Published 'Gathering Darkness' 1993 

 

Jamesiah Fenn settled back into the chimney corner of the Innsmouth Arms, upon a well-worn seat which he had made his own from decades of supping and chin-wagging.

 

          When other less hardened regulars wandered into his conversational catchment area, they were often amazed by his ability to feed off stale gossip which they brought with them, often thus creating new gossip of his own for them to translate into action.  It was like visiting the Oracle of Rumours, an ever-tipsy greybeard with telltales and memories to weave, which his audience could subsequently live out as best they could on the stage of life.  Thus, memories became real...

 

One evening, he was talking aloud even before the others gathered round with pint-pots to drink in his every word...

 

          "There was a curious shop in the backstreets, not far from the seafront, called Brix & Malta, where I once worked as a nipper. It was next door to a wetfish shop, selling long cod in the main, I remember..."

 

          I dreaded a tangent.  Fenn's tea-stained face nodded in tune, not with his speech, but with some contradictory inner rhythm caused by an encroaching disease which old age could no longer disown.  His eyes weltered with tears, but I wondered if it really were sadness that had brought such glistening to those sunken oases either side of the beached nose.  He decided to continue with his story of Brix & Malta.

 

          "It purveyed bric-a-brac from the Mediterranean, things made with care and unmodern hands.  The figurines glinted in the bay window ... and there was one item in particular..."

 

As he hesitated lengthily, I nodded. I was the only one present.  The rest were strangers of one kind and another, I realised, irregulars fresh from beating tracks along the esplanade, those on solitary holiday from the cities further north.  The locals, who usually populated the Innsmouth Arms were noticeable by their absence: a peculiar evening of coincidence, by all accounts, since they all must have dicky stomachs or been kept at home in the fishing cottages by overwhelming wives.  Pity, that, for tonight, Fenn was in evident form, eager to let drop perhaps a prize tidbit of scandal-mongering.  Being on my own, it was not too difficult to interrupt him, for he could see I was a thinking being, unlike those irregulars with the mindless routine of the cities still hanging about them like a set of glassy-eyed masks in the window of Brix & Malta.

 

"Hey, Mr. Fenn, I bet you anything the item you mention in Brix & Malta was a painting in a splendid frame."

 

          He turned to me (and I was grateful that he had at least recognised me for what I was) and nodded his head:  "Yes, you are right about the painting, if not the frame.  It showed our resort when it was little more than houses and redoubts made of upturned boats.  The artist had captured the sea and its close inhabitants with a few deft strokes and just a little bit of imagination on the part of any that viewed it."

 

          All this time, the Innsmouth Arms was filling up with more seeming strangers (some more complete than others and a few with saucy postcards in their hatbands).  Old Fenn scowled and continued, whilst finger-combing his beard.

 

"I was so desperate for that painting myself, I can tell you. I tried to prevent anybody else from buying it.  I told the customers that it had been in the shop for twenty year or so, gathering dust, because nobody wanted it.  So nobody did want it, even (or especially) at a knock-down price."

 

          "Why didn't you buy it?" I asked, knowing the answer all the time, but hoping to lead him away from another tangent.

 

          "I had no money, of course.  I was paid in kind.  Crusts of bread dipped in pulse soup.  My mother used to send me to Brix & Malta, because there was nothing else for me to do and nothing at home to eat.  She used to have nightmares about men who scratched underneath our home, themselves wanting something to eat.  Did you know my home?  Even the fish swam no near it."

 

He turned more positively towards me, as I asked:  "I understand your family lived in one of the boathouses on the backwater?"

 

          "Yes, the sea weeds did crackle outside the porthole of my bedroom."  He leaned closer to me as if I'd become the confidant he'd awaited for decades.  "You see, it was our boathouse at the centre of that painting..."

 

          I sighed with relief.

 

          But the strangers were now growing even stranger around me.  They were tanked to the gills.  I hoped the pub would soon shut up for the night.

 

          He had stopped speaking because of an incident at the entrance door, but it soon passed over.  For a moment, you had thought some regulars were being forcibly kept outside, their bellies having now abruptly rumbled out their long pent up bouts of wind.

 

          Not to be swerved unduly from the fateful course of his speech, Jamesiah Fenn continued:  "Yes, I think our boathouse at the centre of the painting had a face at one of its portholes.  And it may have been mine ... with terror in the eyes..."

 

          I could only interrupt:  "Surely you must have bought that painting in the end.  You surely wanted it so very much ... a souvenir of childhood..." 

