continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/285.html

I must look nervous, thinks Jane as she shuts the door behind herself.  She's always been small - her full height is five feet one - slim-built, looking younger than her years.  She seems to inspire men to want to protect her, always older men.  From her father onwards.

Her father.  She rarely thinks of him now.  She was six when he died: his face is a vague blur.  The man in the old photographs is almost a stranger to her, even in the picture of him with her one-year-old self on his lap.  She remembers more vividly her mother, racked with grief, bent over and crying.  The grey shell of a woman she was in the ten years before she died.

After she has finished, she pulls up her underwear and straightens her skirt.  She walks back down the aisle and sits again next to Simon.  He is still asleep.  She crosses her legs, reaches out and puts her hand on his knee.  Let me protect you for a change, she thinks.  She's calmer now, but there's still the landing to come and of course the return flight.  But I've got this far.  It's not so bad.

She gazes out of the windows to her left.  The plane is tilting in the opposite direction, lifting up and away from the seascape.  In his seat AJC is still asleep.

*

The knock on the door again.  "Come in," Peter repeats, before realising that he's locked the door from the inside.  He stands up and opens the door.

Roisin stands in the corridor.  Her hair is loose to her shoulders, and she is wearing a long bottle-green-and-red-squared dressing-gown.  It's open just below her knees, and he can see the lace hem of her nightdress and below that her slim hairless legs and her feet in blue fluffy slippers.

"Roisin..."

"I couldn't sleep," she says.  "There's - just something.  I can't explain it."

"Come in."

Her words skitter from her mouth; she seems much less composed, much less poised than she is by day.  He's only seen her once before like this - that night they made love.

She sits on the armchair, he on his bed.

"Is it just because it's a strange bed?" he says.

She shakes her head.  "No, it's not that.  It's not the nightclub on the ground floor.  I've slept through worse than that, believe me.  I just can't sleep."

"What's on your mind, Roisin?  Tell me.  Is it Seamus?"

She shakes her head again, more vehemently.  "No. No.  I don't know how to say it."

Peter's heart misses a beat.  It's about me.  It must be.  He swallows, takes her hands in his.  "Just try, Roisin."

"Last night I had a dream.  I dreamed I was in the cemetery."  Her hands grip his; she looks down at her lap.  "And I saw a gravestone with your name on it."

Peter's stomach clenches.

"I woke up in a sweat.  There were tears in my eyes.  I realised how much I care for you.  It scared the shit out of me."

"Shhh," he says.  He takes her in his arms.  She seems very small, very fragile.  She slips her arms about his shoulders.

"Just hold me," she says.

He rocks her gently, as he would a young girl.  As he's done to his own daughter.  As to Helen, when something had upset her.

Tears track down from her eyes, down her cheek, drip onto his trousers.  "Hey, come on," he says.  "Don't cry."  There's something about women's tears that strikes deep to the heart of him, reduces him to inner trembling.  And something erotic.  He gently pats her back; she holds her clinch tighter.  He puts his hand under her chin, lifts her face, leans down to kiss her.  He moves his hand down, undoes one of her dressing-gown buttons, slips his hand inside.  He pushes the fabric of her nightdress aside, and runs his hand over her breast.  He hears her breath, sharply indrawn, in his ear.

Once can be excused as a lapse, he thinks.  But not twice.  Twice has to be deliberate.

He sits on the bed and undoes his shirt.  He watches her as she stands, undoes her dressing-gown and pulls the nightdress off over her head.

*

Statistically, dreams are most often dreamed in pairs.  Ranging from a couple entwined in bed to two individuals continents apart who may never become acquainted.  The strangest element in this already strange waltz of sleep rhythms and mutual mind adaption is that the partner leading the dance forgets the dream when waking, whilst the one twirled and led remembers it...perhaps forever.

*

Peter does not ask Roisin what she dreamed tonight, if she remembers it.  In the darkest hour of the night, he feels her warm smooth flesh slide over his own, tender and sensitised by the memory, the dream, of their lovemaking.  A faint kiss on the cheek, a soprano whisper I love you in his ear.  A sleep-bleared view of her pulling her nightdress on over her head, letting it drop to cover her nudity, doing up her dressing-gown.  Tiptoed steps, the quiet opening and shutting of the door.  The memory of her words in his ear, her sighed and gasped orgasm, his final inward thrust.

