Published 'Stabat Mater: Multimedia DFL experience - Digital Workshop 1996

Becky's husband seemed full of an uncontainable victory of delight. 

            By backing into the house, he found it easier to carry the huge Christmas present, without it being spotted by prying eyes from the dark landing of the stairs.  The dolls house to beat all dolls houses.

            Becky looked askance, since she thought he must have spent a fortune on such a big present.  However, when he had eventually lugged it into the dining-room and carefully lowered it upon the table, with one of its bottom edges as a pivot, all her inhibitions were useless.  Gurgling at the back of her throat, she wanted to explore room after room within the intricacies of the mighty mansion.

            Becky pointed in childish excitement.  She collapsed into a pile of giggles, pawing vigorously at Jimmy's shoulder as if she wanted him to come to her rescue before she succumbed to complete breathlessness.  The rooms were perfect in every detail, with hot and cold running taps in every bedroom, dimmer light-switches and wirelesses that actually seemed to be making a barely decipherable tinny broadcast.  Also, there appeared to be a cellar literally under the house, into which they could not see, but Becky managed to thread her finger in and wiggle it about ... incredibly somewhere below the surface of the dining-table upon which the house rested.

            Slowly, with a flourish, Becky closed the front of the house which acted as a vertical lid and merely stared at her husband with merry sparkling eyes.  He looked like Santa Claus incarnate.

            "How much did it cost?" she asked with a manufactured frown.

            That was his cue line and, once given, he couldn't seem to stop:

            "I got it cheap, for what it is.  You know the lady I've told you about who usually sits on the steps at the underground station ... she must have sensed that I still had to buy the one Christmas present which mattered.  She had a shine on me and took me to the shop I didn't know existed beyond the park.  You remember, Becky, where we went for a walk once, that year you said the trees were slow to shed their leaves.  Well, there's a little square behind those alleys which you thought led in haywire directions.  I thought that was a funny expression at the time.  But not now.  The square's full of secondhand bookshops, antique dealers, curiosity shops and a community of youthful-looking people with ancient crafts in their fingers.  It was a grey day, but it now became sunny and too humid for the time of year.  But it felt as if it had always been Christmas in the square, for everyone was in a perpetual state of being highly-strung, poised upon a pinnacle of emotions, daily eager for Christmas tomorrow."

            His speech reeled off like a spinning-wheel: an centuries-old process learned only today.  For his part, he did not realise that he had actually thought all those things; the description merely seemed to come naturally, each word fitting into an old-fashioned jigsaw that would take several lifetimes to complete.  If he had been Beyond The Park, then this was not the first time.  A recurrent plot with different characters.

            Becky grew quieter, more serious, as she again opened the front lid of the hinge.  Nothing jumped out on a spring, as she feared.  All the light fittings (except that on the landing) were now brightly sparkling.  This was only right, she thought, as the darkness in the real outside was already settling into the late afternoon.

            It abruptly dawned on her that there were no doll figures inside the house to represent the inhabitants unless, of course, they were in its cellar.  She laughed out loud, barely stifled for the benefit of the intended recipient somewhere else in the house proper.  The dining-table was laden with all manner of soft-coloured cakes, oozing at the edges with what appeared to be fruit jams and honey and coffee or chocolate cream; oval plates of sandwiches, precisely cut to the demands of a set square, in which the fillings were so thinly spread it must have been anchovy paste or Marmite, although a few revealed the manicured edges of cucumber; a steaming samovar of tea (and she imagined she could scent its heady infusions in every corner of the room); bowls of strawberries and green ice, giving the whole array a splash of colour that the rest lacked; and, finally, rice-paper crimped into flowery napkins and arranged neatly by each place-setting. 

            The dining-room's large corner clock tinkled the hour barely above the threshold of audibility.  Her husband's voice was now lower than whispering. 

            "The shops in that square, Becky, had glowing windows chockfull with handmade toys and childish knick-knacks.  That was strange since it made me think that Christmas was perhaps months away, instead of tomorrow.  Also, I wondered why there were no shadows in the square, with the sun so low in the sky."

            The handle on the dining-room door turned surreptitiously.  Becky was perturbed to think that the destined recipient of the dolls house had slipped from her little girl cot and descended those steep wooden hills beyond which she had been sent to spend the frightening hours.  Her pretty face would be a white sheet, just like the giant tablecloth from which Becky and her husband fed their open mouths with High Tea: the Magic Time of Twilight, when even conjurors were tricked.

            "Mummy, Mummy, I'm frightened, cos I can feel something moving about inside me."

            "Don't fret so, my darling," said Becky to the creature encotted in her soul.  And then, almost as an afterthought:  "It's only Daddy's finger in our cellar."

Written 2000 -  previously unpublished

The teapot – more an urn or samovar  than a teapot, in truth – seemed to be made from a dirty grey clay.  Utility times needed utilityware.  The whole kitchen, indeed, was black, grey or white (as in the newsreels of the day) – save for the odd glint from foreign colours that may have existed.  Even though wartime had officially finished, ration books were still in fitful circulation and a sense of community survived – in as much as the whole family would often sit, come evening, round the low-key kitchen trestle with this teapot upon it.  As the nights drew, so did the brew.  Then the ritual of the tea’s pouring, the sanctity of allowing its healthy gurgle from the spout to take full rein … into the off white chipped crockery.  Then the conversation – Uncle Willy, Old Ma, Old Pa, others of more nameless hue and, finally, Grandma Elspeth in her over-sized bobble hat … each taking it in turns to be the mother and, once the act of pouring was spent, wielding the strainer which they ended up emptying of its nest of dead ants into a basin of leavings.

            Grandma Elspeth often poured some of the tea into her saucer and allowed the small twins to sip at its scalding edge – their eyes brimming with delight at the privilege of savouring such sweet infusion.  They adored the simple deep richness of the colour they saw it to be.

