A collaboration with Tim Lebbon

Published 'Blood From Stones' 1999


Love is dark ... but not black; it's dark red, like matured wine. So, my love, draw near...

Night is full of silent echoes and fulsome lateness - O that Day could be thus! I tote a heavy stone through our turn-tangled town. This was simply because I was ordered to do so. Although I relish the night, I fear its dark breeding-grounds (alleys and blind corners where unbroken glooms and noxious whiffs are rife) and I dodge their enticing entrances (which for some may be exits). I keep to the windy, narrow through-ways that we all know.

Cobbled by-ways, up-ways and down-ways, whatever one decides to call them, the stone grows heavier and heavier. The one who indeed ordered me on this task was a quietly spoken man who looked like me a little older than I am now; he had dug the stone fresh this very night. I queried his look but he passed a hand across and, by magic, the countenance became clean of any innuendo.

My love, you do not know what it is to suffer want. The belly aches as it sucks upon itself. The inside surfaces of the head fall away to the centre. The bones become porous and allow in the phlegm and bile to their very marrow. And the bloodstreams flee the heart for fear of its hammering.

So, I took the man's employ.

At the harbour, hidden in foggy shadows, I watch them unloading pianos from a ship. My weight (as well as the stone's) draws me to the ground, pressing cobbles to my back, making me wish your wondrous hands were here to strip away the aching of the flesh. There are mutterings and a startled curse, the tinkle of unhindered keys, and I suddenly realise the freedom which has been afforded me. The careless bashing of the great instruments is a concerto to my pain, a composition of craving to send me hurrying once more into the dark heart of the city, my love, whence I came.

Leaving the harbour-side dotted with pianos, like a strange orchestra awaiting organisation and introduction.

Love is dark. To recover love, one must experience darkness.



She had come to the city to find someone. But in a place where a million someones lived, her task was all but impossible.

The city still shook with echoes of war, still stank of death and dejection. Sad voices whispered from the shadows of shop awnings, shaking empty tins; there were few rattles. Limbs were missing all over, and there was the occasional grey ghost of a man, face melting to the ground, eyes still seeing the first haze of gas drifting across autumn meadows.

"Bollocks and shit," someone muttered from a paper-strewn doorway, but not the someone she sought. She dropped a copper into his withered hand. "Bollocks and shit," he said.

The city was laid out in incongruous abandon: so, next to the market lay the cemetery, sprawled across three hillsides and full of dying flowers; at the centre, the slums, home to the homeless. Even the dock seemed to sit further up-river than it should, as if fleeing the sea.

#

And, here I am, at the darkest point before dawn, with the heaviest lump of raw earth with which it has ever been man's misfortune to burden himself. I know that I have to meet another gentleman, who will give me a coin (a coin with holes in), for the humping and lack of barrow.

I sit for rest beneath an unshuttered window in a courtyard which by day will bear fountains and ice-cream-vans. I doze; dream that the man with the coins will take a chisel and crack the stone in two with a mallet; and, inside, at the core, will be my own finger-print, which is in fact exactly like the map of our turn-tangled town...

I wake with a start, gnawing hunger beginning to creep along the tunnels of my intestines towards where the belly ends.

My love, I fear to continue. Do you remember when I once loved you almost too much, dearest, when you were much much younger? Your parents forgave me, in the end, and I actually became a friend of the family.

I know I became a little crazy after that; I couldn't help myself. You believe that, don't you? Yes, I know I jumped upon you on the floor, in front of your parents, and I lay down beside you. They shouted for me to get up as I tried to look down your frock to see your pert breasts. "You've seen the piano," shouted your mother, "now get up!" I understood "piano" to be colloquial for breasts or something like that, but looking back at the incident, I wonder if it hadn't been: "You've seen her, Piano, now get up!" Could Piano be my name, like Pablo, Pedro or Piero?



She reaches the dock, at last. Crematory peacocks peck at inurned earthnight. Then, as the last curlew drops its songstone into sepulchral silence, the huge beaked dragonfly swoops from the blackening sky and the gates of Hell let fall a blood of rain...

Baal!

Belus! Al-Uzza!

Uitzilopochtli!

Midnight erupts with scurrying figures, for Nygre-Maunce is afoot. Some beckon others, whilst a few kneel and watch for latecomers. Time is short, for the over-lashing from the sky is ripe. Splishes and splashes scatter the bay with borrowed starlight, the signs of fish gulping in fear inbred by race memory. And her race memory? That bit of her hidden away beneath instinct and learning, huddled beneath the boilers of her mind like a canny ship rat?

She is on the ground before the first scream cuts the dark in two. She tries to press herself closer, but she is already one with the earth. She feels solid and invulnerable, possessed of stony attributes upon which fear will slice its slimy fingers. The scream she had heard halts suddenly, punctuated by the pouncing thud of a dear departed head rolling along the ground next to her, eyes spinning. Its previous owner scurries away into shadowed shadows, never to be seen again.

