, by now, were wrapping the central torpedo-like bodies in the gossamer wings the creatures had earlier sported prior to coupling. Another figure – and I was astonished to see it was my partner – had been given the job of carefully detaching other appendages from their central bodies. Call these appendages muskets, for want of a better word or, if a better word existed, it would bear a more cumbersome spelling. These ‘muskets’, then, came off quite cleanly, or with just a smidgin of mucus still clinging to their triggers. Each had a blade-like super-appendage: an appendage of an appendage, as it were, which was left intact. My partner seemed to be putting these bayonet ‘muskets’ into pickling jars.
FIFTH MOVEMENT “What’s in those jars?”
I saw a shadowy hunched figure in the residues of moonlight cast by our bedroom window. I had woken, it seems, but the continuity of the dream was buzzing through my head. I had not yet noticed the snoring lump by my side. Otherwise I would have inferred that was my partner, and not the see-through shape by the window. That shape indeed was replacing a lid on one of the pickling jars and she swivelled – like a shop window mannequin suddenly come to life – with a plastic creak. She bore an iron mask and the voice was muffled into indistinguishable syllables by the clamped mouthpiece. Or so it seemed. But I deciphered the words for my own purposes;
“It’s a stick insect … or a stickleback … fixed in aspic.”
I’m sure none of that was said but I replied as if it had been said:
“Why were you dreaming about insects in jars just now?”
I ignored the fact that a stickleback, I knew, was a tiny fish; one that I collected as a child in jam-jars from the Walton-on-Naze backwaters. It did not seem to fit the context. Nor did a stick-insect, for that matter. A dream’s context seen in hindsight was never easily rationalisable or reconcilable. But here I was suffering from foresight of hindsight! Not, in any shape or form, a comfortable disposition to be in.
“I wasn’t dreaming. You were the one dreaming,” replied the fast diminishing shape by the window. Even the iron-mask faded or became insubstantial: leaving the silhouette, for a split second, of a flower, something like a tulip: and, being a silhouette, like all silhouettes, it was black. Only shadows are grey. Silhouettes have the deepest black despite their one-dimensionality.
I and my bed-shape partner joined the other four on the floor, making six of us. We drew our muskets and fired. Leaving only the tears.
CODA We were collected later as wrinkled drape-silhouettes (folded together like a patchwork quilt thrown off the bed) – collected by the French scientists for later investigation and dissection. They discovered at least one of us had a hip replacement. They mumbled of mosquecristos as they counted them and one scientist wrote notes; the spell-check would come later when they were processed.
TEN BOOKS
Hazel knew there was something special about Bill. She’d been in and out of affairs since the year Dot left her for another woman. She still felt yearnings for Dot and the type of sex she (and other women before her) had once provided; but now men seemed to possess more of what Hazel began to teach herself to need. Bill was the umpteenth candidate to the nth degree: and infinity was indeed the target for which she aimed in her emotional and physical complexities of any momentary desire or lust.
Bill was coming for dinner, bringing, he claimed, a present that would give her more than just love. After all, he said, you have love already, you have me.
She had spent most of the day preparing the menu, but couldn’t, it seemed, actually get down to the shopping for it -- let alone the cooking. She had been interrupted at one stage by a call from Dot, wanting to know if she could come to a hen party? No, Hazel had said, Bill’s coming round tonight. With a present? How had Dot known to ask that? A peculiar question. You’d’ve expected her to ask about Bill himself, if she were a true friend, not whether he was bringing a present, which, of course, he was indeed bringing, but that was a side issue to the relationship and to the forthcoming dinner, except it wouldn’t be a dinner at all, unless Hazel got her skates on and putting a halt to Dot’s call would hopefully be halfway to accomplishing at least that.
Did Dot know Bill? To Hazel’s knowledge they had never met. Bill, Hazel had always assumed, was just a name to Dot, someone Dot simply asked after before she immmediately went on to talk about hen parties and so forth. But Dot must know something about Bill more than Hazel had told her. Why the present question, otherwise? This nagged her as she prepared to ring the supermarket to see if any of their delivery vans were free. Except she pressed the wrong button on her mobile menu and got through to Dot again. Did she want to go to the hen party, after all, Dot asked. No, Hazel claimed, but she wished somehow she was going to the hen party rather than having all this worry about doing dinner for Bill. The doorbell went. Abruptly. Surely not Bill already. Curtains for Hazel if it was.