            One day, the war was finally forgotten.  Tuesdays, everybody talked of nothing else, the war’s trials and tribulations, its challenges, friendships, loyalties, braveries … its tragedies, too.  The family had halved in size during its brutal course.  So, yes, one Tuesday, the war was still very real.  But the next day, Wednesday, it was as if God had willed a new start to life.  The whole family began thinking of the future – of what the young twins would accomplish when they grew up – and even the dear departed ones were spoken of as if they were still alive ready to start some battle with death itself.

            Grandma Elspeth, nodding her faded bobble-hat up and down, suddenly suggested they painted the kitchen until someone (Uncle Willy probably) pointed out they had no paint.  But by the third Thursday after that, the place was alive with colour.  Either they had imagined all the colours with their thoughts or a miracle had happened … or a combination of both.

            Except the huge family teapot had been forgotten.

            Until one of the twins pointed at it and simply christened it the blue-speckled teapot – out of the blue.

            On the following Sunday, Grandma Elspeth died naturally in her sleep.  And in her memory they employed her bobble-hat as a cosy for the pot.  And although the hat utilised no real primary colours of its own, everyone knew that the world was not simply black and white, but full of the colours inside Grandma Elspeth’s head.

And so, eventually, did the world.

A collaboration with Tim Lebbon

Published 'Blood From Stones' 1999


Love is dark ... but not black; it's dark red, like matured wine. So, my love, draw near...

Night is full of silent echoes and fulsome lateness - O that Day could be thus! I tote a heavy stone through our turn-tangled town. This was simply because I was ordered to do so. Although I relish the night, I fear its dark breeding-grounds (alleys and blind corners where unbroken glooms and noxious whiffs are rife) and I dodge their enticing entrances (which for some may be exits). I keep to the windy, narrow through-ways that we all know.

Cobbled by-ways, up-ways and down-ways, whatever one decides to call them, the stone grows heavier and heavier. The one who indeed ordered me on this task was a quietly spoken man who looked like me a little older than I am now; he had dug the stone fresh this very night. I queried his look but he passed a hand across and, by magic, the countenance became clean of any innuendo.

My love, you do not know what it is to suffer want. The belly aches as it sucks upon itself. The inside surfaces of the head fall away to the centre. The bones become porous and allow in the phlegm and bile to their very marrow. And the bloodstreams flee the heart for fear of its hammering.

So, I took the man's employ.

At the harbour, hidden in foggy shadows, I watch them unloading pianos from a ship. My weight (as well as the stone's) draws me to the ground, pressing cobbles to my back, making me wish your wondrous hands were here to strip away the aching of the flesh. There are mutterings and a startled curse, the tinkle of unhindered keys, and I suddenly realise the freedom which has been afforded me. The careless bashing of the great instruments is a concerto to my pain, a composition of craving to send me hurrying once more into the dark heart of the city, my love, whence I came.

Leaving the harbour-side dotted with pianos, like a strange orchestra awaiting organisation and introduction.

Love is dark. To recover love, one must experience darkness.



She had come to the city to find someone. But in a place where a million someones lived, her task was all but impossible.

The city still shook with echoes of war, still stank of death and dejection. Sad voices whispered from the shadows of shop awnings, shaking empty tins; there were few rattles. Limbs were missing all over, and there was the occasional grey ghost of a man, face melting to the ground, eyes still seeing the first haze of gas drifting across autumn meadows.

"Bollocks and shit," someone muttered from a paper-strewn doorway, but not the someone she sought. She dropped a copper into his withered hand. "Bollocks and shit," he said.

The city was laid out in incongruous abandon: so, next to the market lay the cemetery, sprawled across three hillsides and full of dying flowers; at the centre, the slums, home to the homeless. Even the dock seemed to sit further up-river than it should, as if fleeing the sea.

#

And, here I am, at the darkest point before dawn, with the heaviest lump of raw earth with which it has ever been man's misfortune to burden himself. I know that I have to meet another gentleman, who will give me a coin (a coin with holes in), for the humping and lack of barrow.

I sit for rest beneath an unshuttered window in a courtyard which by day will bear fountains and ice-cream-vans. I doze; dream that the man with the coins will take a chisel and crack the stone in two with a mallet; and, inside, at the core, will be my own finger-print, which is in fact exactly like the map of our turn-tangled town...

I wake with a start, gnawing hunger beginning to creep along the tunnels of my intestines towards where the belly ends.

My love, I fear to continue. Do you remember when I once loved you almost too much, dearest, when you were much much younger? Your parents forgave me, in the end, and I actually became a friend of the family.

I know I became a little crazy after that; I couldn't help myself. You believe that, don't you? Yes, I know I jumped upon you on the floor, in front of your parents, and I lay down beside you. They shouted for me to get up as I tried to look down your frock to see your pert breasts. "You've seen the piano," shouted your mother, "now get up!" I understood "piano" to be colloquial for breasts or something like that, but looking back at the incident, I wonder if it hadn't been: "You've seen her, Piano, now get up!" Could Piano be my name, like Pablo, Pedro or Piero?



She reaches the dock, at last. Crematory peacocks peck at inurned earthnight. Then, as the last curlew drops its songstone into sepulchral silence, the huge beaked dragonfly swoops from the blackening sky and the gates of Hell let fall a blood of rain...

Baal!

Belus! Al-Uzza!

Uitzilopochtli!

Midnight erupts with scurrying figures, for Nygre-Maunce is afoot. Some beckon others, whilst a few kneel and watch for latecomers. Time is short, for the over-lashing from the sky is ripe. Splishes and splashes scatter the bay with borrowed starlight, the signs of fish gulping in fear inbred by race memory. And her race memory? That bit of her hidden away beneath instinct and learning, huddled beneath the boilers of her mind like a canny ship rat?

