Published 'Unsane' 1998

­­

Why Jack decided his job in life was to strip those young people he came across late at night in the midst of the city park roads, I can only guess.

­­

          He came close to doing it by means of mind power alone.  But when he got stuck in with fingers, he found he usually enjoyed it.  Not that it was really dirty work, because blood these days is more like water than old-fashioned earth.

­­

          He tore at his victim's outdoor clothes with his overgrown teeth, to get a good peel going;  followed closely by the more lingering work of removing the hugging vests and briefs; then meticulously unwinding the long turban of more fragile underfilm; finally gouging off the pith with fingernails specially nurtured for the purpose. 

­­

          The art was to spill as little blood as possible but, of course, quite a bit would seep from the body's pulpy marshland which lay under the various skins.

­­

          The face was the easiest area, for the nose usually acted as a good starting point, once it had been neatly slit down the bridge; the rest seemed simply to fall away from the cheeks, jowls and jaw, thus allowing purchase on the neck and, thenceforward, the rest of the ripe body.

­­

          With men, the privities were often best left to last.  Then, he would need sharp-edged tweezers and a strange implement that looked like a darning-needle with a point at either end and the threading-slot in the thicker middle.

­­

          True, he could have accomplished it all by telekinetics, but he preferred working his fingers to the bone.  After all, he was brought up on the ethic of hard work by a rather overbearing, if elegant, mother ... who, directly he had been born, had started worrying and teasing at her own frayed edges in the nether regions of her body.  It was as if she rather resented her body having been used as a vessel for the likes of him.

­­

          The day I renewed acquaintance with Jack Skinner, it was winter, so I was muffled up in several volumes of outer clothing.  So, if a description of me was relevant to what transpired, well, I was pretty well insulated against such an intrusion.

­­

          In any event, I could see straightaway that this was a situation I'd always previously assumed happened to other people: a deserted road that wound between shorn lamp-posts through the midst of a disused city park: its direction uncertain, because it did not appear to follow the lie of the land: and a dark imposing figure loomed. 

­­

          But it was no stranger but the boy I knew at school as Jack Skinner.

­­

          I had no idea this was the dreaded Flayer, because nobody had heard of such a monster.  Those poor people whom he had earlier pinked or strimmed or dove-tailed or slivered or filleted (or whatever was the correct word for his various acts of multi-dropped stitches and centrifugal acupuncture) had surely crawled into bushes off the beaten track, to hide their new-found ugliness: wrapped themselves into a ball and painstakingly died. 

­­

          So, such extempore surface surgery was not a familiar crime.  and nobody needed to question why neighbours often hung dirty washing on their clothes-lines.

­­

          Description still eludes me.  But I did shamble home, a shadow of myself;  I crept between the crisp linen sheets I'd only that morning laid and twirled myself into a mummy of bandages, with no loose ends.

­­

          As dream leapfrogged dream, I knew I would never be able to wake up properly.  But I realised that Jack Skinner still roamed the dark parks as well as through my dreams ... and although we were still both but mere striplings, we travelled together—which we do now as one—in search of those of you who do not take sufficient care of your appearance. 

­­

          My mother was always a stickler for dress sense, you see.  I can still remember the meaningful look in her eyes as she sat in the shuffly near-darkness of my nursery with a really huge-looking darning-needle—as she prepared to thread my finer part from its one-eyed head to its deepest root with imperishable cotton.  She was not, however, as possessive as some mothers, I'll be bound.  She loved her Jack with all the goodness of her heart.  and that was all that you were going to get...

­­

­­

... because I was determined to leave myself behind and fully assume the Jack Skinner rôle.  However, there came a day when Jack vanished.  and I was me again.  The first I knew in this new stage of my life was Mrs Panegyric.  That was what she called herself.  I've guessed the spelling—and the pronunciation.  I've guessed her motives, too.

­­

          She was a saleswoman by temperament.  I could easily imagine her on a medicine-wagon, propped up at the front poising a whip over a scrawny cart-horse—and the words Mrs Panegyric’s Haunting Melodies emblazoned on the side.  But her only wares were small jars (like containers for skin cream) filled with a sludgy grey liquid which, if you inhaled its fumes, supplied your head with hankering harmonies and tunes as soft and smooth and comforting as a beautiful woman's inner thigh: mellifluous musings of sound that were as distant from real music as faith was from doubt—and were independent of that particularly intrusive medium which made bed-fellows of ears and hearing.  Or that was what she claimed.

