With some of the sayings of Rachel Mildeyes who dreamed one night of becoming Pope





If Beethoven'd had a skateboard, he'd not've stayed indoors so much.



Out, out, out, with no sense of urgency, the waters divided about his head like flowing hair, to reveal the Duck's Flesh Boy in the throes of his very first experience. His mind teetering on the brink of identity, his heart still learning to keep to its own beat, he was nonetheless mature in every other respect, with lengths of jointed muscle rippling like a river-snake through feathered skin and with eyes imploring light to fill them.

He crawled from the lake, thirsting for new-drawn breath to swell his lungs. Sucking in a few flying insects under his tongue, he found a tussocky weed to wrench from the side of the bank and gulped it with his stomach to staunch the stomach's new-found appetite. At the back of his emerging mind, he was however no more what he seemed than a duck. And out of his mouth, amid the green returns of his uncompliant belly, there came a quack more pitiful than the breaking wind of a dying man.



The family had gathered for an occasion in which few participants failed to see any significance. Indeed, the odd hanger-on or two with, at best, a tenuous relationship to the full-blooded family members, were less confused during the actual event than within subsequent memories of it. But hindsight should have had the benefit of cool reflection, in contradistinction to the bitter misunderstandings that underlaid the subject-matter of such hindsight.

Henry, the father figure, if not a father at all - merely a step-father who had children foisted on him by an impulsive marriage to their mother, Louise - was, as self-styled head of the household, top of the table: a position matching his earlier insistence that his former wife, divorced on mental grounds, should be given house-space in the attic. Louise, his new wife, sat at the table's other end: an honour which some laid at the front door of social protocol and others at a far more sinister cupboard door, behind which sat a skeleton that combined features of both Hate and Jealousy, red- and green-eyed, respectively.

The diverse collection of siblings, halflings and distant cousins - whose place-settings, each side of the long dining-table, bespoke a disputed hierarchy - remained unaware that there were any parties present who would later be interested enough to describe the gathering, least of all in writing. Indeed, they were rightly unaware, since much of what Rachel Mildeyes has to set down is at second or, even, third hand. With that proviso, she is convinced that her account of the dinner up to the climax is as correct as it is possible to be from such a position of relative hearsay. The fact that there was a loose tongue belonging to or associated with one of those seated around the table that night says much about the category of people that could include such a person in the first place. Needless to say (whilst there is often a need to say things to some people), Rachel Mildeyes attempts to make no value judgements. How can an outsider such as her be sufficiently presumptuous to do otherwise? But, perhaps, not a complete outsider, or would she have been made so privy to what transpired? Suffice to say (and, here, she makes no excuses in holding back a few facts), one of the people present that night was rather sweet on Rachel, but whether this would remain so after Rachel’s account was anybody's guess - and guesswork is something to which Rachel will not stoop. Studied inference, yes. Wild guesswork, no.

With that preamble, she hopes to have laid her cards on the table (if not all face up), each with its suit and number sufficiently shuffled for even God not to know whether the game of Patience was to 'come out' ... in the same way as each member of the gathering had his or her own card hidden, ready to be revealed at the optimum moment to trump whatever cards he or she thought the others kept "close to their chests" or "up their sleeves".



Only the pontiff can dream of true horrors without fear of fearing them.



Rachel Mildeyes was out for an evening stroll, having played straight through all Beethoven's piano sonatas in one fell sitting. Her fingers were sore from the ringing chords of the Hammerklavier's last movement which, as the legend went, was supposed to call up the Old Gods from such places where they themselves did not know they resided.

She skimmed her eyes over the flat fens which surrounded her home, feeling an emptiness that the sonatas had done little to fill. Even so, how could one man, deaf at that, set loose such sequences of notes which even now were echoing in her mind like angels' bones upon hearts' strings. The vessel of the composer's soul must have borne a special syrup milked from ghosts - but the dark sun was now beneath the horizon and she fancied she heard its feeble farewells between the familiar notes of a nightbird's song and a mouse's dying squeak. No memory of whatever sonata could outlast such dismal desolate tones and half-colours of a fennish dusk.

A slow-dripping splash she imagined was a blind animal taking an early swim in anticipation of a wanton moon that it never hoped to see.

She heard what sounded like a solitary oboe reed being double-tongued and, for one moment, she was back in her solitary cottage's music room. But out, out, out of the murk, there bloomed a swollen beetroot face with a mouth that exploded into a razor-edged beak. Violently quacking, the snake's tongue which was originally the whole of the snake slipped from the purple circumcised lips of a second mouth below.



But Rachel Mildeyes is not here to play with words. She is not the expert on the bon mot or mot juste. She needs to experiment with phrases to judge which fits best. Bear with her. It is as if she is reading what she has written for the first time.