 

Silence intervened.  He looked simply inscrutable and then laughed his butt off.

 

          But memory can only play tricks.  I was hustled, I think, from the Innsmouth Arms by many hands with unseen faces.  Some had children's sand spades grasped in them and others fanned out yellowy close-up photographs of human genitals like raw meat.  And if I had not seen fit to write all this down, even the certainty of Fenn's existence would be merely another item of gossip.

 

          I can tell you one thing for certain, however.  The shop that was once called Brix & Malta is now a pork butchers.     

 

 

Cheryl knew she wasn't in Brighton for nothing. A message, an email or text on her mobile, or whatever: saying a gentlemanly ex-String Quartet was needing her services for a come-back.

 

She didn't know Brighton very well, but she felt her way: near the pier, where shops and houses strangely mixed with each other in a untypical fiftyish style; indeed it may have been a part of Brighton nobody knew!

 

A single pub where she thought a supermarket must once have stood. Called the Dog and Onion.

 

Cheryl shook her head; this couldn't be right. Over there she spotted some dilapidated back-to-back cottages, where a modern internet caff – many years before – had done a roaring trade in Jaffa cakes, as well as electronic chat-shows. The pub was crawling with low life. Cheryl was, of course, a theatrical agent; hired to bring back the dead. Corpsing was not allowed on her stage! The four old ex-musicians, complete with instruments, sat in the snug, eager for a reprise of a late Beethoven quartet.

"About time!" snarled the ex-cellist, leaning his beer-mug on the curved brown shoulder of his seasoned scrape and shudder.

"Sorry, I was held up at East Croydon," Cheryl announced, sitting beside them.

"Would you like a drink?" asked the ex-violist. He caressed his instrument as if it were a new born baby or, rather, its young mother.

She nodded.

The two ex-violinists played a playful trill with their bows and catgut, almost in unison, almost replicating the devil's own fiddling. One of them bustled over to the old-fashioned bar, where a balding drag-queen pulled at the pumps. Cheryl had not even said what she wanted.

"You see, Miss, we'd rather like to get some bookings in London." The ex-cellist passed his bow over his instrument without making contact. A tentative, tantalising manoeuvre more in keeping with salaciousness than chamber music. His voice was two octaves awry. Indeed, the mumbles and grumbles of the other ex-quartet members were decidedly shrill, making Cheryl wonder if this were typical of the whole of Brighton.

 

Meanwhile, a yellowy-creamy snowball was delivered; and the four gents started squawking. Their bows raising a squall of notes that even avant garde musicians would rather have eschewed.

The rest of the pub crowd looked askance and the balding drag-queen managed to slant his eyes in their direction with veritable daggerpoints emerging from the pupils. Cheryl managed to quell the racket. She told them that London was full of String Quartets, Piano Trios, Ensembles of French horn and other brass and woodwind - and the four gents would do better on the north east coast of Essex, like Clacton on Sea, a resort simply clamouring for more adventurous music of the serious variety. They'd just fit the bill.

The gents beamed and entered upon a soft lullaby with tingling touches of their gnarled fingers on the necks of their instruments.

The tides shushed back and forth beneath the nearby pier's boardwalk in accompaniment.

The pub smelt of potato crisps and mild. The clientele returned to their bevies with a will. The balding drag-queen head-pointed towards the old stand-up piano in the corner. Evidently a Piano Quintet was in the offing. One by Alfred Schnittke.

Cheryl left the paper contract on the table and sidled from the pub. She thought rather avant-gardely that the new arrival – an ex-pianist – probably had horns under his saucy seaside hat.

 

Even the noise of the sea couldn't conceal the rather loud pub music she left behind.  Thankfully she'd not forgotten that she hadn't left a forwarding address for the contract.

 

 

 (unpublished)

 

 

 

Published 'Black Lotus' 1993

 

If fear were music, it'd be the near silence of the bedroom when you woke in a house you knew ought to be empty of anybody but you – and you caught the sound of low breathing coming from your fitted wardrobe.

 

Then such music was accompanied by your own heavier breathing which sleep had previously kept away from your consciousness, albeit the ears knew a thing or two: a counterpoint in terror.

 

Then, the crescendo reached fever pitch. With the hyperventilation of your clambering crawl across the carpet in the dazed doze of near nightmare, you questioned, somewhere deep down inside yourself where the heart's fast percussion was deeper than any ear drum's range, which of the two participants in such dire duet was more hysterical with fright – you or the thing in the wardrobe.