Guilt.  He should feel guilty.  If it was casual dalliance, just a fuck, then maybe he wouldn't.  When Helen rings him up first thing he'll be cheerful, he forgot to ring her just one of those things you know how it is had a bit too much to drink you know how business trips are.  But he knows his mood is fragile, a shell.  What he and Rois�n have done goes beyond a mere lapse, and sometime soon they may have to pay the penalty.  They have made a mistake by making love a second time; they've bound themselves together too tightly now, and he won't be able to free himself without leaving part of his flesh behind.  And if Helen and the kids found out...

He and Roisin breakfast together.  Next week they'll meet again in Dublin, her home town.  Perhaps if he were to arrive the night before...she'll make some excuse to her boyfriend, say a girls' night out, and she'll stay with him in his hotel room...  He nods; he knows he wants to, but he wonders what he's doing to his marriage to Helen.  Poisoning it from within.

Roisin is in good form at today's meeting.  Changed into a pinstripe suit, her hair gathered up at the back, her face subtly made up, she seems the model of a professional woman.  But he can't think of her now without seeing the image of her, naked, walking towards him, arms outstretched.

He wishes he could leave.  Be at rest.  No more meetings.  No more treachery.  But then what would he do, with a wife and children and a mortgage?  No, he's in a rut, no matter how comfortable it may be.  What you regret most are the risks you don't take.  A lifetime of if onlys, until you wake up one day to find it's getting dark and it's much too late.

*

In his seat AJC taps into his laptop.  The woman opposite seems nervous...has been all flight.  A phobia for flying: understandable.  He taps a key sequence and her file is presented before him.  No, it's not her time yet: there's still part of the long string left.  She's only just got married; that's her husband next to her.  What a tragedy if she died on her honeymoon.  So much potential.  Future generations sleeping inside her, silent eggs in a full ovary.  Conception on her wedding night: the traditional way.  How romantic.  AJC hasn't been totally eaten up by cynicism.

He looks at her name, in bold type at the top of the file: DAVIES, Jane Mary (nee Crichton).  There's something familiar about her, something he can't quite trace.  He's encountered so many men and women, they all tend to blur into each other...

He presses another key and wipes the display.  He calls up another file.

*

Jane is looking the wrong way when it happens.  She is distracted by Simon's muttering something in his sleep, a disruption to his quiet snoring.  So she hears a thump as something hits the floor and, as one with the crowd, turns to see what has happened.  Behind her, wakened, Simon does the same.

At first something clenches in her stomach - what's gone wrong something wrong with the plane am I going to die now like this?  But no, the plane is steady, nothing interrupting its serene onward journey.

She sees a pair of legs lying in the corridor, and Grainne O'Hara's green-beskirted backside as she bends over him.  The other stewardess helps her lift the man but he's too heavy for them; a male passenger helps out.  Jane leans out into the aisle and watches as the three of them carry the passenger (collapsed? dead?) down the aisle out of sight.  When they've gone, the passengers sit back in their seats, relax.

Jane sits back and closes her eyes.  Silently she reaches out and clasps hold of Simon's hand.  "What happened?" he says.

"Don't know," she mutters.

She leans out and attracts Grainne's attention as she passes.  "Excuse me...is he going to be all right?"

"I hope so," smiles the stewardess.  "There'll be an ambulance on the runway when we land.  About ten minutes."

"Fingers crossed," says Jane.

Grainne smiles and walks past.

In a seat ahead, Jane can see an attaché case, lying unattended.  Now she knows who the man is who has just collapsed: the one who used the toilet before her.  A middle-aged man, balding, overweight.  She can read the gold-embossed initials on the case: PHC.  Jane thinks to call Grainne back, but doesn't.  Someone will notice it.

Whoever you are, I hope to God you're all right.

"A heart attack.  Or a stroke," Simon is saying.

Jane nods.

"He'll be okay."  A voice behind her: male.  She turns, to see AJC sitting to her left, watching her.  "It'll act as a warning, that's all, Jane.  He needs to slow down."

Jane says nothing, just stares in disbelief.  How do you know?  How did you know my name?  But Simon didn't hear: he distracts her by tugging at the sleeve of her blouse.

"Look, there's Dublin."

In the wonder of the sight - the illuminated, nighttime city from the air, laid out like a gigantic jewelbox - Jane forgets everything else.

I've got this far.  It's not too bad.

The plane banks - a huge dark kite - over the sleeping city.  It is silent, as silent as most graves.

*

The man who collapsed - PHC - is let off first, carried off by two ambulance men on a stretcher.  Then the other passengers disembark, row by row.  There's a buzz of conversation, brought about by the unexpected drama in the routine flight.  Jane wants to confront AJC, ask him how he knew what she believed he knew - but she loses him in the crowd.

