When the Smarts took on Cloysters, they failed to see the trees, their eyes being for the House alone. Deep into the Green Regions and distant from the various connections which civilisation boasted, the property was outlandishly expensive. Supply and demand, the Smarts surmised. Ozone friendly.

Tom Smart had been a member of a busy-busy partnership embroiled in Commodities and Futures. So, without too much sweat on his part, he had ended up well-heeled and, almost to his own surprise at the way fortune had shaken his dice, able to afford such eccentric luxuries as Cloysters. To the shock and, in some cases, disgust of the other partners in the firm, Tom had decided, on the top edge of a moment’s whim, to up sticks and leave for unholy early retirement. Let the whole side down. Quite out of character, the others mumbled over their cocktail umbrellas, shaking their balding heads in bewilderment. Tom Smart, the solid citizen, the tall elegant businessman, taking leave of his senses ... or vice versa. Earthing himself up in the godforsaken north somewhere. To his peers, it was tantamount to dying.

Tom had been married for some time. No doubt that had something to do with his decision. Sue Smart, on the face of it, was a sophisticated woman of losing, or even lost, figure. She had a look that teetered on the edge of a smile, the skin lightly wrinkled by punctilious age. Her eyes were inscrutable, peering inward, but fulfilling the role of business wife with each jab of her forehead. They had once loved each other, but the strains of business, as well as life taking itself for granted, had replaced sex and affection with merely the acknowledging of mutual presence. Indeed, Sue’s glasses were identical to Tom’s, as they stared sightlessly at each other across the well-scrubbed trestle table, on the very first morning at Cloysters. The move north had thus happened very quickly, almost instantaneously, despite Tom having to ensure that any necessary repairs and replenishments bad been made - difficult though it was for labourers to be brought to the far-flung area. Cloysters surely needed much tittivating, having remained shut for as many years as it takes for several major wars to start and end. As a very large rambling affair, the contractor’s first estimate was soon overtaken. Tom wondered why the magnitude of the task had not been properly assessed in the first place - surely the House was not “rambling” further as the time passed! He laughed. Many would have cried. Many would have wondered at the apparent speed of things.

God knows what the price would have been if he had not instructed, at some unremembered stage in the proceedings, the builders to leave all the rooms in the East Wing boarded up. He could not see Sue and himself, childless as they were, needing to expand into those reaches of Cloysters. Yet, already, foreign thoughts began to spread - and the trees seemed to muster closer.

The towers had first attracted him. The House was one of castellated magnificence; the two vast end-wings being the glorified residential chimneystacks of an industrial heritage, with the central buildings between. Tom had simply no option but to arrange for the renovation of the West Wing as living quarters. There was the minimum repair of serious degradation in the central buildings: these were merely to be utilised for housing Tom’s collection. Yes, it was important to have a place for the constituents of his collection, before they slipped their tethers. Tom’s sudden instinct was to come clean about his ideas. Only time would eventually reveal the one vital element which he required in order to make some sense of everything. Although life was strange before, even in the city, here things were noticeably strange.

One Autumn afternoon, some months after the Smarts’ arrival at Cloysters, the wind had managed to animate the shuttling leaves that littered the paths around the House. The trees stood stark against the fennish horizon as guilty parties. Tom pondered at a window, staring absently through the eye-pricking light towards one of the nearest trees. He fingered, without looking, a prize item from his collection. Sue, who had begun to feel the necessity of hiding a disappointment at the ever-encroaching solitude of the House, squinted desultorily at her husband as he toyed with an object that meant nothing to her. The House was not only boring, but at such times positively sickening. She did not share Tom’s obsessions. She did not even feel that they shared the same life. They had no ideas in common.