­­

          I met her at an Auction in the local Community Hall.  She took an immediate shine to me and, after a smattering of small talk, told me many secrets none of which, however, allowed me to plumb her true motives.  She was a side attraction which did not participate in the Auction proper—and I helped her sell the many little standing jars.  Not that she really needed help.  I was more moral support.  A sympathetic ear.  Or perhaps someone whom the potential purchasers of her purveyances knew and trusted.

­­

          The whole thing was a scam, of course, which was understandable, if not excusable.  Most people were so confused, they couldn't distinguish an elephant from a packet of tea.  and Mrs P knew that I knew that her “skin cream” pots of so-called music were a scam, since we were in near perfect harmony: two resonating souls who spoke with some bass rhythm underneath the small talk and the false secrets. 

­­

          She had promised me a share of the takings.  Nothing had been put in writing, but the likes of Mrs P exuded honesty.  That's why so many punters exchanged their recession-diluted earnings for her china phials of sweet sweet sound—without testing them first.  You see, we told the poor suckers that the full benefit would only come with the very first sniff and, for full enhancement of effects, such an act needed to be held in the quietness of their own bedrooms.  Subsequent sniffs would simply supply second-rate reverberations—but that did not matter since the first sniff would have its own snowball of echoes rolling from here to death's door.  What a hoot!  I pitied, yet scorned, the sorry simpletons who stashed their vaselets within inner pockets and traipsed home for a snort.

­­

          Despite such a sting, we had no belly-aching punters traipsing back to the Auction Hall.  Perhaps, they were ashamed of being gulled.  Or the punters were still studiously sampling snifters from their urnlings, desperate for the effects to start—and, by the time, they surrendered all hopes, Mrs P and I, like Jack Skinner before us, would have scarpered.  Or the punters are keeping it for a special day, like Christmas.  Or they intend it for a secondary sucker down the line.  Or a gift for a small child's special birthday.  Or, even, the punters were hypnotised by Mrs Panegyric, beguiled into honey-bee sounds of bewilderment, besotted into belief.  Or the damn stuff actually worked!

­­

          Yet, I lie because—as the auctioneer's repetitive exhortations to budding bidders minimalised the music in day's random noises—we did have one belly-acher who returned to our stall with his screw-topped vessel clasped in his sweaty palm.  Not a complaint so much—rather someone seeking clarification as to our claims.  He told us that his hearing had suffered from a noisy case of tinnitus for many years: a disorder to which, I understand, those more long in the tooth are prone.  He was indeed older than Mrs P and myself put together.  Having sampled one inhalation in his bedroom, yes, music had come, he said, as if the chronic tinnitus was being tuned by angels and remixed for harp—the organic clash and clangour and intermittent tinkles harmonised and transcribed in some heaven he hadn't believed existed, until today.  But, why did it make him also sense that his life in the here and now was a dream?  He had previously  trusted that reality was something you could touch or see or smell or hear.  Now he had a nagging doubt.  He sensed an encroaching non-existence of self.  Why had we not warned him about such a side effect?  Was it dangerous?  Had his tinnitus filtered the full effect?   Was it all caused by the poxy ointment we’d saddled him with?  Or, more likely, was he still suffering from last night’s skinful at the Duke’s Head?

­­

          He shrugged on realising he was talking to himself and slowly shambled from the hall.  Mrs P had already vanished, you see: going, going, gone, to the sound of gavel-strains.  But all this of course was now hearsay and I couldn't even guess my own motives, because there was nobody left to guess.  Naturally, I would have refunded the punter's money from my own pocket had I myself not earlier snatched a surreptitious sniff of the stuff, when Mrs P was off for a P.  

­­

­­

...and talking about bodily seepages, during those dim and dark days when mothers-in-law lived up to their reputation and lavatories were non-flushable and the stink-carts came to collect people's doings once a week from the creaking oaken tank where they were all depostited pro tem and history was no longer dependent on primary sources and ... well, let me tell the likes of you, there was one day I remember in particular.  (But who knows if I’m me or you or someone quite different, so bear with me, please, during such presumption of first person narrative power).