A cry goes up: "But it's over! But it's over!" as if repeating the words will imbue them with a greater truth. But some wars can never be over, because they have never actually begun; they are as timeless as the rocks in the ground. Most rocks, anyway. And most times.

Soon, a bastard symphony of sound breaks out over the city. With each wrecked piano there chimes a random series of notes, so perfectly chaotic in their profusion that she cries with the emotion there inherent. Claws made from frozen tears and dripping fresh fat punch through old wood to grasp at wires and send them whipping away into the night, free. Worship takes place at the altar of screaming chaos, groups of people kneeling and keening, every single one of them facing in a different direction. Later, some of them stand again. Some of them do not. One remains kneeling, his heart turned to rock by the brief glimpse he gained into the heart of his own putrid nightmare.

She wonders, as she flees the dock, whether he is the one she seeks. If he is, and she has found him, then her search is over. And for years now, the whole purpose of her life has been the search. She could not bear a purposeless life.

#

I sit beneath a dead fountain, bathing in ghost waters. My love for you knows no bounds. The stone is breaking me, but for you I would carry it forever. Though I wish, secretly, that you never ask me to.

And I fear that the man I am to meet will be your father. What, I wonder, will he think of this sad wretch now? Will he turn to his wife (your mother) and ask her to confirm it is me? Being blind now, he can only see the black and white notes in his head.



The monstrous elbow-fight is about to begin and a church-big shape thrusts its hinge to the upper parklands of the town. Another, fresh from suckling in a different quarter of the sky, plonks his down too and grasps his opponent's bunch of fingers with a curved claw. The war that hadn't begun till now had suddenly ended just as it began. Crystallised into two zebra-striped Grands facing each other - sucking out all our battles for their own.

Further honky-tonks stretch from Edinburgh to Plymouth ... but most countrymen sleep in blended dreams and are unaware of these bloodshot ivories skimming across their roofs. If they only knew, fright would turn their genitals to windfall fruits.

A giant Piano sits on a mammoth concert platform, elbows resting at its side, gobbling a newly hatched human being. Its guests crawl to the throne and are duly welcomed: the Eternal Lynx of the Onyx Field; the Mighty Emu, the unchained of the plains; the Blue Gnu; the Butcher Bird, known as the Shrike; the Red Ocelot; the Giant Rabbit, the roamer of the unroamed; the Snow Leopard; and many others. The purpose of the gathering was to examine a walking human head. They came to the conclusion that it was a mutation and not worth eating. Even now, they are disposing of it, by thrusting it back where it came from.

The Piano takes note that an elbow fight is in progress in a different quarter of reality from its own. It ceases fiddling with walking human heads and queries no longer the pretend stone head still sticking to its dark black and white nippled breast. It has to do something, since the elbow fight threatens Truth and Existence themselves.



There is a pit
Where thousands sit
They wink and snigger
As their bodies grow bigger

The turn-tangled streets are full of alien wayfarers, with strange tuneless songs, like these. They should be a-bed, my love.

Let's eat monsters
With their heads and tails still on

A roll - with inverted braille-like notes - starts turning against the plinky-plonk of yet another piano just seen where St Paul's Cathedral once squatted. The roll had been impressed by a London virtuoso during a war that did begin and did end. Nygre-Maunce was afoot now even in real places that suffered historically verifiable air raids.

London is a big big city with big big men
Who sit in offices and count to ten

The voices came from nowhere, and went nowhere. The music sounded like it would never stop.



In the dark, it is difficult to discern what is real, what is not. The stone is turning warm in my hands, my dear love, like a dead heart running backwards through time. Soon, I fear, it will begin to pulse. I can hear the cacophony of war, and I begin to wonder whether the stone is worth keeping. But I have always been an honest employee, if a little light-headed, and my promise to the curiously familiar man should be fulfilled.

I head to the dock, where water laps at the land ... like black blood. Here, light streaks overhead, cutting the night sky into black and white swathes, each of them throbbing to the notes being bandied around. The stone suddenly moves, a definite twitch, as the rumbling thunder of a huge piano in need of urgent tuning slaughters the air. I hear the scream of millions as their sterile idea of reality is brought sharply into focus. Or thrust cruelly into an eternal, stone-cold blur.

#

The shapes of strangers crawling into doorways as the battered notes stream above their heads sets her laughing. Other things scurry around her feet, but they are not really here yet, and there will be plenty of time to fear them when their bastard concerto is finished.

There is a man standing further along the dock, holding what must be a present for her. She wants to reach for him, but fears that he is the one and her quest is over. Already anti-climax beckons.