She is on the ground before the first scream cuts the dark in two. She tries to press herself closer, but she is already one with the earth. She feels solid and invulnerable, possessed of stony attributes upon which fear will slice its slimy fingers. The scream she had heard halts suddenly, punctuated by the pouncing thud of a dear departed head rolling along the ground next to her, eyes spinning. Its previous owner scurries away into shadowed shadows, never to be seen again.

A cry goes up: "But it's over! But it's over!" as if repeating the words will imbue them with a greater truth. But some wars can never be over, because they have never actually begun; they are as timeless as the rocks in the ground. Most rocks, anyway. And most times.

Soon, a bastard symphony of sound breaks out over the city. With each wrecked piano there chimes a random series of notes, so perfectly chaotic in their profusion that she cries with the emotion there inherent. Claws made from frozen tears and dripping fresh fat punch through old wood to grasp at wires and send them whipping away into the night, free. Worship takes place at the altar of screaming chaos, groups of people kneeling and keening, every single one of them facing in a different direction. Later, some of them stand again. Some of them do not. One remains kneeling, his heart turned to rock by the brief glimpse he gained into the heart of his own putrid nightmare.

She wonders, as she flees the dock, whether he is the one she seeks. If he is, and she has found him, then her search is over. And for years now, the whole purpose of her life has been the search. She could not bear a purposeless life.

#

I sit beneath a dead fountain, bathing in ghost waters. My love for you knows no bounds. The stone is breaking me, but for you I would carry it forever. Though I wish, secretly, that you never ask me to.

And I fear that the man I am to meet will be your father. What, I wonder, will he think of this sad wretch now? Will he turn to his wife (your mother) and ask her to confirm it is me? Being blind now, he can only see the black and white notes in his head.



The monstrous elbow-fight is about to begin and a church-big shape thrusts its hinge to the upper parklands of the town. Another, fresh from suckling in a different quarter of the sky, plonks his down too and grasps his opponent's bunch of fingers with a curved claw. The war that hadn't begun till now had suddenly ended just as it began. Crystallised into two zebra-striped Grands facing each other - sucking out all our battles for their own.

Further honky-tonks stretch from Edinburgh to Plymouth ... but most countrymen sleep in blended dreams and are unaware of these bloodshot ivories skimming across their roofs. If they only knew, fright would turn their genitals to windfall fruits.

A giant Piano sits on a mammoth concert platform, elbows resting at its side, gobbling a newly hatched human being. Its guests crawl to the throne and are duly welcomed: the Eternal Lynx of the Onyx Field; the Mighty Emu, the unchained of the plains; the Blue Gnu; the Butcher Bird, known as the Shrike; the Red Ocelot; the Giant Rabbit, the roamer of the unroamed; the Snow Leopard; and many others. The purpose of the gathering was to examine a walking human head. They came to the conclusion that it was a mutation and not worth eating. Even now, they are disposing of it, by thrusting it back where it came from.

The Piano takes note that an elbow fight is in progress in a different quarter of reality from its own. It ceases fiddling with walking human heads and queries no longer the pretend stone head still sticking to its dark black and white nippled breast. It has to do something, since the elbow fight threatens Truth and Existence themselves.



There is a pit
Where thousands sit
They wink and snigger
As their bodies grow bigger

The turn-tangled streets are full of alien wayfarers, with strange tuneless songs, like these. They should be a-bed, my love.

Let's eat monsters
With their heads and tails still on

A roll - with inverted braille-like notes - starts turning against the plinky-plonk of yet another piano just seen where St Paul's Cathedral once squatted. The roll had been impressed by a London virtuoso during a war that did begin and did end. Nygre-Maunce was afoot now even in real places that suffered historically verifiable air raids.

London is a big big city with big big men
Who sit in offices and count to ten

The voices came from nowhere, and went nowhere. The music sounded like it would never stop.



In the dark, it is difficult to discern what is real, what is not. The stone is turning warm in my hands, my dear love, like a dead heart running backwards through time. Soon, I fear, it will begin to pulse. I can hear the cacophony of war, and I begin to wonder whether the stone is worth keeping. But I have always been an honest employee, if a little light-headed, and my promise to the curiously familiar man should be fulfilled.

I head to the dock, where water laps at the land ... like black blood. Here, light streaks overhead, cutting the night sky into black and white swathes, each of them throbbing to the notes being bandied around. The stone suddenly moves, a definite twitch, as the rumbling thunder of a huge piano in need of urgent tuning slaughters the air. I hear the scream of millions as their sterile idea of reality is brought sharply into focus. Or thrust cruelly into an eternal, stone-cold blur.

#

The shapes of strangers crawling into doorways as the battered notes stream above their heads sets her laughing. Other things scurry around her feet, but they are not really here yet, and there will be plenty of time to fear them when their bastard concerto is finished.

There is a man standing further along the dock, holding what must be a present for her. She wants to reach for him, but fears that he is the one and her quest is over. Already anti-climax beckons.

She opens her mouth to call, and it is this which allows the whipping-strands of torn piano-wire entry to her throat. The wires pierce thin membranes and enters veins, squirm their way through moist passages, sometimes resurfacing into the cool night only to re-immerse themselves once more into warm, safe darkness. They criss and cross inside her, forming a skeleton which will hold her together under terrible pressures. They inch their way through turn-tangled routes, following a higher-dimensional map of the very city where she finds herself lost, plinking and plonking their findings back to whence-ever they were torn.

The Piano at St Paul's shakes itself free.

Another call comes, from elsewhere, away from the docks and the chaos there; a set of perfect scales, weighing the hope of Truth on the back of what would have been Beethoven's greatest concerto, had he written it.

In Cardiff, Roath Park heaves open, and ivory fingers send ducklings flying.

In wars, the greatest genius is propagated by the very worst nightmares. War pigs send bodies to burn, the war machine spins on an axle guaranteed for eternity. Existence suckles at the breast of perfection, yet shadows still twitch and squirm in some of the most remote courtyards and alleys of this contorted place.

The grunts are always the last to know when the war is over.

