“In the first world war trenches, there was very little trouble with dog muck.”
Rachel Mildeyes,
THE LESSER KNOWN FACTS OF MODERN HISTORY


Cissy Horn sat on buses and read minds. Not in the ordinary way of the prestidigitators and fortune tellers, but actually being party to them, experiencing them as a surrogate and, unlike the people whose thoughts she read, knowing their outcome (without the need of predictive powers); understanding, too, their role in the context of alternative destinies and enduring their repercussions rather more than the originator would, even into the otherwise untenable future. I knew all that, because I could read her mind.

The bus trundled down Moorgate, evidently trying to hit as many potholes as it could. Cissy was on the top deck, at the front, pretending to drive it, as she once did as a kid. She grabbed the silver window bar and pulled it in whichever direction she thought the bus was going to head. She looked around, to see if anybody was was watching her. Who had heard of a thirty-nine-year-old woman (a mother of three and ex-wife of two) steering a bus from the front of its top deck? There was only one other passenger right at he back,who seemed to be writing (a difficult task on a bus in full flow) and ignoring her. Otherwise, there were the empty pairs of handlebar seats, glinting in the late afternoon sunshine.

The conductor was ascending the stairs, already turning the inner tumblers of his ticket puncher in eager anticipation of the long white ribbon he would produce specially for Cissy. Whistling in unconscious embarrassment, he approached and cocked his head for the destination she required.

‘St Paul’s, please,’ she enunciated in as sophisticated a voice as she could muster.

Then they came to her. The conductor’s thoughts crowded in like ticket strips in overspill, and it took her quite a time to differentiate one from another through the lack of perforations. They caused memories of her own past to seep down the drain of used time, whilst replacing them with another’s memories, however ill-thought out.

He was a chimney enthusiast.

He had made a study of those terraced cottages in Battersea, now sadly demolished, which were dwarfed by their own chimney stacks on the roof: the prime size of flues for updraughts to work efficiently: the cleverness of the Victorian skyline in elongating the smoke travel by the use of pots, thus enhancing, if only slightly, the environment: the silver spikes of costume jevellery that future people were to erect upon their stacks, all pointing in the same direction, towards the enemy: the coming generations who would never know that chimneys once had something to do with coal: the seven-foot ‘tallboys’ in distant Leicester: the houses that suffocated when the chimneys finally disappeared, their windows swelling out into oversize breasts: the roosting-posts of large dark birds: spiky-haired creatures emerging... The thoughts were too numerous and somewhat garbled to categorise or even take seriously.

Cissy tried to regather herself. It had only taken a split second to absorb a life-time’s obsessive knowledge. The conductor was flicking through the dials of his machine, finally producing enough paper tape for a hat band and ribbons for a bumper girls’ tea party.

She was now receiving thoughts he had never had. They were memories of his forebears instilled into his very fibre at birth: his father as humble ironmonger: his father’s father as sewer-hunter and seller of dog droppings to the tanneries: the glue factory outside the maternity hospital where he was born: the friends he never met because hey were killed in the war: and so on.

She could not bear it. She decided to leave the bus to its own devices and staggered against the rhythm of the bus towards the head of the stairs, knowing that she’d missed her stop anyway. The stairs seemed an endless spiral downwards, as if Hell was a machine. An old lady was attempting to come up, toting piles of shopping under both arms. And Cissy saw visions of two world wars, one just gone, one about to start, where memories and premonitions were as one. There was evidently someone on the lower deck the old lady didn’t want to meet, hence her long clamber up the swaying staircase. It was her son who had been too young for the first war, but she feared not too old for the next. Cissy felt the blind tears at her own eyes and the sorrow in her own heart that caused them. The old lady, Cissy knew, had been fooling herself and the son had really absconded in wild youthful enthusiasm to the first trenches, only to return to haunt the lower decks the City over, along with his dead counterparts. No wonder people rode these days on top.

‘Oi, Miss, you’ve only paid the fare to St Paul’s, not to the dogs’ home!” the conductor snapped from behind, startling her with ideas of chimney fires and Victorian urchins who were made to climb them, their skin hardening into leather: not sent to sweep them, perhaps, but to shoo off the chimney ghosts.

Cissy imagined she was in a vertical charcoal tunnel, as she saw faces in the flames below her. There was a pile of what looked like droppings on a sooty ledge, glistening as the inflamed eye of the sun inched into the open hole of the sky.

Cissy Horn left the moving bus, pumping her legs against the impetus, only just avoiding a particularly slimy ghost of a dogpat. As the inscrutable lamplighter lit the wicks in the street gas mantles, much like the soldiers cupped hands round their ciggies in the trenches, she walked on, feeling handsome in her uniform, and puffed on her pipe. It was as if she had decided upon a course at birth, only now, at this distance, panning out.

I rubbed my bloodshot eyes as the bus took me on. The past seemed to have gone on with it, too, into the future.


(Published ‘Picatrix’ 1992)