 

If death were music, its marching strains would surely not be those of a funeral, nor even a dirge of last minute forgiveness to the world, but more the missing notes of a silent tomb where you could wake to mar such silence.  And you could have no hope of rescue this time. No pomp, no circumstance, no march, nor even clambering crawl.

 

 

 Published 'Vicious Circle' 1993

 

Devon lived a long way from London, but on his seventeenth birthday he decided it was high time he hit the smoke.

 

Whilst a baby, he had not heard the name London but, slipping free from his mother's arms for the first time late on Sunday afternoon, he spotted a yellow photograph of St. Paul's cathedral glued to a tin where, he later learned, his mother kept stale biscuits for the Trick-or-Treaters each Hallowe'en. This being the first picture he had seen properly, Devon's brain kept a little bit of itself devoted--and he thought the dome of the cathedral a hat. He knew all about such things, since his mother often wore one, with a tortoiseshell hatpin.

 

School taught him a lot more about London--that there were City people quite different from the normal ones like Devon, like his mother and his school chums and even the teacher--that trains went below the pavements like horizontal chimney­sweeps--that it was bigger than all the world's cities put together--that, most important of all, it had a peppering of tall churches sowing the skylines with forests of faith.

 

And the church the teacher pinned up was, of course, St Paul's.

 

 

 

The train loitered through the countryside as if it had lost its way. Devon sat in the corner of the carriage, pretending to read a book, while his mind reacted to scenes it had not yet experienced. The book was by Harrison Ainsworth, and the print on the pages was in blocks of foreign black. Use Town was the place the station ticket­puncher had mentioned as being the train's destination. Near London it was, Devon was assured. Use Town may even have one of those underground trains. The Express he was on might even change into an underground one, come London.

 

There were three other people in the carriage, a woman with a large flowery hat in the luggage rack, a man up there with her who sniggered a lot and an oblivious little girl in the other corner on the seat who was evidently someone's daughter. Devon stared at the girl. She must surely be in her teens .. .just.

 

"Is it Use Town this train's going?" he asked. This was the first time he had spoken on a train.

 

"Euston, she mumbled, after a tunnel.

 

"Is it near London?" he asked.

 

"It's in London, it's part of London. A big station."

 

"Does the train go underground there--I want to go to the City and see a big church, you see."

 

"No, you'll have to change."

 

Devon pondered. He'll have to change. He nodded, understanding for perhaps the first time.

 

 

 

The hubbub of the big station was more surprising than he expected. It hit him like a chain of those summer storms chasing each other around the hills of Devon's village back home. The little girl told him the whereabouts of the Gents. He hadn't realised that he could have relieved himself on the train.

 

The man and the woman who had been in the luggage rack, Devon saw, had turned themselves over to the station lost property office -- they evidently were even more confused that Devon. To his horror, he lost the little girl in the crowds. And the crowds in Useton seemed not to be at all like the little bunches that automatically formed during games of "Denno" in the school playground of his childhood. But here they were constituted of bodies in sheer uncoordinated selfishness. Devonl found himself party to a particularly large one led by a gangling youth with ear­rings--and this crowd violently careered from one end of the concourse to the other like Devon's demented Uncle in the padded cell back home.

 

Eventually, he was expelled by the crowd outside Smiths, where a policeman was standing guard and eating crisps. "How can I change?" asked Devon, without fear or favour, for policemen were an upstanding lot back home.

 

"Spam off, you bugger! I'm shitting well not going to tell you anything!" This was a foreign language to Devon, but, evidently, the policeman was not impressed with Devon's reaction--so he decided to try the soft touch, as an alternative: "Well, young man, see that bar over there--the place is what they call Bottoms Up ... " And he pointed to a joint bursting to the seams with ill-dressed miscreants tipping wine­-glass after wine-glass into their thirsters. The policeman continued: "Go in there and I'm sure they'll give you a drinky poo on the house."

 

Devon wandered over to the evil-looking place and a great stench of piss met him which he remembered from the boys' toilet in the school playground back home. And amid the dirt and the foul language, he spotted his little girl friend from the train, who was asking one of the customers to interfere with her.

 

Doubtlessly, Devon can't recall much about it, least of all the mysterious motives that must have taken hold of him, but he took the girl's hand, dragged her out into the concourse and delivered her up to the policeman--who forthwith took her away to apparent safety.