She sees the shape approach her as her eyes turn silver. Then her senses flee, and she begins to see things in a whole new light.

#

As a cough-drop sun enters dawn, the creatures of the night dissipate, grow as thin as the porridge that you and I sucked before unmaking love. The elbow-fight echoes on, but have you seen a statue dance, my love, or stone that moves as bone? The town churches peal their oranges and lemons, and seem to lean towards each other, like eventual lovers. All unwelcome creatures have fled upon the coat-tails of the night.

Two gentlemen play trapped metal-piece puzzles. And, later, as afternoon turns to dusk, two girls will dance piano-breast to piano-breast. When night returns, as it must, I shall part the ventricles of my hammering heart and place each bleeding half, as poultices, to the incipient sores of curdled dreams and night terror-and the pecking order of all that crow and crawl should stretch from nil to the square root of nowhere.

#

"You've seen her, Piano, now get up!"

But my name is not Piano, is it? It never was.

I get up with the stone. I can now hold it more easily, as it seems to have a top-knot to use as a handle.

It is time. It is time. Ancient Gods have fled with the night. It is time to search the stinging-nettles for my gloves. It is time to wake my parents with the news of my death. It is time to use the curtains to wipe the window clean of overspilt gutter-scum. It is time to reach deep into the pond for the inner pond where the fishes do not swim - and pull my love out like a rabbit from a hat.

#

I can see you, sweetness, and your pain is mine.

The stone is never to be opened, as I had once thought, because it is the smallest of things. There is no inside to it, because it is made from one piece. It can never be broken, like the bulky atom. It is a map, not only of this ruined place, but of all things, ever. A map to be remembered.

Stony eruptions squirm beneath my fingers. I cry clear tears as red drips fall onto my hands. Your body is changed, but you will always be the same as me. I'm so glad you found me before you had gone completely. If I kiss you, will you feel it.

There was once a woman made up of wire
They thought she'd died, when she merely went higher

The stone is as it was destined to be. I place it on your shoulders, and wispy tendrils leap out and grasp it there. I take my hands away, lest they be stripped in your eagerness to change. But still, I risk one final kiss. A kiss at the end of a concert, a 'did you enjoy that?' breath.

#

Yes, I hold your head, my love, not a stone, dangling from my hand like a lumpy balloon of jellified Claret wine. "Drool!" says the dead night. I shall return home to drink my sherbet and play chess with nobody - but not before planting your dear head in the darkest breeding-ground at some off-centre core of the town's perhaps still benighted suburbs.

The neck-root, if it only takes, will grow to knot and twist below our turn-tangled streets, will map and trace their leys and underpaths; and the windfall fruits floating with the winds that come off the artful angles of the town's huddled roofs, will dangle from a majestic but sinuous Tree of Love arching and shading our daily endeavours against want, hate and boredom.

And a pair of its fruits, Eve, my love, shape sensuously slowly into the most gorgeous dangling piano ever - to tempt your sweet Adam.

#

In the old graveyard, the haunting place of dead flowers, I can still see the signs of the elbow-fight we so nearly lost. My love is abroad in the night, seeking the excitement of another Nygre-Maunce, promising to perform the truth of things at its tympanic climax. And I have no doubt of the outcome, none at all. When Perfection is involved, how can one doubt it?

I dodge hunched shadows as they curl between the graves, like the souls of those long gone come back from a night of mischievous tinkering or tinkling. I find the grave marked Pablo or Pedro or Piero (time has fingered the name away) and dig deep.

The stone is mossy, heavy, cool and damp. It may have once been a head, but I think not.

The piano notes wander randomly, underscored by the thread of a my life's tangled ley-lines.

I need to find someone soon. Someone who knows the colour of love. And when I find them, I will give them the stone. I will tell them that when the time comes, they will know what to do.

Published 'Urges' 1995

Muck and dust.

Sally had never seen anything quite like it—but, David having bought the place upon the risk of a guided whim, she agreed with him that they needed to pull out all the stops to get the building renovated for the next season ... otherwise, as David maintained, their nurtured dreams of life bursting skyward upon golden wings would be grounded in gravel.  He shrugged his shoulders, as if he knew he was a poet as well as a businessman.

Not that Sally or David were dreamers at heart.  David certainly had a core of reality, hardened by impoverished bouts of overheating and freezing-over, stretching right back to before the time whence he could recover memories.  Sally, however, had been reared with the big people on the big people's side of the track, that area of castellated riches which overlooked the crowded cottages where David's family had pecked their grit and flapped their stubby arms.  Yet, she was now destined to shed her velvet skirts and become accustomed to overgrown sidings, as it were, having herself abandoned the fast track—by marrying David ... against her parents' earnest wishes.  They'd said David would never be nearly man enough for their daughter, at which statement David had laughed.  He vowed to be embody two men: one with brute force to gut her deep; the other to preen and pamper her feathers. 

The derelict property was now their chance to better themselves: turning it into an inn which, if they played their cards right, would become an eventual chain of guest houses, hostelries and, yes, those tall joints, where big men paid through their noses for doubtful dormitories and à-la-carte caresses. 

It was indeed a demolition's delight—on the outskirts of town ... when David and Sally first viewed it.  On the market for its land value only; to their eyes concrete poetry.  Yet, even at its relatively low asking price, David knew that he and Sally hadn't got the readies nor, for that matter, the provenance as a person with purchase pulling-power.

Even with the painstakingly prepared business plan and inside information which David presented, his bank manager's answer was a slow swing of his heavy-duty prayer-beads in tune with a shake of the shaven head, accompanied by a sickly smile.  David's wings were not only ruffled but decidedly clipped, as he swung through the doors of the bank shrugging as high as shrugs could go.  He'd show them.  He not only had in mind the bank manager, when he said this, but also Sally’s parents who had disowned her for marrying a mere man from the wrong side of the downside track.  That was surely the one reason why they shouldn't have disowned her ... whatever their ulterior motives.  The last thing Sally needed, with David as her husband, was being plucked off the well-mulched family tree.