They collect their luggage and make their way out into Dublin Airport.  They change some traveller's cheques for Irish currency, have a coffee, wait for the coach to Busaras, the central bus station.

On their way out, a woman comes up to them.  She's about the same age as Jane, a couple of inches taller, in a sweatshirt and black leggings, with collar-length red hair and glasses.  "Excuse me?" she says - and Jane notices her accent: she's a local.  "Were you on the flight from Heathrow?"

"Yes we were," says Simon.

"Are you waiting for someone?" says Jane.

The woman nods, obviously glad for Jane's perceptiveness.  A woman-to-woman exchange, excluding Simon for the moment.

"He's probably got lost," says Jane.  "He might be wondering around the airport looking for you."

The woman smiles thinly, anxiety undercutting her goodwill.  "Is this your first time in Dublin?"

Jane nods.

Simon says: "We're here on our honeymoon."

The exchange over, the woman smiles.  "It's a beautiful city.  "I hope you have a great time."

"Thank you," says Simon.  "Jane, there's our coach."

"Good luck," Jane says over her shoulder to the woman as they make for the exit.

Published Substance (1994) and as part of Gary Couzens’ Second Contact And Other Stories (Elastic Press 2003)

THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT

A collaboration with Gary Couzens

Ten minutes before he died, Andrew James Crichton selected a drink from the bar.  A single Southern Comfort with ice.  He pushed away the remains of his in-flight meal and gazed out of the window at the deep blue of the sky.  At 30,000 feet he could look down at the clouds, thick and drawn up into ice-cream peaks, or single tufts like cotton-wool.

Five minutes before he died, he continued to sip at his drink.  He switched on his laptop.  Two minutes later, feeling distracted, he gazed up at the seatbelt sign, which was unlit.  He was lost in a reverie for a minute and a half before he returned to the laptop.

He was so engrossed, all he knew was a loud roaring in his ears, intense heat and splintering, and a sense of infinite space around him as he fell.

*

Statistically more people are killed every year on the roads than in the air, but air disasters are more newsworthy.  A car accident will normally kill at most four or five people, maybe seven or eight, but unless it's a major pileup it won't make the news.  And because it takes place on terra firma, it's more survivable.  A plane crash will eliminate more than hundred people at once, and if your vehicle disintegrates several miles up you have no chance.

*

There's a sick feeling in Jane's stomach as she sits down and fastens her seatbelt.  It's not the wine she drunk the evening before, at their wedding reception.  After they'd made love, Simon slept easily, strange bed and all, and woke up refreshed.  Jane tossed and turned all night.  It was the thought of this flight, her first since the bomb which tore apart that 747 and everyone on board.  Including her father.

After the take-off, after that rushing of blood to parts of the body gravity normally fails to reach, Jane gains comfort from the ordinariness of her surroundings.  A stretched-out hotel foyer.  Simon, by her side, leans back.  A man, across the aisle, tapping at his laptop.  The plane's hum of power, a throbbing which could easily be mistaken for a deep-throated central heating system.  She relaxes.  A honeymoon is not a time to allow an embolism into the mind: a memory of a father who died after surely comforting himself with similar ordinariness.

*

Statistically more people die before their predetermined mind-stop than otherwise...and so they hover onward like misbegotten memory forces - or anachronistic ghosts - blotting up further thoughts and, yes, memories.  They skim and soar in the same air through which sleek metal monsters divert them into a mixed backwash of mentalities.

*

Peter Clayton had risen that morning, not knowing he was to fly later in the day.  Business trips were often abruptly arranged by the Director in charge of his area.  Based in London, Peter often flies to Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or Edinburgh or Southampton.  Not for him the nervousness of the infrequent flier; nor the boredom of the long-haul traveller.  An hour to check in, an hour to fly, and he is at his destination, fuelled by plastic-wrapped food and airline coffee.  All airports are basically the same - the details and language spoken may differ - but there is no plunge into disorientating strangeness.  Later in the day he returns, sustained through the tedium of the meeting by company catering - all laid on, of course: keep the important delegates happy.