Tom, in careless dressing-gown, a drooping cigarette in his mouth, smeared glasses, abruptly felt an almost touchable depression enter the room. The sun’s sloping shafts cut momentarily through the dusk - and disappeared, leaving the trees clearer but blacker. There was a hint that Disease was the approaching season, instead of Winter. Sue turned a page in the book upon her lap, but she did not know who was reading it. Her hair was tied in a bun but insufficiently tight to restrain wayward wisps smoking out. She knew, as women are always first to know anything, that the decision to up sticks and buy Cloysters had always been a disaster in the making.

The most telling moment of that dreadful afternoon had yet to be recorded by Sue Smart’s slowly turning thoughts - and such a moment was when she decided that she was unable to recognise the object in her husband’s grip. She could not even remember what he had been collecting for many years. Nor could he.



Tom had much pain to come. Once a rich man of the City, he now contemplated what remained of his short life. People to die, people he loved, and, finally, himself - racked with pain and pointlessness. He drew the covers to his chin and followed the cracks in the ceiling to their uneasy confluence of rivers. Suffering had been so far contained within reasonable margins, so he wondered whether the worst pain was incubating, moving slowly against fate’s dam, threatening to overspill at any moment.

The bedroom window rattled in a sporadic wind, the only element breaking the only silence. And Tom, perhaps the only person left in the world, dreamed everything, thousands of self-imposed dreams crowding nightmare’s dam, threatening to break out in one fell swoop or, at best, simply seep through the haircracks in the ceiling - silver teardrop by silver teardrop like counterfeit shilling-coins.

There had been little rain: a cold dry sumner edging into another endless winter. The sun was a dull orange stain upon the curtains, as if it were incontinent. He recalled the other one who had shared his pillows - but even the pillows had been stuffed into the rucksacks of derelict ghosts, who were now traipsing into the distant corridors of Cloysters.

The only remaining pillow under his head was sodden with dark sweat, into whichhe turned his only face with a sob.

There was more than just wind at the window. Fingernails cut their teeth upon it. They were not people, but monsters, the only monsters left to taunt the one monster who still called itself man. He turned bodily in his sleep, if indeed sleep it could be called. His dreams were of clean sheets, silk sheets - and the pillow full of teased satin feathers for a pillow-fight at a schoolgirls’ midnight feast - and a body so soft, so luscious, so self-responsive, he was confident that love could outlast the night. He should have known money could not purchase such love when the chips were finally counted.

Then through the billowing curtains, there came the creature - a huge monstrosity with huge flapping banknote wings, one huge searing searchlight eye and the smallest possible credibility - shaping out the arrival of night in its own shape, a shape the sleeper could not fathom nor, in a million years, have invented. This was the shape of pain to come, now finally come - dripping indeed with spent passion. Only to find the bed empty. Empty of even the last dream. The pillow plump.

The cracks in the ceiling drew to a tangled doodle of tentacles - but nobody was left to tease out the final clear-cut image. The sleeper had departed, returned to the city in one final trial of nightmare - to reseek his fortune in the City, where it was said the streets were paved in gold - and the lowlying motorway across the central City filled quickly with seawater after marauders undermined the coastal dam - but the palace was waterlogged and the pelican crossings impassable. The money-lenders foreclosed when the Exchange’s plimsoll-line for narrow money supply fell short of the realisable residue of the readies.

Tom became a dosser, on the southernmost bank, but did not have enough pockets to take what came floating down with the man-made tides. Then there was the body in the water. Tom recognised the body that must have thrown itself in. A mock-up, a right Madame of a waxwork.

“That body’s me!” he screeched to the wizened woman who took alternate suck with him on a bottle of pother. He’d named her Sue. They both slept in cardboard boxes - like abandoned dolls.

“That can’t be you, ‘cos you’re you here.” And she pointed to the bottle’s glass neck which he French kissed. “That’s your reason for living.”

“But it sure looks like me bobbing like a corpse.” The River Thames twined between hard shoulders that were planned from time immemorial for its course. Large black inverted statues of fish creatures supped at its margins. In the distance, the searchlight on the top of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral’s winked like a lighthouse, its beams crossing the whole of the city skyline “with the revolving spokes of God on His one-wheeler,” a smart-arse dosser nearby whined out.