­­

          Well, whatever the case, I had a bit of a problem when I suddenly realised that the garden wall surrounding my house, at the height of a full grown African elephant, badly needed tusking over with lethal bits of glass (in case of burglars or pesky do-gooding ne'erdowells)—and during breakfast that very morning, I recalled the day before when I had inadvertently swallowed a jagged piece of dismembered tumbler (about as large as an old fashioned half-crown, if I'm not too much mistaken) that had previously been dropped into the frosted flakes by some careless, if not malicious, member of my family.

­­

          I had already evacuated my bowels twice (or was it thrice?) since then so, as you of all people can appreciate, I had no option but to rummage through the septic tank for it.

­­

          There was an input hatch at the top and another at the side towards the bottom for the lavatory-man to shovel it all out into his shit-pans.  I considered the most efficacious method was to climb to the top and gently lower myself through the hatch up there, into the soft consistency.  The tank had not been cleared for over a week (because the lavatory-man had been on sick leave) so it was all pretty stiffened together—but I managed to wedge myself down, with a sort of breast-stroke manoeuvre amid the squelchy friction, meticulously examining each turd as I went.  Some were conjoined and some had taken a turn past the mush-by date but, nevertheless, I was pleased to see that they were all mine or at least my wife's—pretty sure, anyway.  But, then, you can surely empathise with my shock upon encountering a whole clutch of them, like bad bananas: a dead giveaway that my mother-in-law had been sneaking a use of my lavatory! 

­­

          I had of course forbidden her to do so.  I'd told her in fact that the canal at the end of the road was good enough for any joblots from the likes of her.  and she'd promised faithfully to squat down there with her cronies.  But here they were, plain as a pikestaff, foreign turds in my tank!

­­

          I was quickly pacified, however, for, nearby, I found the shard I'd shat.  I wormed back to the top and raised it into the air with a flourish.  The sunlight caught it a real treat.  I felt good, as if the world was OK, after all.  Every one of God's creatures was in its rightful place.

­­

          I descended from the tank-top—a bit of a relief really, for the stench was becoming a trifle heady—and I quickly found a ladder, leaning against the garden wall at its most vulnerable point, climbed it and embedded the broken glass proudly at the top.  The first of many, I hoped.

­­

          But then I happened to glance towards the canal at the end of the road.  I was irritated to see a hippopotamus wallowing in it, as if it didn't have a care in the world.  I immediately scrambled down from the wall, without preventing a slight incursion upon the integrity of my left shin, ran to the house, ignored the irrelevant remonstrations of my wife  and telephoned the local zoo.  They couldn't understand what I was trying to say, as none of their mothers-in-law were missing.  Or was it me who couldn't understand them?  Or perhaps it's you who's the sucker, a bit like the man in the olden days who looked at a giraffe for the first time and said he didn't believe it at all!

­­

          There’s many a way of podding peas or skinning a cat or cleaning an angel’s face, but only one way of ending, namely death of all collectivities of consciousness.  In any event, the zoo never did answer my phone call (that bit was fiction) because, in actual fact, all I heard was polite muzak-while-you-wait at the other end for the rest of someone else’s existence.

­­

­­

­­

“To skin something, either apply a skin or remove a skin.  Both are equally valid.”—(Rachel Mildeyes from OCCAM’S RIZLA)

­­

­­

Published 'Sundown' 1998

We talked, having unexpectedly been thrown together and then abandoned by two friends ... to stand - or, rather, sit - guard over all the luggage.  And Sadie smiled as I exercised my skills of word power in her hearing.  And why I use words in an attempt to make Sadie and I as tactile as two soft dummies thrown from the nursery by an obstreperous toddler - rather than abandon us to the more two-dimensional gossamer of memory - is really because, like all people, I have pretensions of existence. 

            Whatever the case, the meeting was a snatch of time which turned out important in the context of my whole life or, rather, my whole life to date - having stretched on, it seems, for centuries since those events although, in reality, probably only about ten years, if at all.  Indeed, I was not present at the natural conclusion.  And the reason why our pair of friends committed suicide remains blurred; the answer surely lies somewhere amid the events surrounding the luggage alongside which Sadie and I were consigned - by those very friends called Trevor and Teresa - to spend several hours' vigil.