**** It’s now much later. Bill had arrived soon after the groceries were delivered. The groceries had been the earlier doorbell, Hazel having forgotten -- amid all the fuss created by two people from her love life in unexpected and mysterious cross-section -- that she had already ordered their delivery. A nice lad from the check-out carried two large banana-boxes of provender into her flat’s hallway and left with a tip and two winks, as if Hazel and the lad had opted for winking at each other before waiting for the other to do so. Bill was much older than this nameless delivery lad, of course. Ah well, no point in hankering after younger flesh, and Hazel waved the grocery lad goodbye from her window as he slowly drove off in the supermarket van.
It was then she noticed that one of the banana-boxes was not full of groceries for the forthcoming dinner but contained ten books. Being abruptly followed by a quirky tune on her doorbell which portended Bill’s premature arrival, she did not have time to investigate these books, despite knowing, without counting them, that there were ten.
She used what few groceries had been delivered in the other banana-box to rustle up an emergency snack for Bill who had not only brought a present but also the customary bottle. They drank the bottle and Hazel put his present aside on the tallboy for her future attention. Waving goodbye to Bill was a peculiarly long drawn-out affair as he had mixed waves with attempts at kisses. She was rather pleased to see the back of him as she needed to investigate the books in the box. The ten books.
Bill’s present remained on the tallboy for ucounted time, and Hazel on the shelf for even longer. Bill never returned. If he couldn’t manage to plant a kiss on Hazel what else couldn’t he manage, he must have wondered. And Dot never invited Hazel again to any of her hen parties, which loud and wild events seemed to be happening more and more as the years went by, judging by the shrill catcalls that echoed outside Hazel’s flat every single night about one a.m. onwards.
The books that the inscrutable lad from the supermarket had inadvertently left in her hallway instead of half the ordered groceries did prove to be a consolation prize for Hazel rather than a cabbage on Double-or-Drop. They were books she firstly began to puzzle over as they were blank, except for squared-off areas for each date in the future. But why only ten? Surely, she would need more than ten. The first book started on the exact date she received the box of books and lasted to the end of the current year. The others were for the whole of the nine subsequent years, each with carefully squared-off areas of blank paper for each date, even Leap Year gaps.
She wrote in the very first square in the very first book: “Saw Bill today. And a lad with a rare smile. Dot rang. Not sure whether she will ring again. Bill left a present. It is not a very interesting present. Tomorrow I shall widen my expectations of life.”
***** The books were tantamount to conscious. They woke in the deepest watches of the night. They often saw Hazel clamber upon a shelf that had been manufactured from darkness just above the skirting-board.. Then, later, as she began to shrink, they saw her attempting to climb the tallboy itsef -- to reach a dark packagey shadow on its top. They felt empty. They pretended to imagine redness articulating into spidery joined-up meaning across their own blanked-off square areas. One by one they filled up. Till the last one to see Hazel pretended to imagine a grey-haired deliverer and then no more. A collection, perhaps, rather than anything else.
The last bill had been paid. And year dot was still aeons away, great empty expanses of duration for others to fill with their own messages to infinity without really understanding what sex acts were needed to flesh out the present.
Hazel had been her own gift to time, perhaps. Taken as read, writ large in blood. **** The last square, the last entry: “Had another dinner party. Bill came with another present. I let him kiss me this time. Perhaps there is more to him than meets the eye.”
