The beard felt like a swarm of insects furious at being rooted in the skin of his chin and cheeks. He had finally realised he had missed the bus of life. All his ambitions were pie in the sky.

Stan had awoken feeling decidedly offish, wondering if he should wake his wife Susan before he died - or whether to wait until after he died because if he didn't die it would save her a lot of unnecessary anguish. However, his dilemma was short-lived...

Susan woke with a start, stirred by an instinctive resonance with her husband's predicament. She loved him dearly.

"Whatever's the matter with your face, Stan?"

He failed to hear her except he dreamed that he heard her and thus replied: "Nothing, dear, it was only a bad dream."

"Your beard - it looks decidedly ... iffy..." she intoned.

But his dreams had drifted elsewhere before she finished.



The fog closed in like bad breath. Stan could barely see to the end of his nose and, with heart in mouth, he tentatively, yet foolhardily, resumed his evening constitutional. He knew this much - he was dead ... but he was wandering through the city he had once adored; where he had originally shaken down with Susan - when young and beardless - beside a river that bled sunset like turmeric wine.

The domes, the turrets, the convoluted lanes, back-doubles, blind-alleys - they were tonight swaddled in a soggy duvet of sudden smog. The most Stan could manage was fabricate the familiar skyline from a latent under-scoring in his mind.

Fflonk!

His face hit a cornerstone which, no doubt, on a better, less iffy, evening, would not even have been there at all. He rubbed at the grazes on nose and forehead, recalling an image of his long dead mother retrieving her invisible pot of magic ointment from inside her cure-all workbox.

Stan was lost, of course, but not desperately so, since, although the city was too large for coincidenecs to be noticed, with acres of untrodden by-ways, he did feel confident that he was on a course close to the river wharf. He scratched his raging beard in an attempt to forget other things that would otherwise occupy his mind.

From his house, with clearer air, he had often watched the river's shimmering yellowness and even heard the aching drip of drenched timbers, the odd curse of otherwise silent cargo-workers and ballast-shifters. Yet, tonight, not a single sound snagged the silence; even the sluggish, shaggy shapes of dossers slid easily through the ground-clogged clouds, just like the engine-room oilmen on leave from the creaking cargo-ships - and Stan realised, too, that the cafes to which he thought he had been heading were, when there at all, uncustomarily low-keyed as well as possessing, on second thoughts, more if than when or even where.

Fflappat!

He felt a tap on his shoulder and he turned to see a face of fog: Susan had evidently been seeking him and was, thankfully, planning to lead him home. She smiled, wisps of visible whispers, like cigar smoke, forming her gracious head of familiar hair. Or were the whispers mistakes for whiskers? A tongue curled out her mouth and Stan found it difficult to track the words which darted from corner to corner of his beloved's face. Yet, as he now weaves between the yellow cargo in an endless tangle of night, he clearly recalls what he felt that first foggy foggy dew-gorged evening...

Schpplonk!

A sharp swipe forced his cheeks together with a violent jolt: a beard left homesick by its face.



With some worry, Stan realises that the bus is crammed with passengers who are complete strangers to him. Having been raised in a close community where interbreeding was sometimes tantamount to onanism, the shock to the system of travelling any distance from his home is that much more marked. Any country hick knows that adjusting to life outside an ordinary ranch enclave is bad at the best of times. Indeed, he harkens from a dockside hamlet which was so self-sufficient he sometimes reckoned it was happier without inhabitants. Which, he supposes, in a roundabout way, brings him back full circle to the first bus he has taken since venturing beyond the bounds - and that's because there's no-one on board whom he recognises as someone. Even the driver's decidedly iffy.

Stan is indeed alone in a jungle of bodies and loose small-talk. He never mentioned the weather back home, because the sky simply stayed the sky whatever its state, not worth the candle of consideration. Instead, he used to speak about bigger matters: people's desires and concerns for each other. On the bus, however, are bearded undergrunts, side-glancers, thin-lippers, tittletattlers, chancers, losers, all the fingers and thumbs of fate. They make him so utterly homesick.

And homesickness is not merely yearning for Susan's pies of fruit and cloves, steaming hot upon the window-sill, as you trek home with your latest snatch of summery scrumping-apples from a farm whose owner loves Susan's pies, too. Homesickness is not merely dreaming of sweetheart Susan with whom he once tossed in the softest hay imaginable, under the gossamer skies and dewy-eyed dusks. Homesickness is not merely wielding the longest possible shadow at the end of day, so blackly bright each grass-blade pricks up under the stain of his shade. No, true home-sickness is all such things plus many more: where even his own body is a home he has left and feels sick for.

He is one of the bearded chancers himself, now - one of those loose-zipped dockwork dossers, zombies programmed to talk without thinking. And, so, where has that wide-eyed, bare-faced lad who once dreamed of pies in the sky gone? He alighted at the last stop, no doubt, leaving on board a man too iffy to be him.

A wintry woman in a threadbare headscarf stands at the bus's next stop, her hand raised.


(published 'Chronicles Of Disorder' 1996)