Still, no accounting for humanity.  Humans couldn't help their nature, could they?  He should know. 

Well, he managed to settle a few ancient scores with once back-slapping streetwise sidekicks—eventually amassing for himself sufficient wherewithal to buy the ramshackle inn-in-abeyance.  The inside information—from one of his boyhood chums now made good and living on the right side of the upside track— indicated that the precinct containing the property was about to be developed as an Earth theme park—where an inn with rough edges would indeed be in.

Muck and dust.

Sally was aghast when she saw the tumbledown horse-hive that David intended to make into an inn.  

“David ... this stable's real unsteady," she said with her customary understatement and a feeling for the cut of words.

He faced her, took her shoulders and tilted her towards him as he planted a kiss on her forehead.  There was nobody in the vicinity—the Land Agent having left his prospects to their own self-devious devices—and David pushed a hand under her blouse.

"Incorrigible!" she said, with a smile.

It was not as if their nights were expended sleeping off all the hours God gave to darkness.  David had these unclocked urges, however, that couldn't be predicted, even when a valve had already released a head of steamy lava from his volcano of libido that very morning.

Sally was accustomed to this, even enjoying his endless sex-madness most of the time.  Yet there were awkward occasions ... in public places ... when she was too tired ... or sinking beneath a monthly tidal surge ... or all of them, like today.

"Come on, Sally," urged David, recognising her smile as a sign of opposition.  The best times were when she fended him off.  Mock rapes were the greatest aphrodisiac as far as David was concerned.  Her screaming "Keep Out—Trespassers will be prosecuted!" was a veritable come-on.  However, her sweet smile tended to burst the passion at its swollen source.  A strange love affair.

She plucked off his fingers, one by one—before they had the opportunity to peel the bra-cup from the give of her left breast.

But, for once, her manufactured smile was forced back into the teeth by the relentless pressure of his lips—cheeks spiked with shadow.  Followed by the automatic caressing of his bulging pouch.  Feeling the wings unfurl.

This was no ordinary couple's rôle-playing to spice up their love-play—when pleas-to-stop ceased to be acting and became for real—the spice scorching the backs of throat ... acid tongues seeking quenchment beyond each other.  Misunderstandings rife—neither party knowing if the other was still acting ... or bluffing ... even, double-bluffing.  That was as nothing, however, when the rôles reversed—mounts changed midstream—up various creeks without paddles—craft docking amid the blood-soaked thermals—switch-backing ... thrashing, neighing, snickering, champing at the bit—a huge swollen aileron—spinning, spinning crabwise, widdershins, in the crimson welkin—then, a second aileron which at first failed to steady them.

Sally unplugged herself from Pegasus' spread remains.  If low-down creatures like David had suspected what women from the upside of the track were really like, she thought, he would have taken her parents’ assertion more seriously—that she needed twice the man the likes of him.  She needed more than merely a wing and a prayer.

The bank manager, who’d slipped surreptitiously into shot, took one look at the caved-in walls, collapsed floorboards and riven roofs—all forming a rudimentary cone. He smiled and took Sally into his arms. They had simply needed that nugget of inside information from the downside and could now make the clip-joint into a mock Mount Etna, to match its peeled pyramid shape. All the rage in drinking-holes, with its henges of rubble and blunt bluffs oozing with blood-rich lava flows.  Fuck and lust. 

Published 'Skeleton Girls' 1995

The female creature had sharpened fingernails, one of which she viciously dug into Bell's cheek. The blood gouted as if a bomb had dropped on a high pressure mains...

It was wilder on each occasion: including the waking up process itself when the drone of an aeroplane  above the house sent the eardrums into deep murmur and mumble.

Forty years since the war's end, and here Bell imagined it still going on. The contemporary newspapers rang with the Berlin Wall's dismantlement as Old Europe's face assumed a new disguise. What was more, an anachronistic pilot maintained a blitz of London single-handed, for whom alone the War perhaps had never ended: trying to stir the embers of man's natural antagonism to man by releasing a dream bomb on Bell.

He woke with a start. He knew dreams within dreams could not be allowed to continue or one of them might take on a semblance of unshakeable reality. The Berlin Wall was a fixture, after all - its crumbling even more unlikely than the London skyline being without the dome of St Paul's Cathedral as a credential.

Bell peeled off a black sticker from an album beside the bed. He applied this sticker to the wall mirror. He never questioned such a routine: rather like an assassin would notch his gun handle (uno for an enemy soldier, duo for a nun, tres for a new born baby). The stickers were mementoes, insignia, regalia, accoutrements - of dreams had. Sometimes the sticker was white: an inch by inch square. Often both black and white: with straight or blurred divisions. Sometimes slightly smaller, sometimes bigger, but always square enough to fit like straight jigsaw bits.

He needed faith in the reality of reality and in dreaming's discontinuity and such faith entailed returning to this room, find the sticker album, knowing intuitively the exact place on the mirror's surface to affix the next randomly chosen one and, finally, with a flourish and a fanfare of tuneless humming, pressing it neatly next to its neighbour.

Bell would soon not be able to see his own face in the mirror at all.

One dream he feared more than any other was the female, with nails sharp enough to worry and tease the edges of the stickers and eventually flay them from the mirror. He would shake and shiver, not even able at first to establish the album's whereabouts nor even possessing fingers nimble enough to pick a sticker out.

In the early days, he thought the evolving design of stuck stamps was a Jackson Pollock mishmash of monochrome. No rhyme or reason to the shapes and smudges of black into white, white into black. They were predominantly spreading from the left hand side of the mirror in a snowstorm. But then, after a spate of dreamless nights, he surrendered any idea of ever finishing it.

Eventually, a pure white shape began to form about three-quarters of the way up, subtly widening out as it angled downwards at about forty-five degrees. For several weeks of sporadic dreaming, each stamp was an untarnished white. There were, of course, various shades of black which intervened, but always positioned to leave the white shape uncorrupted.