STRONG COFFEE
Drinks were a business plan that Thomas and Joanna considered could be quite profitable both for hot and cold weather fronts, due to the shortage in liquid assets caused by the Government squandering any balance between exports and imports coupled with miseconomies of scale currently rife in the brewery chains. They could corner the market, of course, before any long-lasting factors took hold upn the situation. Indeed, it was during a few months of temperate weather and text-book conditions of trade that the couple started stocking up on all manner of drinks, weak and strong in flavour, fizzy and still, hot and cold. They eschewed thick drinks like soup or slush puppies – since a drink worth its salt could be sipped or threaded through the teeth past the tongue to slake the gullet’s thirst, but not spooned. Above all, it should be able to be sluiced to the body’s lower levels like a swigger downing a yardarm of brew in one fell swoop, if definitions of ‘drink’ were worth anything at all in the scheme of things. A drink was a drink and the couple (who we know as Thomas and Joanna) thought that diversifying into all variety of stew, canned soup, cream &c. would merely blur the focus of market forces vis-à-vis their business plan. Dilute it or drown it, in fact. They needed to distill not corrupt or de-couple tastes with off-centre products that were neither foul or fair, nor drink or non-drink. Come the next season and the hoped-for weather front and the Government’s customary cyclical cock-up of supply-and-demand, they set up their stall in Buckminster High Street, offering cups of many different beverages to the passing trade … but when a gaggle of fun-runners snatched the cartons at full stretch of life & limb without paying even a sou towards its cost, there was a certain amount of head-scratching amongst the couple’s debriefing conferences. Thomas and Joanna did have variations and under-the-counter drinks like hot chocolate and bovril and ovaltine and hot vichyssoise and catchy songs that accompanied their launching upon the market-stall of their head office – but trying to palm these off on unsuspecting lager-louts on the way to the pub was not conducive to much. Of course, the business eventually fell flat. They had somehow forgotten that most of their potential customers preferred alcoholic drinks and so their market research (slipped past the bank manager in a moment of inebriation) must have been next to useless – or they had actually drunk most of their own stock dry before selling it. As an unexpected front encroached upon Buckminster’s boundaries, Thomas and Joanna toasted each other in strong coffee, with loud gusts of laughter. No point in crying over spilt profits or split sides.
THE MORNING AFTER
He looked in the mirror. A shaving one that magnified his pores, but seemed to leave his eyes alone. Or were they always such small, squeezed-up apertures with red whites and completely no pupil. He’d never learn, it seems. A skinful last night, and here he was examining the ruins of the night. He stuck out his tongue to see if it was discoloured.
No tongue.
He tried to poke hard with muscles at the root of his mouth, but they merely had no flag with which to wave. Panic was about to set in. Except he was yet insufficiently awake not to discount a drunken dream. Binge-boozing was like that: intoxication even to the very bottom of the mind’s imaginings: voluntary or involuntary hallucinations of a mismatched sleeping and waking, as the body itself tossed and turned amid the runkling covers.
Bingo! There was his tongue. Poking out like a flat fleshy fish flapping for breath.
No, that was the dream. The reality was tongueless. He tried to stir the cloudy frosty air with an imaginary flannel of yellow meat. Breath was in gusts of wild smoky terror at its missing friend the tongue. Terror is more terror with regard to nothing than it is to something.
His eyes now bulged, the pupils popping out like black peas, the redness in the whites brightening to a tone of scorched scarlet.
Even the shaving nick under the nose which had left a scar from the previous morning seeped a renewal of blood. He put a tiny tear of toilet paper upon it, creating a red archipelago upon the tissue which he even recognised as real geography given the calmness to recognise anything.
Scar tissue was the least of his worries. Yet patches of his skin were so thin, the skin itself seemed to threaten bursting the banks of its blood dams. That surely was imagination.
Tonguelessness was real. Thoughtlessness came to his rescue. If you didn’t understand anything, put it out of your mind, he thought. And he staggered into his living-room where the floor was scattered with spent bottles of hard spirit. He waded through thousands of them, it seemed. Clunking and dribbling beneath his feet. He slumped on to the couch – only to find the clunking magnified manifold, as he tried to make himself comfortable amid the rounded arches of funnelled glass. The neck nozzles intertwined like stone. snakes. Except the description was not on the tip of his tongue. He had more worries than verbalising the terror of the moment. Terror has no diary, as Terror cannot write.
This ‘morning after’ was so severe, it seemed, he actually wondered if it were after death itself. After was a peculiar word, one he couldn’t quite pronounce in his current predicament. The f became an s and the and ah & er a blur of groan. Words mixed and matched with foreign languages so foreign they were from the voices of aliens with speech patterns only possible with a completely different geography of the mouth. Human geography could never survive the ultimate bodily self-degradation as the binge drinking he had last night imposed upon his most valuable ally: himself. His self. A self that now floundered to gain a grip on reality.