The obvious thing to do now would be to name each person in the order they sat round the long oblong table, if sitting round it is not a contradiction in terms. Yet, Rachel hesitates to do so. What good would it do? In fact, if the truth were known, she is insufficiently au fait with the place-settings or, even, with the actual names themselves. Names are merely convenient coastal barriers against the waves of confusion. Names, indeed, are words by another name: bricks in the sea-wall: the sound-bites of muzzled reality. Rachel shall be sparing with names, by necessity as well as choice.

There is more point, perhaps, in dwelling for a moment on the dining-room's ambience - not that endowed by the downbeat personalities ranked before their meticulously ordered cutlery but, rather, the room itself without the deficit of human occupation. Indeed, Rachel wonders whether just one aspect would satisfy her own obsession for detail: the vase of flowers that a servant had arranged as the centrepiece of the feast. One strange ingredient in this array was a variety of plant she had never seen before (nor has she ever seen it properly, even now): a red jester's hat of a bloom with a dark mauve hood in its mouth and ringed by dangling bobble-ended, red-stemmed dreadlocks. The spell of vase and contents was broken by someone pacing up and down above the dining-room. Someone, yes, but later events could well have disproved such attribution of human qualities as the word 'someone' implied.

"Don't worry, we have a servant up there," said Henry in a gruff voice, having noticed that the young girls at the table looked more startled than the rest. His face was a map of wrinkled rivers and valleys.

"Servants tend to move about," said Louise from the other end of the table, believing she needed to clarify her husband's attempted explanation. Her innocence went hand in hand with her relative age.

"Yes," said Henry. "Unlike skeletons," he added as an absent-minded non-sequitur disguised as an inverted simile.



I dreamt I had two heads, until deciding it was only possible for one head to have the same dream.



Rachel Mildeyes is said still to play her piano come evenings. But it is the music that only the dead can hear. Yet the deaf can catch just a breath of it too, whilst its hammer-notes are far too deep for normal ears.

The land flattens out even further from sky's end to sky's end and, because of an imminent World War, the land's ghosts have departed to where they're needed most. Not entirely empty, though, for clutches of duckheads are oozing from one large fibrous egg upon the lake-bed. As they plop to the surface in serial rhythm, their cartoon squawks are human in their plaintiveness. And, as they frailly struggle to the bank to seek their mother, their wood-wind lungs breathe notes of pianissimo despair.



"We ought to speak about ... the thing we were meant to speak about."

This speaker who spoke about speaking possessed a piping voice, either a child or a woman, Rachel is not sure which.

"Why don't you speak then?" thundered Henry, as if stirred beyond the petty concerns of skeletons that a household should have consigned to the broom-space under the stairs.

"It doesn't matter," said the piping voice, disencouraged by Henry's encouragement to speak.

"If it doesn't matter, why speak about it in the first place, then?" questioned Henry.

"Henry, don't rant so," said Louise, whose innocence often gave her unguarded moments of bravery.

"One can't rant in questions, my dear," said Henry. "One can only rant in statements."

At that point, there was no spell to break, but merely a heavy hush that could have been cut by any one of the knives poised above the thinly sliced, if long-cut, pork. The steps overhead seemed nearer as if they had descended at least one floor, since the initial sighting, if steps could be sighted as opposed to heard - and, judging by the expressions which the eyes pinpointed on every face, except Henry's, 'sighted' was indeed the mot juste. When the steps ceased pacing again, mouths returned to chewing, minds preferring not to disown the event or reinvest it with a faith in stray servants.

Henry's teeth were snagged on some pork-crackling, a substance which lived up to its name, giving a chance for someone to speak with the bravado of interrupting without appearing to do so:

"I can't help thinking some of us shouldn't be here at all," said a man who had not spoken before.

"Well, isn’t that always the way?" said Louise.

"Weddings, Christenings, First Communions, Funerals...," enumerated another.

"When does the priest arrive?" asked a woman with the stature of a tiny girl. She was bolstered by cushions to bring her level with the table. She was obviously out of touch with the arrangements, having arrived at the house barely before dinner was served. The wavering candlelight filled her crows' feet, tending to hide them rather than illuminate them.

Henry had swallowed what was left of his mastication, only to announce: "The priest's expected." His gold tooth glinted as if ashamed of the dullness of its cousins the eyes.

Yet, Rachel Mildeyes had vowed to make no value judgements. Like characters on playing-cards, would it be too far-fetched for her to be able to believe that they had no legs below the table but a second set of head, chest, torso and arms? She guesses not, bearing in mind that she’s feeling her way in the dark - a peopled dark, yes, but one where the stubbing and stumping make her think otherwise. And, what's more, she’s beginning to grow fed up with her lack of progress in nailing some sense in the gathering - to such an extent she’s eliding words in a devilmaycare fashion, against her own stylistic pride, something, self-evidently, she wouldn't've done earlier. It is tantamount to feeling her bones unsolve their own jigsaw frame, allowing the rest of her to flop towards the feet in crumpled folds: words being bones, as well as bricks.