 

 

 

He reached the city with the help of a friendly-seeming taxi-man who took pity after finding Devon in his empty bonnet pretending to be the engine. Devon's Uncle evidently had a lot to answer for. The taxi-man knew literally everything about London, where to go, what to do when you got there and, most important, how to change. Devon had used up all his disposable assets on the train journey, but he had a silver tanner left. The taxi-man knew the A to Z like the back of his hand and, for the tanner, he agreed to allow Devon to follow his taxi on foot. But he couldn't get it started, for some unaccountable reason, so he palmed Devon off with some complicated misdirections--and Devon went, on his own.

 

However, before he rounded the final corner away from Useton, he turned to wave goodbye to the taxi-man. But he'd gone--no doubt for a snifter at Bottoms Up.

 

 

 

All roads lead to St. Paul's--and, after several hours, a tired and hungry Devon arrived before the mighty edifice of his childhood dreams.

 

The enormous dome lifted into the blue sky. If nothing else, Devon had chosen a nice day for his trip--and the sides of the pillared buildings had statues dotted about like rock-climbers. But it was the dome to which his gaze kept returning: the huge hat of his childhood with a crucifix hat-pin rising from its peak.

 

He was in awe. If he had not changed at Useton, he was certainly changing now. Sublimity filled his head, gorgeous rhythms of faith and desire. Then he heard the flapping. From somewhere beyond the dome, it sounded as if a mighty bird as big as the catheedral itself was slowing its motion for landing. Devon still could not see what made such a noise--it was probably Concorde, a photograph of which wondrous jet-liner the teacher back home had pinned on the wall next to that of St. Paul's. But now it had leather wings and a spindled snout, Devon feared.

 

And what eventually loomed above the dome was indeed a monstrosity. Its face was the Devil's own Hallowe'en mask, with skin in leprous folds, wild staring eyes swimming in pools of blood, champing beak of yellow splintered bone and wicklow wattles. Its nose was indeed Concorde's--but surpassing by far the produce of the vilest fount of slime in the ranks of nastiness. The ribbed, webby wings filled the sky, as if the Earth itself had unfurled them. Devon called out for his Mummy--he wanted to be back home more than he had ever yearned for anything.

 

He felt a small hand slip into his and, looking down, he saw the little girl he had met on the train smiling up at him. "I didn't let him," she piped mysteriously.

 

"Good," replied Devon, without really understanding why. They wandered off together to where they thought Useton would be. But before they rounded the comer he turned back and saw that the Cathedral must have been nothing but a figment of his imagination. A bank stood where the monster had been. London was evidently a city of false pretences,

 

They finished up at the Regent's Park Zoo which, after all, could not be far from Useton. There they saw a monkey wearing a bowler hat with the words "I Love U." It threw it into the air and the girl picked it up and put it on.

 

Devon had disappeared when she turned to show it to him, so she now had to find the lost property office.

published 'Neophyte' 1992 

 

            Universes have no dead ends.  Or so thought the lovelorn pilot, as he struggled with the pod's joy-stick. 

 

            He was so alone, he began to believe in himself as the one true God.  The viewfinder was not a direct window but a slightly disjointed image of the pod's surroundings - being a device to prevent Angle Blindness from which early space travellers suffered.  And, by means of such a viewfinder, he saw vast doors in the side of Space opening and shutting, making it the devil's own job to steer the craft through the frames,  depending on the pod's inbuilt Translator to cope with the non-alignments between sight and reality.

 

            The intercom burst into fitful life which, in itself, was not surprising, since it often needed no direct Originator.  Unknown to the pilot, the receiver simply fed off generations of radio echoes with which the bouncing walls of the universe played eternal Catch.

 

            "Ancient message to future man.  Ancient message to future man."  The intercom spoke through the typical static of the past, since Universes were by nature inefficient places, badly needing Time's traffic wardens to guide the various bustling items of past, present and future round the unexpected corners of a finite Universe...

 

            Finite Universe!  The pilot was abruptly brought short in his moitherings.  Surely he hadn't thought that thought!  He stared at the intercom, believing it had bitten him.  The joy-stick throbbed in his hand as if his own emotions transferred by this medium into the pod's very inner workings.  His religious upbringing as a boy had been geared to the awe of pure, unfettered immensity: like the man in prehistoric London who had stood in the zoo grounds staring wide-eyed for the first time at a giraffe and saying he just did not believe it.

 

            But then, gradually, Infinity became two-a-penny, like giraffes themselves and rhinoceri, white elephants, rocs...

 

            "Ancient message to future man..." 

 

            He shouted back at the intercom: "Cease thy daftnesses..."  But it didn't.  It began to sound convincing.