There was a partially recognisable shape emerging: as if real life was in slow motion, compared to the speed of his dreams. Holding his breath, to die...

One night, when Bell dreamed of the aeroplane droning over his house, even the bombdoors unlatching could be heard followed by the half-stifled shrieking whistle of a short­cut doodlebug rocket.

     He woke - thankfully before whatever was dropped fell on his house. But the sticker that night was convincing: the last one that formed the camel's back. How could he have been so blind? The design on the mirror was not a wartime St Paul's Cathedral amid revolv­ing floodlight as he had once assumed - but one half of an old-fashioned aeroplane battling against so much snow the driving flakes seemed like the ghosts of killer bees.

Bell was crazy to finish the design, even if stickers needed to be ripped off galore without first dreaming the concomitant dreams. The grid built up under flickering fingernails, square by square. A star on the plane's wing. Heading into a snowflake flak over the dark seas of time past … cheating the wind.

The final stamp fitted perfectly. There seemed to be a dome, too far back for a cockpit. Was this a consolation prize for the plane's design not being a mandala of his favourite St Paul's Cathedral? He knew next to nothing  of mantras, let alone Fokkers, to appreciate the plane's significance or, even, trade-mark of manufacture. He understood too little to know how wrong any guess would be wrong, whatever decided. That was the way fantasies were built up: with bricks that seemed to fit, until they toppled.

The relentless droning above went unnoticed - despite being fully awake by now. The noise was too obvious. He had encountered it too often in dreams, teasing the sensitive eardrums with barely heard undergrunts of vibration. In real life, it was there and not there at one and the same time. Crossing the wall of the mind he heard the bomblatch slip...

       Bell woke, not with a start, but an ending. The bedroom's walls were shimmeringly illuminated by a city ablaze. The doomish domish silhouette decked with black streamers of shadowed flame. The mirror reflected shunting ghosts and living smoke. Bell  stared wild-eyed at the image of self staring wild-eyed at its replica. Raising his sharpened red-painted fingerclaw, Bell gouged a deliberate divot in his own closely shaved cheek.   His engorged thigh-trapped privates exploded bony gristle and pomegranate-like seeds towards the sticky magnet of the mirror. Simply one more single-minded skirmish in the eternal battle of sex against sex. A tectonic incontinence as not one, but two domes rose through his chest hair. Then nothing but dream masquerading as the reality of a new world order...

(Dedicated to Paola whose name was given to me by the Skeleton Girls as someone to whom they wanted the story dedicated.)

Published 'The Banshee' 1994

The purpose of Bingo was to cross off numbers on a pre-printed sheet of coarsely recycled paper as some loud-mouther called out the numbers to be deleted from the sides of bouncing ping-pongs. The supposed randomness of such a method was unquestioned...until, of course, the occasion on which I thoughtfully accompanied my mother on her birthday. It abruptly dawned on me that such a haphazard method was relative only to the law of averages. Indeed, this law of averages is not an average law, being far more powerful than, say, the law of wasting assets: even, the path of physics that science finds itself treading is nothing compared to it. Futhermore, Chance, that some treat as a deity greater than God Himself, sometimes has to curtsey to Fate, which, in turn, is subservient to the law of averages...

My mother did not seem to listen to these ramblings of mine with which I assailed her. In fact, she was rather irritated, because her almost religious concentration on the numbers was being adversely affected. Had she won, I imagine the whole matter would have blown over and lain down like sleeping dogs in the mercenary fortunes of war. However, I was deeply perturbed at the manner with which my mother's gullibility was being milked for the little she was worth. There could only be one set of winners. Those bingo bongos. Chance chancers. Snotto blotto scavengers of the golden average. Whatever they were called, they couldn't even lose a blind farthing.

On top of that, there was a single punter who kept on winning all the games, the full house, the pyramid, the single slice, even the so-called nationwide jackpot; a little lady with granny glasses who was, I suspected, one of the snotto-blottos in disguise. So, they weren't even playing the law of averages by the rules. Means and medians were by-words for something far more insidious.

Ignoring my mother's pleas, as she tugged at my sleeve, I stood up in the middle of a game and shouted BINGO! at the top of my voice. This was despite only having crossed out a measly two numbers. The scowling scoundrel with multicoloured ping-pongs for balls motioned to one of his side-kicks to check out my credentials, which he had obviously pre­empted with prejudice.

In the meantime, my mother was as good as having a coronary at the embarassment of me sticking my head above the parapet of averages. The grannied lady had turned her bristly chin towards us. She nodded to an accomplice who was directing the spotlights.

With the help of osmosis rather than self-built instinct, I suddenly realised that all the punters, my mother included, had actually paid good brass for the purpose of being ripped off by slick merchants -- all part of an enjoyable evening's entertainment -- and I was in the process of spoiling it with my jumped-up principles. Losing was better than winning, because people of my mother's vintage can no longer handle good luck. It would deprive them of the ability to complain bitterly about their lot in life.

I waved the side-kick into touch, indicating that the numbers I had crosses on were more faith than fact. The spotlights uncrisscrossed and abandoned me to re-gather my resources in a moment of simple shame at trying to untangle the knots that held the world up.

My mother smiled, showing me that she had already crossed out all her numbers. Too shy to shout. Too long saddled with sadness to suffer the statistics of success, even on her round-numbered birthday.

Published 'Daarke World' 1994

            "You were very naughty, messing about with my sewing basket," said Nanny Bobbin to the girl. Since it was the time of year when evenings were drawing in, the roaring coal fire stood out in the penny-pinching gloom as if Hell were homely.

            "Sorry, Nanny, I didn't mean to get it all mixed up." 

            Annabel was too old to simper, but simper she did, nervously threading her ringlets with fingers. 