She opens her mouth to call, and it is this which allows the whipping-strands of torn piano-wire entry to her throat. The wires pierce thin membranes and enters veins, squirm their way through moist passages, sometimes resurfacing into the cool night only to re-immerse themselves once more into warm, safe darkness. They criss and cross inside her, forming a skeleton which will hold her together under terrible pressures. They inch their way through turn-tangled routes, following a higher-dimensional map of the very city where she finds herself lost, plinking and plonking their findings back to whence-ever they were torn.

The Piano at St Paul's shakes itself free.

Another call comes, from elsewhere, away from the docks and the chaos there; a set of perfect scales, weighing the hope of Truth on the back of what would have been Beethoven's greatest concerto, had he written it.

In Cardiff, Roath Park heaves open, and ivory fingers send ducklings flying.

In wars, the greatest genius is propagated by the very worst nightmares. War pigs send bodies to burn, the war machine spins on an axle guaranteed for eternity. Existence suckles at the breast of perfection, yet shadows still twitch and squirm in some of the most remote courtyards and alleys of this contorted place.

The grunts are always the last to know when the war is over.

She sees the shape approach her as her eyes turn silver. Then her senses flee, and she begins to see things in a whole new light.

#

As a cough-drop sun enters dawn, the creatures of the night dissipate, grow as thin as the porridge that you and I sucked before unmaking love. The elbow-fight echoes on, but have you seen a statue dance, my love, or stone that moves as bone? The town churches peal their oranges and lemons, and seem to lean towards each other, like eventual lovers. All unwelcome creatures have fled upon the coat-tails of the night.

Two gentlemen play trapped metal-piece puzzles. And, later, as afternoon turns to dusk, two girls will dance piano-breast to piano-breast. When night returns, as it must, I shall part the ventricles of my hammering heart and place each bleeding half, as poultices, to the incipient sores of curdled dreams and night terror-and the pecking order of all that crow and crawl should stretch from nil to the square root of nowhere.

#

"You've seen her, Piano, now get up!"

But my name is not Piano, is it? It never was.

I get up with the stone. I can now hold it more easily, as it seems to have a top-knot to use as a handle.

It is time. It is time. Ancient Gods have fled with the night. It is time to search the stinging-nettles for my gloves. It is time to wake my parents with the news of my death. It is time to use the curtains to wipe the window clean of overspilt gutter-scum. It is time to reach deep into the pond for the inner pond where the fishes do not swim - and pull my love out like a rabbit from a hat.

#

I can see you, sweetness, and your pain is mine.

The stone is never to be opened, as I had once thought, because it is the smallest of things. There is no inside to it, because it is made from one piece. It can never be broken, like the bulky atom. It is a map, not only of this ruined place, but of all things, ever. A map to be remembered.

Stony eruptions squirm beneath my fingers. I cry clear tears as red drips fall onto my hands. Your body is changed, but you will always be the same as me. I'm so glad you found me before you had gone completely. If I kiss you, will you feel it.

There was once a woman made up of wire
They thought she'd died, when she merely went higher

The stone is as it was destined to be. I place it on your shoulders, and wispy tendrils leap out and grasp it there. I take my hands away, lest they be stripped in your eagerness to change. But still, I risk one final kiss. A kiss at the end of a concert, a 'did you enjoy that?' breath.

#

Yes, I hold your head, my love, not a stone, dangling from my hand like a lumpy balloon of jellified Claret wine. "Drool!" says the dead night. I shall return home to drink my sherbet and play chess with nobody - but not before planting your dear head in the darkest breeding-ground at some off-centre core of the town's perhaps still benighted suburbs.

The neck-root, if it only takes, will grow to knot and twist below our turn-tangled streets, will map and trace their leys and underpaths; and the windfall fruits floating with the winds that come off the artful angles of the town's huddled roofs, will dangle from a majestic but sinuous Tree of Love arching and shading our daily endeavours against want, hate and boredom.

And a pair of its fruits, Eve, my love, shape sensuously slowly into the most gorgeous dangling piano ever - to tempt your sweet Adam.

#

In the old graveyard, the haunting place of dead flowers, I can still see the signs of the elbow-fight we so nearly lost. My love is abroad in the night, seeking the excitement of another Nygre-Maunce, promising to perform the truth of things at its tympanic climax. And I have no doubt of the outcome, none at all. When Perfection is involved, how can one doubt it?

I dodge hunched shadows as they curl between the graves, like the souls of those long gone come back from a night of mischievous tinkering or tinkling. I find the grave marked Pablo or Pedro or Piero (time has fingered the name away) and dig deep.

The stone is mossy, heavy, cool and damp. It may have once been a head, but I think not.

The piano notes wander randomly, underscored by the thread of a my life's tangled ley-lines.

I need to find someone soon. Someone who knows the colour of love. And when I find them, I will give them the stone. I will tell them that when the time comes, they will know what to do.