Professional wreckers were discerned combing the more outlying areas, in wait for banker’s craft to be lured into the darker canal regions - yet unplumbed by any upstart A to Z cartographer recently laid off in Venice. Dislodged pavement slabs with the gold plate flaking off stood on end like reefs. Floating merchantmen cast money-notes to the wind, in the hope that such inflation-ridden confetti would placate any robbers. They even launched giant coins in cork life-rings as same cosmic game of Shove-Halfpenny. The dossers gambled upon them eventually landing between the tramline territories. It was all a cheap way of keeping busy those who would otherwise be dangerous.

Tom turned over under the gummed banknotes that were unaccountably warmer than cardboard. He could not sleep properly, however, because of the hard currency in his back. There was old gold with which to enamel the city basin and hard loot to sink in venture capital: such were his waking dreams, born out of sunset, by high-rise. The wizened woman called Sue put a finger to his cheek - and it sunk to the bottom bone of spent existence, through the yellow waxy loam of his flesh. She felt his heart turn over like a sick house-pet in its sleep.

The Ferris-Wheel eye in the sky hovered - a huge silent Angel Helicopter. Even as children, they never had enough pockets for their money. She wept to see how shorter she had become than when first a child. The coins were now so huge and dragging, yet worthless. She idly counted the “blessings” as they floated upon the scummy river: ancient uncustomised vehicles which used to circle the City rather than dare cross it. She turned a blind eye and took suck at Tom’s ribbed chimney-flesh neck, whence the head had crumbled. She believed that God was probably a Dosser who could not bear the flesh-corrupted body with which He had been saddled, so He flung it off him in desiccations of gold - whilst the vast money-spider monster sat upon the Cathedral’s dome, knitting its tentacles.

The dam which finally burst was not one of fate nor of nightmare, but that of death itself. Yet Tom’s previous pain had not presaged a healing death, only more pain, a pain that was so painful he could only hope to share it amongst others. And upon the death of each human creature, the residual pain continued to grow for those still left alive. And still does. A tontine of torment.



Another endless winter slipped by at Cloysters - a mild, unmemorable time, for lack of other forces. The next summer, far from bringing rescue along with the sunshine and long evenings was sticky, tacky, membranous. Tom’s thoughts carried meanings like ill-fitting clothes. Some thoughts even became wax figurines in real life, instead of ancient dosser dolls in his dreams. Sue sat embroidering in a study in the West Wing tower which she described (in the last throes of supreme irony) as the needleroom. Her hair, no longer bunned, hung in shaggy wreaths. She glanced up at the oil paintings on the walls (row upon row of anonymously glaring faces) and she listened to the shambling of her husband somewhere in the central buildings. She heard the clink of object placed on object, the ruff and gloom of soft things against other even softer things, the dump and thud of discarded items upon a semi-carpeted floor. She felt a nauseous churning at the belly. A stench at the fraying navel.

Sue’s large darner sparked and flickered through the material, shaping out the stitches’ bite, unladdering the grimaces rent into the weft. The needlepoint fireflew in the noon’s direct light. Her scissors snicker-snackered. Her tongue clucked. She spun ghostly catherine-wheels across the oils and woods of the perfectible silence. Abruptly, beyond reach of such words, out of the far corner of her eyes, behind a grimy grey lens, she caught a flick of face at the window. Once there or seeming to be there, it had gone. Was it Tom spying on her? Or some vagrant who fancied his chances? Perhaps, only the House could tell, for the trees had their heads in the clouds. Bewildered by her own racing thoughts, she stepped over to the window. She could not even catch the retreat of crunching feet.