            If the plane had not had such a delay, we would not have been abandoned so long in idle prattling.  Our two friends had departed for a concert in the park which both were earlier sorry they were going to miss.  So the glitch in travel arrangements, shortly after we met up at the airport, was, in fact, a godsend for fifty per cent of the party.  But strikes do not often bring good luck and, in the end, this particular strike (of flight controllers) was no exception to that perhaps shaky rule.

            I cannot possibly remember the whole trend of my conversation with Sadie, nor the exact words used even in the bits I do remember.  She was one of those people who said things without first engaging the brain.  Not exactly fleabites of small talk, but flighty, without being frivolous - friendly, if flirty, yet decidedly unpromiscuous - precariously the sensible side of confused. 

            She spoke about the permutations of where we four had originally met.  She felt her face, as if her carefully concealed signs of encroaching middle age were breaking through the crushed aspirin camouflage.  Her teeth were peculiarly long, two in particular, but not startlingly so to warrant mention or, even, notice.  It is strange that I remember her teeth at all.  Sadie's teeth were, in effect, not her most striking feature. 

            As I trudge back through the foggy creeks of the past, I seem to visualise her face emerging from the bright-backed arena where the luggage of bereft travellers was scattered about like soft furnishings.  It was a face with which any man, especially one as sensitive as I thought myself to be at that time, could fall in love at the drop of a sun-hat.  Words defeat me, as usual.  It is best to let them have their head.  For, as a writer, without words, I am nothing. 

            Disrupted from my pointless revery, I heard myself talking.  "Trevor?  we knew him at University, didn't we?  Flat-mates and all that."

            "Same with me," said Sadie.  "I sat next to Teresa in maths - and we hit it off - somehow!  Next thing I knew - a holiday.  Not in contact for many years.  Talk about blind dates.  Still, I'm sure we'll get along like wild things.  You and me, I mean.  Nothing to worry about with the others.  Trevor's so easy-going anyway.  Teresa tells me she can wrap him round her little finger.  I like men I can get my teeth into - not the wishy-washy sort.  But I've had my fill of holiday romances.  We'll be able to swim and dance and things.  Nothing too heavy..." 

            Sadie pointed towards a couple who were kissing and cuddling nearby, making their luggage bend into shapes it was not intended to.  I nodded.  I imagined Sadie in bed.  I had a phobia of women who could potentially undress you to the bone (and beyond!) and, if there was ever one who could flay you to the soul, Sadie was the primest example, in my eyes.  I was thankful that she sympathised with my need not to get too heavy. 

            Neither of us, it appeared, were ready for a full-blooded affair.  That duty could safely be left in the hands of Teresa and Trevor.  Neither of us, too, would mind being makeweights or, even, lightweights.  As I nodded, Sadie smiled - and I winced upon sight of those two fine teeth as sharp as her painted finger-nails.   She must have taken my expression to be a sign of disagreement.

            "I hope you didn't think..."

            "No, no, of course not."  I was pleased to be able to shake my head at her inference.  It was good to be on all fours.

            Night came suddenly to the airport (despite the blinding lights), with people sleeping on their soft luggage or, at least, fitfully dozing, including Sadie.  The air clung more sultrily than ever, as if the sun had greedily retained the heat for itself whilst it was up and about, but now had selflessly relinquished such heat to its worshippers. 

            There were some shapes still unsleeping, pantomiming about - children too fractious at the holiday's delay, or dwarves slowly circling in apocalyptic games of ring-a-ring-a-roses, some silently tilting back and forth on human see-saws.  The various items of luggage assumed prehensility - but I guessed it was my imagination (or a dozing dream).  

            Later, when the other two were still missing, I took it upon myself to open Trevor's trunk to see if I could use it as a makeshift bed.  It had looked more like a coffin during daylight hours.  I peered into a chasm that swallowed me, a sleep too deep...