"Yes, expected," repeated Henry.

"Who's expected?" asked Louise, not following the talk's audit trail.

"The priest," said the midget woman.

"Oh, yes. It's a pity everything has to end with priests."

Henry visibly prickled and said: "Everything has to end, even the bricks in that wall." He pointed at the chintzy flock wallpaper, imagining what laid behind it. He was usually taxed to imagine more.



If you hear music in a dream, it's not real, only imaginary.



"Give me a chance!" called a voice from beyond the corner of the street Rachel Mildeyes was approaching.

"OK, OK, OK, I'll give you just one chance," came another voice, "I'll toss up my coin - I know it has two heads, but there is a slim chance that it will come down resting on its edge..."

There was a hoot of laughter from the second voice, as if this were an enormous joke, but by now she had reached the corner and she wheelied around it slowly enough not to barge into the owners of the voices.

She saw, upside down and balanced on his two heads, the Mutant Man, talking to himself as well as doing other mischievous things with himself. He had been predicted to be elected Pope one day. But why him? Because he'd got a hot-line to God. It all came about when one of his two heads died and evidently went to Heaven. It flopped like a spent lover upon his shoulder.

Startled, he blurted out as if to himself, "Hey! YOU! Step outside if you want to sort something out!"

This was his customary cartoon bravado of empty threats, so imagine his grief when his other head merely remained as silent as a dead cauliflower tumour. Living cancers usually quack, cluck and chirrup cheerfully at birth, until they're taught to speak ill by their owners. Ex-cancers merely stare sullenly until they rot away.



The house did not exactly shake as the footsteps upstairs grew even louder, but it was like the long drawn-out rhythm of an earth tremor, one which had not yet got the bit between its stony teeth. The paces were now directly above the ceiling and nobody could brush them aside.

"Perhap's it's a ghost," laughed the man who had only spoken once before.

"It?"

"Ghosts don't pound like that."

"Nor do skeletons."

The last laughing voice seemed to come from under the table, but it must have been a quirk of acoustics.

"If it's a skeleton, it might be wearing its hob-nailed boots!"

Renewed laughter.

"Why do you say its boots?"

"The mind boggles."

"No, but it's generally better to eschew it or he, but use she, because that shows you're not making generalisations nor snap judgements nor assumptions, but asserting a definite commitment as to gender."

On the subject of commitment, or lack of it, Rachel has given up trying to assign speech to the person who actually spoke. Well, it had to come, she supposes. Devil comes the hindmost when needs must.

"This doesn't eat like pork."

"What else can it be?"

"It tastes sweeter and (what shall I say?) bodier. Bodier, yes, that's the right word."

The mot juste.

"Not sweet enough, though. I wish this apple sauce was sweeter."

The midget dolloped piles of a pus-like substance on her lengths of filamented white meat.

The knuckling knock on the dining-room door was, to some minds, caused by the perpetrator of the pounding upstairs, now downstairs.

"It's probably the priest."

"Where have all the servants gone?"

"Who opened the front door?"

The questions came thick and fast. But, at least someone had her feet firmly on the ground. Feet too gristly for fry-ups. Good job, too. The family needed ordering. No servants. Who sweet on whom? Or what on what? Bricks toppled into waves of confusion. Mal mot by mal mot. House of cards crumpled. Complete elision. Too late for hindsight.



There was a piano in the next room, but I only knew it to be there from its silence - the next room being merely a false figment of my dream.



The next time Rachel Mildeyes came across the Mutant Man was in Rome. She tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Your Holiness, I beg your forgiveness for all the sins that I have allowed to possess me and that no doubt will continue to be bugbears of my weak soul..."

He turned to her and automatically waved a blessing straight in her face. But, heavens, he was really just another commoner like her, since the only head he now possessed simply stared sullenly. He eventually became a forgotten legend.

Until his rebirth as Donald Duck in a swamp of someone's mind.

After much wheeling and dealing, a new Pope was elected, with smuts of black smoke expelled from every valve of the Vatican. But it was just a little girl - on a skateboard. They nevertheless gave her the run of the Papal palace. Her old Mum always said she had a good head on her shoulders. The cardinals now whip the soles of her feet, creating deep purple weals right up to her knees. And sculpture lessons with split bones, piano wires and dead squawks.



Pulling herself together, Rachel Mildeyes clumps into the dining-room, to see if Louise looks as nice as she is reported to be. And each bitter eye turned to her from the table as if they're about to see a ghost on clodhoppers. And for once Rachel can directly hear what they say - except now most of them scream instead. Henry's stony face stares straight from its head at the ageless skeleton girl.



There are never real hills in cartoons, only flat lands stretching forever, to prevent anyone slipping off the edge.


(published ‘Massacre’ 1993)