 

            The pod jerked as he pulled the joystick into a position that it was not meant to be pulled into.  The viewfinder lost its view, but not before each door of the Universe slowly closed even as he watched.  Thus trapped, he remembered the girl he had left on Earth: the one he loved too much - necessitating this out-trip towards memory-loss.  He managed to prod the joy-stick into its rightful groove, the pod's gears grating and grinding in the process.

 

            "Oi! Oi!" came the gruff tones of the jobsworth Traffic Warden type from the intercom:  "I've got bleeding kids crossing this here road and blighters like you are a real menace..."

 

            There was a horrid noise as the pod lurched through body-flesh.  The pilot somehow knew he had just killed a little girl on the crossing - the girl who was, by all accounts, due to become his only truly love in the one all-embracing future.

 

            The various affinities and infinities of Universes are the very life-blood of Fate and of its mistress Coincidence.  He wept as he pulled the joy-stick right back so as to test the strength of this particular Universe's upper reaches. 

 

            Future man tried to warn the past, but it was already too late.

 

            As God hid Himself behind His own non-existence, the beasts in the Old Zoo grunted and darkness crept from the licquorice bowl of night.  It was the dare-devil's own job to ride the fairground of space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the phone rang, I knew it was the call for which I had long been waiting. Although I was in no way a self-starter - with very little affinity towards saleswork - I had, nevertheless, pulled out all the stops at the job interview: demonstrating that, if I could sell myself I could sell just about anything.

But I had since realised that I must draw a line at trading secrets - not that I was morally in two minds about selling items of knowledge to some parties whom other parties wanted deprived of such items. Indeed, the owners of secrets were nothing to me. My concern, purely for the sake of tidiness in the hierarchies of facts, was for the well-being of the secrets themselves. Secrets being unsuspecting, innocent, human-dependent creatures, I felt duty-bound to keep them thus. Keep them safe. Yes, keep them secret. Sacrosanct.

The nature of secrets, however, is not something that can be broadcast in this way. Hence, there is a need to enshrine them in a piece of fiction, one that nobody will treat seriously, if they indeed read it in the first place, bearing in mind my inability to write readably. Obliquity and opacity are the only feasible clarities, the only tenable transparencies of meaning - because we are surrounded by secrets. The bottom-line secret of such secrets is their existence as autonomous creatures who are, in turn, secret from each other - pigeonholed, ringfenced and circumscribed. Only my words are imprecise enough to convey the secret of secrets, without actually breaking it. Normal words would be see-through and, therefore, unsuitable for keeping secrets separate within the overall conspiracy field. So, when the phone rings, the self-starter stalls, fearing that he has only been given the job as a result of overselling his skills at selling secrets. So he turns down the dimmer-switch of his first person singular soul: to deafen the phone, to fence off the fiction from fact, to eggshell the dream within its ring of reality. The feel of feelers inside his skull, no doubt waking secrets. No doubt, no am. No insulation, no birth.

Discrete secrets. Discreet secrets. They have more to sell than simple fact: filling otherwise empty words with the stuffing of meaning. Padded word. Padded sale. Padded cell. 0.

(published ‘Oasis’ 1996)

Published 'Wearwolf' 1992

The size of the drawing-room seemed to be ever on the change, like an exercise in breathing space.  The lightshade swung to and fro from its ceiling rose, turning the flock wallpaper tidal. 

 

Two women who had been dozing in front of the log fire suddenly woke, wondering what had set the light moving - probably a draught from under the door, drawn in by the heat of the fire, or through the cracks of the window.  The curtains were, however, as still as if they formed splodgy ingredients of an oil painting. 

 

One woman, in her late twenties, was dressed peculiarly old for her age.  The twin set of home-knitted morling wool was crowned with a large crucifix hanging between widely parted breasts: a bluntly carved Christ was just discernible in the flickering yellow gloom...

 

The light had gone out but the shade still swung like an invisible censer. 

 

"Must be a power cut," said the woman in the twin set, picking with meticulously filed fingernails at her tweed skirt for precise specks of dust. 

 

The second woman was older, in a dressing-gown that was hitched above her knees, with mannish lapels flapping open at her chest to reveal the conical ribbing of a heavy-duty brassiere.  She did not reply. 

 

Before dozing, they had disputed a trivial matter.  The younger woman had spoken of those who first climbed Everest.  She said they had carried a life-size Christ pinned to an oaken cross to the summit where they had buried it in the snow.  It had seemed fitting for such a thing to be done. 