            It was daybreak by the time Trevor and Teresa returned from the all-night open-air concert, a little disappointed at having been part of a screaming teeny-bopper audience, whilst having originally expected a more sophisticated event.  They had little dreamed that their favourite group - from a heyday too distant to call anything but an elaboration of nostalgia - would stoop so low as to prejudice their artistic integrity by reconciling so many common denominators in such a brazen fashion.  However, this was completely forgotten when they discovered that Sadie and I had vanished, their two trunks with us.

            The rest of the budding passengers still lolled asleep across their own version of belongings, some with hard corners pressed into their lower backs like makeshift examples of mediaeval torture.  Even the highly strung children were flopped over like slaughtered puppets.  Planes turned over engines in useless attempts at take-off - or so it seemed, in the half-drugged realms of wingless Heaven to where Teresa and Trevor had long since drifted, after administering devices to each other so typical of their earlier romances with needles.  One old-fashioned puncture too far.

            Indeed, like Sadie, I was not present at the natural conclusion, so cannot be sure of what eventually happened, or even if they died at all. So, I have invented the final scenario, in the hope that I may hit on an odd permutation of truth here and there.  To wallow in meaningless words is far better than the strange slow-surging fluids that others of my kind usually feed upon.  I am now a fly-by-night in the guise of Sadie - ever since I slipped on her body as if it were my favourite comfortable dressing-gown discovered long-forgotten at the bottom of a trunk.   You see, the most satisfying, if hardest, task for the imaginer in the art of imagination is imagining the imaginer.

published 'Rubber Stones' 1997

Suzie's were the best parties going.  And the ones with the least hangover.

          In fact, I always felt that there was someone invisible forever tidying up behind the celebrants, so that any residual clearing-up following the final fizzle-out was often quite unnecessary.  When I broached this subject to Suzie, she shrugged, as if to say "don't look a gift horse in the mouth, nor even think about it", evidently fearful of it fading.  And, of course, all the actual guests themselves did finally fade - even those who had temporarily made shifty shake-downs on Suzie's floor rather than negotiate the hard bends towards their more rightful homes and plumper pillows.  And, yes, no hangovers.

          However, Suzie would later collapse for a day and a half in a crumpled huddle with her teddy, vowing never to run such a gig again.

          But, she always did.

          Suzie's shindigs were legendary.

          There was one I remember more than any other.  I was about the first real guest to arrive, as usual.  Well, I liked to help her in the preparation, skewering things for nibble plates, blowing balloons into suggestive configurations, cueing jive music on the tannoy, bleeding radiators, decentralising the heating, starting off piles of wintercoats on the beds upstairs, spirting toilet ducks under various rims, filling the hall with infectious laughter, unclogging the keyholes...

          Naturally, I'm only joking.  Somehow, Suzie's ground-plans were full steam ahead by the time I arrived, however ridiculously early I happened to be.  On the occasion in question, I turned up twelve hours in advance of the official party start-time and, even then, most of the nibbles were out on plates and the optics primed and the living-room cleared for the disco and, yes, I nearly forgot, there was one other even earlier than myself: Chick Louis.

          Canoodling Chick Louis.  I'm sure he must have had a crush on Suzie.  They were smooching in the conservatory when I arrived.  Her lipstick was smeared over her face, as if she were a naughty cat-girl caught licking  the jampot.  Chick Louis smiled guiltily as he unmanhandled her.  I think I must have arrived in the nick of time.  Poor old Suzie.  Still, she gets all she deserves.  A party impresario must learn to expect gatecrashers.  And Chick Louis was the worst gatecrasher of them all, not even having the courtesy to gatecrash surreptitiously.  A gatecrasher coming early was bravado taken to extremes, in my book.  But Chick Louis is a digression, I fear: almost a gatecrasher in what I have to tell.  Indeed, the subsequent events, at the widest stretch of the imagination, could not be laid at his door.  The trouble started much later and, if I am not too much mistaken, Chick Louis had already departed with a nibbleable floosie of a buxom persuasion, with whom he could exercise his canoodling to his heart's content. 

          No, I'm afraid Suzie blames me for what transpired and it is no good me trying to implicate Chick Louis simply by saying he was at the party, too.  Alibis are rare beasts, at the best of times, and masturbation is not necessarily the optimum method of obtaining one.

