FROG IN ASPIC

Published 'Parlour Papers' 1994

I usually went to bed in my body.

 Dreams were like swimming through gluey blood and skin, desperately trying to keep my head above the curdled folds of flesh.

 By day, however, I became a ghost.  I left my home at home.  Along with all the other commuters from dream to real life, I sought a working train which would take me, without mishap, to an end-of-line station - where I could latch on to an individual of my random choice and haunt its bodily home which it had brought to work for the duration of the increasingly endless day that I would have otherwise had to endure.  I preferred irritation to boredom.

 A he today, I was soon to gather.

 Using the windows at the front of his skull, I could peer down at the papers on which he was currently working.  But, what was that?  He kept looking at a young female creature a few desks away in the office - perhaps he wanted to ask her out.  I wouldn't have truck with such peccadilloes, so I forced the muscles at the back of the neck to relax, so that we could return to the proper business at hand.  However, I misjudged the neck's elasticity and it abruptly flopped over, as if it were hinged at the middle.  The head thumped the desktop, knocking over his cup in the process, the contents of which, luckily, slurped across the green blotter-pad - with a strange geography of stains.

 "Are you OK, Bob?"  Evidently, the voice belonged to Bob's boss, unseasonably released from the manager's office aquarium.

 For the rest of the day, I left so-called Bob very much to his devices, if not on his own.  After all, he knew best in the circumstances.  But it <I>was</I> more than just an irritatingly hairy ride on the flesh fairground.  I had no taste nor discrimination when choosing hosts and companion minds for my daytime existence as a benign parasite. 

Bob had a headache.  Since leaving the train which had taken him from his home in Coulsdon to London Bridge Station, a feeling of nausea and heaviness had seeped from the attic basin to lower sumps of thought and feeling - not that I would have expected Bob to be in tune with such a way of describing his unaccountable spiritual predicament.  He shook himself like a sopping wet mongrel.  This must be what a woman experienced at the wrong time of the month, he found himself thinking without really thinking.

 The office lighting blared.  Since the Firm had decided to move, Bob simply knew that he would never be able to endure those air-conditioned office wastes.  A one man Sick-building Syndrome, that was what he feared he was destined to become.  The light fitments were dysfunctionally concealed behind false ceilings.  Each disorientated department had its own identical 'bay', where the open-plan design caused confused faces to scrutinise each other across the wide clerical areas, rather than knuckling down to the core work.  Line-management sat behind tinted glass partitions, not unlike frogs in aspic, sporadically blinking as they kept watch on their office 'young'.

 Bob considered himself too old to be watched.  Yet, today, it was not age that irritated him, but thoughts that kept coming unbidden to his mind.  Usually, he accepted his lot in life: poring over meaningless actuarial statistics of mortality and morbidity - whilst growing towards the old age pension that waited like a little yapping monster at the end of time's telescope which he often held up to his eyes the wrong way round.  Today, in short, he saw everything for what it was: close up: in skin-pore detail: the girl's pimply face...

 He studied the coffee stains which he had so carelessly prevented from spilling.  He felt the back of his neck, discovering nodules he never knew were there.  The green blotter had already dried into ... a face ... yes, that was what it was ... a configured face ... not a pattern of islands which he'd never thought it was in the first place.  As in those scribbling, doodling childhood games, he added a few biro lines to the otherwise haphazard blotches, smuts and smudges ... then, slowly, there gathered the features of one he recognised from erstwhile forgotten dreams.  Unaccountably, he wrote "Weirdmonger" underneath, finishing the word with the automatic flourish of a signature.

Bob suddenly sensed a load lifted from his mind as he reached London Bridge Station in the evening.  He had already struggled across the Thames, his legs like soft iron, a hand in his pocket to keep in place a hastily prepared ad-hoc nappy against his incontinence.  The other faces that floated with him through the adhesive air turned to neither side, whilst he kept a weather eye open to all quarters, expecting the worst.  Distant Tower Bridge was almost sentient as it reared from the screaming orange oils of the sunset like a pair of siamese-twin creatures that cantilevered in slowmo progress through the slimy river gunk.  Over his shoulder, barely discerned through a hairline crack in the back of his skull, was the gold-pulsing dome of St Paul's Cathedral, as if it were flinching from a  ghostly swarm of second-world-war fokkers.  The far-off entrance to Cannon Street Station was a gate to Hell, each trundling strand of traintrack-humanity loosely-coated with fireproof shells of costume jewellery.

 Resuming attention to the frontward view, without turning his head, Bob's eyeball ratchet-zoomed upon its red-veined stalk and managed to see, in the tapering distance, a blurred needle he'd once known as the Telecom Tower, but now it was an Unidentified Flying Object - albeit planted in the ground, unlike those that once floated above in Earth's tidal ether.  But that was strange, because it was now commonly accepted that there was  nothing surrounding the Earth but the known universe - which, to his mind, if not mine, made UFOs obsolete.

I was glad to escape such a irritating mishmash of thoughts.  I dislodged myself from Bob's bony meat-haven and fastened myself to the back burner of the train as it sped southward.  I could see Bob dangling his erstwhile crutch-pad from the window like a ragged army's flag of convenience - before, eventually, letting it fly off as an integral part of dusk's fading red.  I later watched him getting out at his usual stop: home to wife and children where, no doubt, they would welcome him with open arms, blissfully ignorant of the weirdities with which he had been freighted.  Though the overspill of blood on his underpants, without a wound, would take a lot of self-explaining.

 As for myself, I eased back into my own boring body in time for night - in some industrial wasteland, not far from Bob's abode.  My real body was not unlike a lump of machinery that was once a British Rail special and, gradually, as I submitted to an irresistible need for sleep, I drifted amid the archipelago patterns of inherited history and Collective Unconscious, only to pursue an unidentified mind as it slobbered its way through the broths and fleshpots of Earthkind. Yet not as diverting as being such a mind. 

 A her tomorrow, perhaps.