            "It will be the devil's own job to untangle the silk cottons, and colour from colour.  The knots seem to be made merely by the act of looking for them."

            Nanny Bobbin tugged impatiently at the misshapen inspirals, noodly black which the coloured strands had become.  Out came a clatter of trawled thimbles, needles and tiny scissors.

            "I'll help you unravel, Nanny."

            "No point. I'm leaving here tomorrow. There'll be a newer nicer nurse this time tomorrow evening." 

            Dark tealeaf tears gathered at the silver strainers of Nanny's eyes.

            Annabel smirked behind her hand, as she whispered: "I'll help you pack your luggage, then, instead, Nanny."

            The fitful wind gulped in the chimney.  Nanny Bobbin had long since retired for her last night in the large rambling house. 

            Annabel had died, but was so hungry she needed to eat her own body, which had become easily digestible through the process of decomposition.  She hadn't died, of course.  She wasn't even dreaming.  She merely enjoyed exercising her vivid imagination which the lack of playfellows had engendered.

            Unlike Annabel, Nanny Bobbin was scared of the dark. She sat bolt upright in the truckle bed looking back and forth from the faintly glowing curtains of her top storey room to the dark mouth of the empty fireplace.  Only one more night to endure, then she'd be free of this insidious love she couldn't live without. Being besotted in both body and mind with Annabel was not very dignified, after all. She watched skeins of jet-black tubing erupt from the chimney into the grate, as if the corpse of Santa Claus had blurted out spools of its innards in one last foul spasm of many such spasms since Christmas, attempting to unbudge himself from the tight flue. 

            As dawn spread itself behind the house like a backdrop in a pantomime, shades of grey began to curl from the many chimney-stacks—thus a sign that at least someone was up and about, if not anybody else.  A face had already been staring wistfully from the nursery window above the orchard garden for some hours of the sun's shredded gold.  Annabel was praying that next Christmas she'd get the best present of all—a playmate. or, at least, a real Nanny to taunt at bath-time, instead of the imaginary one.

Published 'Beyond the Brink' 1994

Donboy was a stand-up comedian - always had been, always would be.  He had jokes running through him even to the darkest pit of his soul.  Armed to the teeth, too, with the courage to defeat his own lack of confidence, he stood there, spotlit, more on his own than the very solitude of death, opposite a shining darkness that he knew, but could not see, was peopled with those watching and judging him.  Hopefully crammed with such constituents of an audience, all ready to laugh out loud.  Half empty halls tended to produce a quarter hall's laughter.  The more hands to the wheel of laughter, the easier it was to reap the mass suicidal hysteria that a crowd often felt, but didn't usually recognise in itself.

            Donboy had perfected his act at Working Men's Clubs, interspersed with the odd seaside booking - culminating in what he now considered to be his hey-day, warming up for the so-called Big Names in order that the audience's lips would have ready laughter brimming over.

            His gimmick, if birth were a gimmick, was his unconscionable height.  In his early days he wielded the nickname 'Beanpole', then 'Lamp Post', finally (before he eventually became the serious stand-up comedian without a nickname to his name) 'Babbling Tower'.

            So, as Babbling Tower, that was just what he did.  Babbled.  Gibble-gabbled.  Jabbered.  Gibbered.  Giggled.  Bubbled.  A gurgling bone-cistern whose forte was toilet humour.  A walking burbling brain that got its laughs at the soft end of the market.

            Today, Donboy stood tall.  Yet, his jokes were so very much part of him, he needed to rip them out through the membranous section of his soul, dredging up ruptured fibre and bleed-riddled skeins of something he should've jettisoned in his more private moments or during the necessary ablutions of the day.

            The members of the audience were unaware of the pain he expended to produce their laughter.  Nor he their own pain in forcing out such laughter.  They merely awaited the Big Names for whom Donboy was warming them up as if they, the audience, were a cold bone stew on the back-burner of glib existence.

            "Is there anyone here who's come from far away?"

            He often had conjuring-tricks of the mind up his sleeve to supplement his bread-and-butter of verbal horseplay.

            "Me! Me!"

            A little girl in a yellow frock stood up at the back of the auditorium.

            "Your name ... let me see ... is Sarah."

            "No, it's Milly."

            Donboy still stood tall.  Milly was someone whose mind he couldn't read.  Not that he was an official mind-reader in any event.  His job was jokes.  Not see-through sleights of mental prestidigitation.  He couldn't read Milly's mind because it was his mind and little girls didn't know their own minds until they became much much older.

            Yet, Milly could read Donboy's mind.

            He thought himself simply a tragedy that desperately waited its comic relief: Macbeth's Porter who killed himself sooner than answer the relentless knocking of whomsoever was behind the castle-tower's lavatory door.

            The Biggest Names of all Big Name comic double acts sidled on to the stage as Donboy was carried off it.  They'd have to do without warming up tonight.  They dreaded corpsing each other, they didn't even tell any jokes.  Stooge-pigeons, both of them.

            Milly, nevertheless, laughed and laughed till she couldn't stop crying.  She had told a lie.  Her name was Sarah, after all.  But that, in turn, was another lie that even her blubbering couldn't flush out.

            And Donboy?  His name became the nobody it always was.  Donboy Nobody.  Or just another tall story.

Published 'Stuff' 1994

The thing in the wardrobe was wearing garments that had previously hung there by the merest volition of skewed metal and curved hooks and skeletal shoulder-blades and twisted joints...

The coat-hanger creature had indeed gathered substance for itself by the creative force of its abruptly aware mind. A brain is more powerful in its earliest stages, of course, but only if the body that contains it has the wherewithal to accomplish the mind's commands. Human babies are too weak, too small, too fragile and shrivelled, too damn helpless and hopeless, to take advantage of the sudden mental shaft of lightning within its soft-capped skull...

The coat-hanger monster was mammoth mind in motion, its metal arms donning winter clothes whole­sale. The unravelling tourniquets of steel probed the sleeves and leg-holes, giving birth to a jerking marionette of mounds and bundles.