          Whilst I was trying to order my thoughts into some semblance of logic, Suzie was jabbing her pretty nyloned legs to the sound of the Bonzo Doodah Band - in the company of a gentleman I did not recognise.  Not that I could expect to be acquainted with the whole gamut of Suzie's entourage, yet it was a trifle weird that the man in question did not even look like anybody feasibly subject to human suzerainty.  Alien, no.  Foreign, no.  But, yes, with an otherness sufficiently other to make him seem someone different to what he actually was.  How can I describe him better?  He was someone else.  Yes, the chap was an else.  Come to think of it, I've met a lot of elses in my time.  Usually thin-lipped and beady-eyed with a tendency to undergrunt after every word.   And Suzie was definitely jigging with such an else.  So, she needed rescuing.  She was stricken with glee.  To be in love with an else is worse than onanism.

          I made a scene of intervening.  I already wore my wintercoat (retrieved from the pile on one of the beds upstairs).  I had been on the point of departing after making the odd curtsey of politeness or two towards the hostess.  Yet spotting her entrammelled by an else was too much for me.  I steamed into their grapple, all guns blazing, the Captain on my bridge cursing wildly at the suddenly storm-tossed seas around my hull. 

          The else simply punched a hole right through my face.  Didn't he know this was a gentlemen's excuse-me, I asked with an apology of a mouth.  If it had not been for the thickness of my wintercoat, I would have suffered injuries that might have laid me out messily in several different rooms.  Nevertheless, becoming a corpse was, at first, hangover enough.

          Yet now, I, too, could assume the role of an invisible little helper.  Suzie simply being unaware that my ghost became chief mischief-mender somehow added to the pleasure of clearing up for her after each bash. 

Published "Year 2000" (1997) 

For years now, roughly twice in each of them, Clovis has shuffle-footed his battered shooting-brake of a van into town  -  and he has always been struck by the large house silhouetted on the high hill. He could have sworn that the hill seemed higher with each visit, whilst the house itself remained in the same stage of distant dereliction.

The town was one not normally passed through. A traveler could only visit on one road and then leave by the same road. Clovis was not entirely certain, however, whether that had always been the case. His memory often played him tricks. He was half-con­vinced, moreover, that the place might have at one time been positioned near a short-cut to London. The town’s buildings were rendered in checkerboards, often with the doorways partially set below the raised street level, the pavements being back alleys in their own right The town’s name, Rosehearty, felt at odds with its nature.

Clovis had business in Rosehearty.

The populace wss unusual in its proclivity toward such confectionery as boiled sweets, fudge and chews - and indeed, towards saucy seaside bric-a-brac. Despite Rosehearty’s proximity to the coast, there never were any tourists to speak of.

Clovis was a free-lance confectionery salesman and purveyor of novelty knick-knacks and specialist prophylactics, bringing choice brands of sweets to Rosehearty, touring the corner shops (of which there were many more such shops than corners, in fact) and re-stocking the neatly arrayed jars with jaw-breakers galore. He was particularly intrigued by the type of shopkeeper to be found there. Some wore smudged overalls as if grown in them like loose second skins. Others were round-faced individuals who had plenty of confectioneiy jokes to share. Also there were narrow-elbow fellows who weighed out a quarter of lemon sherbets and then told the cus­tomer the story of how these sweets lost their innards in the last dandruff shortage. Inscrutable chumps in red-stained aprons did a roaring specialist trade in beetroot-flavored gobblers.

One particularly nondescript man by the name of Phyck sold throat sweets  -  which, indeed, looked like tiny throats torn from slightly less tiny living creatures. Clovis wondered who supplied Phyck with such dubious delicacies, because it certainly wasn’t Clovis, and, in any event, such ‘sweets’ should have been sold in a butchers shop. Or so Clovis believed.

And, finally, there was Clovis’s least favorite sort of shopkeeper; the squat, gleamy-eyed variety who did their business by dropping the sweets (<I>plop­ plop</I>) one by one into the home-made triangular paper bags, rather than in scoopfuls.

Most of all, however, it was the house on the hill that stirred the hackles of Clovis’s fancy. So much so, on his last visit to the town, just before his planned retirement from the trade, he determined to climb up to it, in the hope of selling off his closing down residues, gone-past, best-bys, long-term returns and remaindered runs.