Summer wore on, lengthening all the time. In her needleroom, Sue sat stock still, a dull wetness at the eyes. Handiwork could no longer claim to preoccupy her. Only the creaks which often interrupted silence in old cut-off buildings kept communion with the residue of Sue Smart’s soul. Tom was no doubt sweeping through on some misbegotten errand, travelling from the quarters of the living, beyond to the central buildings and, evenbeyond those, to the shuttered reaches of the East Wing. To him, Sue was a white pierrot mask simply hung with Sue’s old clothes. Cloysters sighed around her, but she was unaware of the heart beating deep within it. Even her reading had not taught her of buildings which live and even throb, buildings which seem to possess a personality lent to it by a long term resident...

Tom now knew, within an unacknowledged part of himself, that Cloysters was a vessel of memories, some false, some too real. He had not granted it his collection. The House had invested his collection; it had, indeed, given a context of ideas and memories, making the collection seem as if he had actually been involved in collecting it even before he had arrived at Cloysters. Which idea was, of course, quite nonsensical. As a businessman, he had never enough soul to collect anything at all - except, perhaps, meaningless low-grade currency.

The second Winter’s snow wrapped all in ghosts of past seasons. Tom’s ideas had forced him to grant such ideas an existence as autonomous creatures, ones that felt they deserved the apparel of antique poetry. Sue could not comprehend the impulse but only its effect. She knew that Tom was no longer her husband. The white-shouldered trees were more her friends than him. He was always with his collection in the central buildings.

Then a branch scratched the window in a gust.

She had never been properly scared at Cloysters. Nausea had swaddled the fear with layers of emotion. But now, she desperately wanted back the Tom she’d wed in a country church: with the friendly smiling faces of family and friends around. She must find Tom, come what may, even if it meant meeting the man he had become. The first door (the one that led from the West wing) was already open. She strained her eyes at the parade of armour suits in the corridor. As she passed through this phalanx of uncertain identities, she felt self-conscious. Yet, the self of which she was conscious might frighten her more than .......

Indeed, she was too big f or her own body. She had become accustomed to the shifts of Cloysters as it settled further into its history - but now they were magnified by resonating within helmets of iron. The second door, the one which led from that ensorcelled corridor of power towards the East Wing, was shut. She placed a wavering ex-needlewoman’s hand upon the cold slimy knob and turned it widdershins - only to sense the recognisable figure of Tom Smart standing behind her at the first door. He had been in her West Wing all along. She shrieked as she saw in his withered face a smirk of knowing. She opened the second door and fled eastward with Smart snapping at her laddered heels. Down unseeing passageways they ran, past boarded windows. They raced faster than her own consciousness of speed.

Eventually, she sensed him even closer. She believed his arms to be reaching out. Almost abreast, they shunted into a lit room and stumbled into a trestle table the gate-legs of which immediately collapsed , littering the items it had borne. “I love you,” were the words he said, the first for a few seasons. He then punched her in the back, his fist bursting through her front via the navel. Two more dolls were added to Cloysters’ collection: one female with delicately hand-embroidered frock and neatly bunned hair and the other male, tall and elegantly businesslike.

In many ways it was not surprising: not surprising that they possessed an inability to attract anybody’s sympathy or even passing interest ... but the house, yes, Cloysters, clogged the way they were seen: it did not even allow their intimate conversations to be recorded. Even towards the endgame, when suspended belief was ineluctably led towards the climax of Tom’s and Sue’s china-cold imperviousness, one simple snatch of an endearment or a swift peck on the cheek would have brought tears to the hardest heart’s eyes. And, indeed, such quirks of affection were subject to the house’s censorship so that their eventual abandonment as figurines would be credible...

Indeed, Tom’s desperate fistful attempt to be reborn via Sue’s erstwhile body was his only hope to shake off the enwaxen pierrot he’d become. Yet, ghosts, like antique dolls, never had generative organs, in any event. And, in its season, the fleeting face at the window is ever Tom’s a-peeping, a-weeping through the trees.


(published 'White Knuckles' 1996)