The wardrobe—ill-constructed as it was by human buffoons from ridicu­lously measured components which would have been more useful as firewood than a blueprint for furni­ture—shifted on its feeble foundations with a lumber-smitten roar of split and splayed plywood planks.

There was nobody in the room to witness such creativity at work—but the bed did cringe beneath its covers, only thankful that it was a mindless mass of cloth, twill, canvas and soggy springs. Its plump plump pillows, however, surreptitiously nurtured steel porcupine foetuses within feath­ery down...

Upon the air, there burst a baby's mindless screeching to high heaven from a distant part of the house. No doubt it wanted the night nurse to change its soggy nappy or to respring the big diaper-pin. 

Published 'Deathrealm' 1994

Every month there was a day when Bob and I met to talk of life, the universe, everything.  My dear old mother would have had kittens had she known the places we ended up.  Yet there was one occasion where I had my own doubts.  In fact, wild horses could not drag me to the venue Bob had suggested.

            "If not wild horses, how about some loose-limbed lovelies, eh?" said Bob, as if he had read my mind.

            I looked at him askance, or at least I think I did.  As usual, what had started off as a serious dialogue between deep-thinking individuals about the State of the Nation had quickly degenerated into ludicrous pub-talk and tasteless smut.  However I still retained scruples enough to respond:  "Bob, I wouldn't be seen dead in such a place, even if one of your so-called loose-limbed lovelies tugged me there by the short and curlies!"  I could not believe my own ears.  Had I really said that?  Or was it purely the shallow imagination of a hard-pressed narrator?

            Bob laughed in an uncivilised manner, with spittle-bullets rattling out like a Lewis Gun.  During the rump end of our conversation, there had arrived a third party: a wide-skirted female by the look of it.  She sat amongst the other shadows at the back of the otherwise deserted coffee bar.  I could sense her eyes boring into my neck.  I saw Bob once or twice glancing over in her general direction.  We gave each other knowing looks, in some pretence of macho coolness, each hinting to the other that the situation, albeit mysterious and pregnant with unpredictable possibilities, was one that we surely could keep within the tolerances of control.  He took to whispering, so that the shadow could not hear, whilst the sounds of her fidgeting on her chair indicated to me at least that she believed that even the slightest change in her stance would bring improved acoustics into play, thus enabling her to gain purchase on our words and, by so doing, to affect their meaning by the simple method of misinterpretation.  But the Wurlitzer Juke-Box in the corner seemed to have other ideas, taking on a life of its own, since it abruptly rotated through a number of clicks with, finally, the grating noise of the sapphire stylus dropping neatly into the dusty leader-groove of what transpired to be an ancient Buddy Holly disc.

            Then, even Bob and I could hardly hear each other speak.  And, with the music, the western-style saloon doors of the coffee bar swung wide, to reveal a giggle of what I could only describe loosely in Bob's terms as - what was it? - lick-limbed lovelies, dressed in an attractive Fifties mode, who forthwith commenced dancing a rather suggestive form of Rock and Roll.  I glanced at Bob to see if this was what he had meant.  As he stared glassily straight ahead in front of his face, I saw the jitterbuggers reflected in his engorged eyes.  I mouthed a remonstration to indicate that this was not my scene at all.  My mother would not only have kittens, but tigers, too.   But Bob's mind had decided to go walkies.  Nervously, I clutched my coffee cup and hunched my shoulders as a carapace of protection.

            One 'lovely' approached our table and, beneath the music, muttered a few words to me, trying at the same time to drape her length over my lap.  I was paralysed, but the shadow in the corner bellowed some innard-clogged gutterals which, despite their bestial incomprehensibility, the 'lovely' seemed to understand and she withdrew from my vicinity.  I returned my attention to Bob, relieved to see that he was back from his skull-out.   He leaned across and tweaked my shoulders, as if he wanted my ear nearer.  The Juke-Box stopped suddenly (as they sometimes did if a coin of too low a denomination was used) and his whisper becmae louder than intended: "I've got a hard-on!"

            The dancers freeze-framed.  I grimaced, as embarrassment seeped up from the pit of my stomach - bringing with it a prurient froth to the roof of my mouth and rancid bile to my nose and nostrils.  "Bob, for God's sake!"  He blushed, as I must have done, too, and tried to stand up.  However, the 'lovely' lurking at our periphery loomed to the very edge of out table territory.  I could hardly bring myself to look up, whilst Bob, now forced back into the bottom of his coffee cup, desperately scried the pattern of its dregs.

            The shadow's voice was simply a series of tongue clicks, throat grunts and belly laughs.  The lights were doused, as if the meter yearned another shilling.  I heard a sound that was too obvious to be implied: a crunching-off, like celery, a splitting asunder, a tearing-out of a fibrous root from the body-grabbing earth.  And the she-shadow was now touchable terror: harnessed to such a root, as she jigged and jived, in the flickering of her own luminescence - like a jester on heat.  The dream-eyed 'lovelies' gave grudging welcome to the jump-lead she now wielded, as they were in turn short-circuited to the very bottom bone and hell of the she-shadow's searing soul.

            The lights flashed once and then came on permanently.  The Juke-Box completed the Buddy Holly disc - but it now seemed to be a different song altogether, reminding us that love is getting closer, going faster than a rolercoaster...

            Bob was slumped across the table, his head lolling, thick coffee drooling from his lips upon the formica.  And there was a slurping noise upon the floor from somewhere below the table, a spilling that became a splattering.  I shrugged.  I could've wept blood.  I'd taken Bob out on the wrong day of the month - yet again.

            There was no sign of the 'lovelies' anywhere.  Loose bits, all of them!  I cursed my mother, for not warning me about life and its pitfalls.  All she ever did was irritatingly twiddle her whiskers as she nagged me to keep clean by licking my underparts and always to help the earth to gobble up my doings.