The path was long and nettly, the underfoot being particularly treacherous. But, by late after­noon, he had made sufficient progress to spur him to the summit Eventually the house, itself in the typical local checker work, reared above the ragged edge of trees, a lugubrious sight indeed. The window shut­ters hung by the skin of their hinges. The roof appeared to sag around the protruding tent-pole of the central chimney stack.

He rapped upon the slightly sticky front door, which felt like hardened black treacle. He raised his eye-line to the top attic windows, suspecting that any inhabitants (if they could breathe at all this far up into the sky) were peering down to see who was unsea­sonably visiting their lair. But nobody could be seen, except the frayed frills of weather-worn curtains, flapping in spite of the stillness of the ensuing dusk.

For the first time ever in the vicinity of Rosehearty, he sensed the heady tang of the sea upon the roof of his mouth. He had never seen the sea when visiting the place, nor indeed, questioned its where­abouts. The inhabitants were not obvious sea people, merely close to the coast by accident rather than design. And, notwithstanding their loose tongues on other topics, they could never be drawn by outsiders to talk about the sea, nor, for that matter, the house on the hill.

Not that Clovis was especially interested in the sea, even when he had been reminded of it by the rare screech of gull or the relentless undergrunting of rather inefficient fog-horns (which could do, no doubt, with a suck of Phyck’s throat sweets).

There was no front door, after all, merely tangible darkness. Clovis walked through, realizing that his own body was past its sell-by date and anything could happen.

The house, stacked over with all manner of chim­neys, roosted like a battered hat upon the hill’s hump. Brooding above the town, it caused the inhabitants to feel more than just a little persecuted. Apparently, Shumble Hall, as the house had always been known, was an architectural shipwreck, but nobody could be certain about its condition since the path which an­cient maps once showed starting at the end of High street was nettled over.

“Perhaps the proper path is on the other side of the hill,” was one suggestion on a day when nobody had anything better to do than chitter-chatter. The speaker resembled Phyck himself.

“Don’t be silly, the sea is on the other side,” countered Wagger, the town clown. And Wagger removed a gobstopper, to allow freer speech, breathed deep, crystallizing the salt in the air (upon his outlan­dishly long nostril-hairs) ready for use as seasoning upon his Mum’s stew come supper-time, and then spoke of amazing matters. He pointed with his pipe. “Last night, when I was the only one up, the moon was wide open, rising like a yellow balloon above Shumble there.”

Most of his audience did not conceal their loud jeers, because all knew that the geography of the known universe made it nigh impossible for any moon (let alone a full one) to appear in that quarter of the night sky. But Wagger did not pull his punch-line. “I also saw a chimney smoke....” He blew a bubble of soot from the end of his pipe, as if in demonstration. “I saw it come out against the moon....”

“It must have been a ghost, Wagger.” The others guffawed, as Phyck tried to humor him. Then just as they split up amid the mumblings of dusk, lips still fresh from Wagger-baiting, they all saw a large blotched yellowy bubble slowly expand from Shumble Hall’s tallest smokestack. In utter disbelief, they shuttered their red-rimmed eyes with their lick-fingers, as they ducked under the checkered lintels for their lardy bread and acid drops. Wagger screeched like a demented gannet His words were garbled, but, they possessed the same rhythm as “There she blows!”

That night, whilst the townsfolk of Rosehearty moithered in their truckles, all they could hear was the distant swell of the sea. Wagger was out scouting for signs of life on the moon, which his mother had once told him when he was a baby was a blunt pineapple chunk. Phyck was spitting things out into his chamber pot.

Meanwhile, within Shumble Hall itself....

The ladies, flounced up in great variations of ball gowns, sported ruffs and frills. Their ribbed showy corsets led tucks and pleats towards the most accentu­ating bodices. The nodding bustles and multi-layered underskirts rainbowed the polished woods of the dancing floor. They also wielded gossamer wings upon their backs, woven with slender bones. Furthermore, tantalizing skeins stretched between each of these ladies like the finest sugar-glass: beating like fans to cool their ardor whilst they waltzed from one set of leering beaux to another. The brilliant chander­lumes shone along the avenues of bobbing dancers as they took reflective rhythm from an ensemble of elbowing fiddles, sparkling silver flutes and trem­bling drum-skins. Candy floss was being served at the bar where a contraption also extruded endless sticks of seaside rock. One silken-breeched footman crouched in the great fireplace, sending invitation messages tied to party balloons up the chimney.