Without a tongue, anything was possible. Words were said, in his hearing, that would never otherwise have been said. Words concocted from the very air around him, as the bottles clicked and clunked semi-articulately in rhythm to the still vilely gusting breaths of his body’s metabolism. The room compensated for his own inarticulate grunts and tongueless mouthings, by itself speaking through the natural settlement of its walls and the automatic creaks of its furniture as the cushions and springs recalled bodily inhabitants from the past. The man’s wife. And friends. Now no longer customary visitors to the room that now fondly remembered their visits. And the room thus spoke of the degradation with which the man had shamefully tortured his body and mind the previous night. This had been a sight all the room’s contents had witnessed in the very room which thus spoke of his wild cavortings of intoxication and later despair.
Morning itself spoke.
“Morning” it said.
And, in response, he tried to make small talk about the current cold snap in the weather.
Tried so very hard to enunciate the tiniest possible word. But he was too cold to speak … or even breathe.
HAWAIIAN SHIRT
I read 'Pilgrim's Progress' by John Bunyan. It just seemed the right book to start with. I'd spent most of my life reading non-fiction and biographies, believing this to be more worthy than reading fiction. Fiction isn't real. Therefore, fiction is a waste of time. But, then, I decided: out of the blue: to give it a try. And 'Pilgrim's Progress' seemed the right place to start. I was a sort of a pilgrim myself, embarking on a rite of passage towards a something that never happened or didn't exist.
Nobody had told me, you see, that even non-fiction was a concotion of misappropriated facts leading to a similar altar of untruth. History, biography ... all networks of criss-crossing lies. Fiction was no different.
From Bunyan - I literally leapfrogged all so-called literature such as Shakespeare and Dickens - and started reading a Private Detective novel featuring an investigator who was known for his Hawaiian shirts. One shirt in particular - highly coloured, wearing it time after time. Its armpits hung out, but you didn't notice under his wide-lapelled baggy suit.
Amazing coincidence. This novel I had picked out at random as my second step in the Ways of Fiction happened to feature a central character - the investigator with the Hawaiian shirt - who was actually called John Bunyan. How did the author of the novel *know* that I would be reading this straight after 'Pilgrim's Progress'? Such things only happened in fiction...
I worked out who committed the murder before the Private Dick did, I'm proud to report. It was as if I simply knew - or, incredibly, that I was truly *there* watching events as they unfolded. I witnessed John Bunyan as he questioned various wide boys and coves who inhabited the Slough of Despond that some call downtorn Dark City.
Bunyan even attempted to finger me - the reader of the book.
I escaped to another city - where I live now. Tomorrow I shall start another book. Not sure which one yet. Maybe a Stephen King. Maybe a bigger, blacker, older book. Instead of a crown of thorns on my head, there is a garland of Pacific flowers.
A PIE WITH THICK GRAVY
A pie with gravy didn’t make much sense to George – unless, of course, the gravy had spilt from the pie inside. Did meat generate its own gravy or was gravy forced upon it by use of dissolving Bisto or Oxo in boiling water? Meat came dry - its natural state, with the juices burned off in cooking. So the gravy was false dressing. A sauce in all but name. Like Chicken Tonight or Rogan Josh. The pie in gravy seemed to imply that the pastry itself exuded curds of brown sweat, rather than from the meat inside the pie. The crispy pastry coating of the meat was indeed swamped with gravy – as George crossed his fork with his knife and dug in. The gravy slowly began to vanish into the pie’s wound that George had gashed. It was as if the pie itself was swallowing the gravy – or taking back into itself something that it felt belonged there. George made another, this time more careful, incision to see the pie further gobble down the thick gravy. The pie had a live creature inside – despite the cooking. This was George’s next thought and he was frightened. The crispy pastry coating was starting to crack all over like an earthquake as whatever was inside continued to thirst for what it considered to be its own belongings: the lifeblood that was loosely called gravy. George could see porous membranes and gristly marrow-bone mouths eager for each gooey gulp, twitching with each satisfying quenchment of an eternal famine that the pie’s innards had suffered. Evidently, the cooking had not killed it, but woken it. The snout was the first definite proof as it poked through the decorative fork-holes in the pie’s crusty roof. Sniffling around for further doses of the thick gravy. George’s gorge rose. He was about to be sick. He was sick. And the snout fed further upon the stream of diced carrots that had emerged from George’s mouth upon the quaking pie. George was being milked to the bottom of his stomach – and beyond to where deep bowels of even thicker gravy lurked.
nemonymous four
2005/6 REVIEWS OF THIS 2004 ANTHOLOGY WILL APPEAR HERE SHORTLY.
Followed by some links to its previous reviews.