 

The older woman said this was poppycock.  None of the mid-fifties newsreels had recorded such an event.  There were merely those images of Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing standing with flags aloft.  Nothing about burying a cross.

 

The younger recalled this previous argument and, in the now almost dead light of the log fire, she lifted herself from the armchair and plumped down on the older's lap, lightly brushing her teeth across the furrowed brow.

 

"I did not mean that you were wrong, dear, but it seemed the obvious thing to do - at that point on the world's surface nearest to God..." 

 

The older picked up the crucifix from the younger's chest and kissed the icon.  She felt the Christ squirm under her lips as, from the chimney, the night swept into their living space like a black snowstorm.

 

Belated Moments

First published 'the kore' 1994


My custom was to explore secondhand bookshops at the slightest opportunity. It needed guile to shake off my wife and children - but, one day, I had a rare success in subterfuge. We were about to traipse around a toy museum near the sea front and, without giving them a chance to reply, I told them that I would be back in half an hour to conduct them onwards to the various amusements on the pier that needed coins in the slots.

I had indeed spotted a wondrous curiosity shop on the approach to the toy museum, hidden to the view of my wife and children (and of most other visitors, too). But my expert tunnel vision having picked it out down a sunless alley, I was convinced by my instinct that it would purvey a veritable trove of dusty books. And I was not mistaken. However, it proved not very different from what I imagined the toy museum to be, since in every corner there seemed to reside many ancient jacks-in-the-box, china dolls, pop-up nursery rhyme books and colourful whips and spinning-tops - but here they were for sale rather than show. If I had known, I could have killed two birds with one stone by bringing my family here.

The books themselves were a dream. First editions galore with lightly pencilled prices on the fly-leaves, some even within the range of my purse. Others, of course, not. Many were Victorian, but mostly hardbacks (with original dust-wrappers) from the twenties, thirties and forties, children's dreams and adults' fancies.

I was surprised to discover an old stamp album: full of colourful squares, oblongs and triangles (and even one trapezium from Darkest Africa), carefully affixed with sticky paper hinges. I imagined a child (now grown into an adult more long in the tooth even than myself) meticulously wielding tweezers, positioning his prize specimens at the optimum angle and sitting back sighing with pride. This boy would have eschewed even playtime in the sunshine for such a close-ordered activity.

My surprise was generated by the fact that such an article was stacked with the secondhand books, bulging as it was with well-hung stamps. Some of the stamps looked "rare", but many must have been gathered together from a lucky-dip selection which children used to obtain by sending off a coupon from the Tiger or Lion or Eagle comics. The stamps used to come "on approval". But there were some examples of stamps in this album that I had not been able to even dream about when I was that age.

I covetted that album more than anything I could recall covetting before. I held a whole childhood between my fingers. But there was no price pencilled, presumably because the fly-leaf was covered with a highly stylised map of the world. So, that was where Saar was. And Andorra, San Marino, British Honduras, Monaco and St Helena. Nobody ever seemed surprised that most of these small places had outlandishly large postage stamps. I looked round for the shop counter, fully expecting a wizened old man to be stationed behind it - one with pipe, toothbrush moustache and eyes bleary from poring over small print. But this was a day full of surprises - since a girl of surpassing beauty smiled at me from behind the counter, appearing as cool as her flowingly diaphonous dress of white.



I collected my family who were impatiently kicking their heels outside the museum. Apparently, it was a natural history exhibition. Why I had originally thought it was a toy museum, I could not now fathom. What was abundantly clear, my wife and children had been bored and decidedly crotchety at my lengthy absence from their party. I blamed it on having been cut short and the nearest convenience a fair step away on the sea front. And it had not been a particular pleasure, I assured them, standing next to all those sweaty individuals in trunks. But my family soon oozed forgiveness when I changed my remaining ten bob note for 120 pennies at the amusement arcade on the pier. The old wizened fellow who sat behind the copper towers in the change booth actually winked at me. He looked decidedly unhinged.

As I tried my luck on the fortune-wheel, which was supposed to give some inkling into one's future love life and luck, I suddenly wondered why stamp collections always used to be conducted by short-arse boys who did not have many friends with whom to go scrumping apples or building dens. I could not possibly imagine those unattainable angelic girls of my lonely childhood abandoning their china dolls and dressing-up hampers for such close-ordered activities as mounting stamps.

The fortune-wheel did not record any romance in store for me. In fact, the bad luck it indicated seemed to start with me somehow losing the stamp album soon afterwards. Like the beautiful ghost, it must have slipped through my fingers.