Into the midst of such scintillations of sight, sound and sensuality, there tottered Clovis in yellow waterproofs, scratching his head and blinking his bleary eyes. He looked as if he had just disembarked from some godforesaken trawler in the Minches.

“Lummee!” he expostulated. “I must be deader than a door-nail, but I didn’t reckon on Heaven being like this. One moment a common commercial traveler and the next right up to my neck in this right old Malarkey.

Abruptly, Clovis’s privities began to itch and, with the habit of years, he mauled at his flies to staunch the irritation. Then, the big stand-up clock struck its own version of midnight! His sea-proofs disappeared in a flash, leaving him nuder than a fish -  to reveal broken glass embedded in his groin, jagged shards of it splintering into the tenderest parts. A fine lady, previously unnoticed by Clovis, skimmed off in a right old huff – since the glass condom slipper he wore was far too small to fit.  Or was it because she knew what sizeable pleasures she had missed with the real Prince Charming?

Meanwhile in the town below....

Wagger frequently kept watch upon the dark­ened hulk of Shumble Hall. He ruminated on next to nothing, whilst gently chewing what could very well be the end of the line in yellow bubble gum, and he blew a fragile shimmering globe of it, growing more red than yellow.  And the shopkeepers of Rosehearty dreamed of new dreams and old jokes, of other Hansels and other Gretels, amid the rather inefficient fog horns of their snores.

The Jinx

 Published 'Zine Zone' 1997

I'm sure you'll want to hear from me about certain events - events that probably affected you more than me - even if my word is easy to doubt following those lies I once told you, all those years ago, about loving you. Or is it that I think you need my side of the story before you get your own - if that were indeed feasible? Yet words seem to confuse issues. What we need are more smiles and kisses. But here goes with words.

Like myself, you no doubt tend to believe the latest pack-of-convincing-lies ... a belief which, in many ways, is like life itself. A mood is ever the current one, isn't it? And death the final certainty. Indeed our happiness at that time, short-lived as it was, did not entail, by necessity, eventual unhappiness.

I may not even send this letter but if I do, you may put it at the back of your mind where forgotten memories flourish. You see, I haven't lost my touch for words, however clumsy the words themselves are. Yet it is perhaps my words against yours, as it were, but can you believe either of us? You'll even doubt I'm writing this letter at all, despite my signature at its end. Is that the case? If so, it would have to be from someone else pretending it's written by me? I'd have to get the body of it word-processed from this rough draft to carry off that little ruse, there being no hope of forging my handwriting for such a length. Simply the end signature will take eternities to get the tails and loops just right, in any event.

No, you've no real confidence in being able to comprehend this letter? But you'll have to believe what seems natural by the time you've finished scouring its contents .All I ask is that you simply reserve judgment till the very end, when you can compare the signature to that appended to the previous missives I sent you - all those lovey-dovey ones with pierced hearts from the hey-day of our happiness. I expect your signature is a template of your unsullieable soul.

Anyway, do you really want me to nanny you in this way? I recall us exploring your mother's wardrobe, to see if we could find evidence of your father's strange hobby.  The smell of mothballs, the deeper-than-usual coat pockets, the dark dresses – all were signs of something like forgotten memories: signs in the end, of nothing. What we were really intent on finding, you and I, were your father's tie pins and cuff links, his wire rings and prongs - not to speak of his surgical umbrellas, steel enemas and iron mouth-stretchers. The stigmata represented his signature, didn't they? Every tail and loop in place and recognisable – even when we came to identify the stigmatised body itself, one gloomy autumn afternoon, in the bright mortuary.

"Did your father have plastic surgery?" was the official's first question, point blankly ignoring your evident distress and wondering how such a tall corpse could have fathered somebody as short as you.

"Plastic? No it wasn't - plastic," you answered, without really thinking, your eyes still locked upon the corpse who'd once given birth to you. The body's eyes were coppered. Nose bent out of joint by the fatal accident, w