Today, Manchester; next week, Dublin, the location of the farthest-flung present, a pretty thirty-year-old redhead called Roisin, representing the company's Irish holdings.  A few months ago, in an overnight stop in a Glasgow hotel, in an access of loneliness he and Roisin made love.  A moment in time, nothing more: a meeting of tired bodies and bored minds.  Now and then he thinks of her: of her slim boyish figure, her small breasts and tight upward-pointing nipples, the sensation as her legs clasped his hips and he slid warmly into her.  It never happened.  The next morning they went separately to breakfast and were later debating fervently from either side of the meeting table.  It never happened: he has a wife and three children he adores.  He's forty years old, with thinning hair, a developing spare tyre and a blood-pressure problem; Roisin is ten years younger than him, unmarried but with a live-in boyfriend of two years' standing.  The hurt they'd cause if what they did became known, and the consequent misinterpretation: they'd meant no harm, it was just a gesture of friendship.  It never happened.

*

Jane watches the landscape veer away, as roads become lines and fields green and brown mosaic tiles - a flush of white as they break through the clouds. The sign ahead of her still burns its red message: FASTEN SEAT BELTS.  Her hand inches sideways and meets Simon's.  He wraps his fingers about hers.

She remembers the dream she had sometime during last night's fitful sleep.  She was on a plane similar to this one.  She tapped a passing stewardess on the arm.  "Excuse me...?"  The stewardess turned; instead of her face there was a skull.  Jane screamed.  She jumped past the stewardess, who reached for her, her bony fingers touching the fabric of Jane's blouse but sliding off as Jane ran up the aisle.  She reached the cockpit and tugged at the door –

"Excuse me, Madam, you're not allowed in there - "

- and finally she forced it open.  It was noisier in the cockpit, and as she half-stepped, half-stumbled in, the co-pilot turned. His face was another skull. And the pilot's face too.  As she stood there and screamed, she saw through the window the plane's nose tilt downwards until she could see no clouds no sky just the ground rushing up faster faster and faster -

She woke up choking back a scream.  Simon was there, holding her, soothing her.

"Are you okay?" Simon asks, bringing her back to the present.

The sky: an intense unbroken blue.  The clouds below: a thick clotted white.

"I'll get you a drink," he says.  "You're shaking like a leaf."

As he reaches past her to attract the stewardess's attention, Jane lightly closes her eyes.  Her blouse is damp under the armpits, her sweat glands defying her antiperspirant.  Face your fears.  Well, so far she has done this.  That was her first take-off.  Overcome your fears.  As if by shining a light on them they shrink, become trivial, instead of letting them lurk in darkness, your imagination doing the rest.  She feels light-headed.  It's the pressure: hold your nose and pop your eardrums.  Well, if she is to overcome her fears, what better than an hour-long flight from Heathrow to Dublin?  Short and sweet - soon be over.

*

Peter Clayton spends the hour's flight reading through the paperwork he'll need to get through before tomorrow's meeting.  He breaks for the in-flight meal - lamb chop and  creamed potatoes and green beans - and towards the end of the flight gives up reading and stares out at the darkening sky over Manchester.  He thinks of collecting his luggage after disembarking, then the bus into the city centre and the at-first-overwhelming largeness of Piccadilly Square, and then checking into the hotel.  He'll phone Helen, his wife, then there'll be the evening to kill.  Hopefully Roisin will be there; they'll share a drink for old times' sake.  Old times: the memory of that never-mentioned, half-denied infidelity.

In fact she's in the queue ahead of him, waiting to register.  The only woman there, amidst all the anonymous men in suits.  At first he doesn't recognise her, not even when she turns to face him: her hair has been cut to collar-length and she's wearing wire-rimmed full-moon glasses.  It makes her look older, more like her actual age instead of just out of her teens.  She waves to him and after she's registered walks back down the queue to where he's standing.

 "Hi."

"Hello Roisin, how are you?"

"I'm fine, thanks.  How was your flight?"

"Oh, nothing special."

She touches her hand to his elbow.  "You going to have dinner with me?"

"I had something to eat on the plane."

Head-and-shoulders shorter, she gazes up at him with something he reads as disappointment.  Atavistic gallantry gnaws at him.

"But I'm still hungry," he says.

She smiles.

The meal doesn't live up to expectations.  Roisin, changed into a lavender-coloured top and black leggings, eats voraciously.  Peter forces himself to finish his meal, knowing he'll have to do some exercise to burn it off.  He feels bloated as he stands up and they move to the bar.  He has a second drink although he knows he shouldn't; he feels himself become light-headed.

Conversation remains on the surface: how are his wife and children, how is her boyfriend Seamus (fiancé now), company gossip - the substance of many past face-to-face, phone and email conversations.  As he slides into tipsiness, he slips his arm about her shoulders.  He senses her discomfort, but she doesn't resist.  He thinks guiltily that he hasn't rung Helen, but he feels in no condition to do so.  At ten o'clock, Roisin yawns.

"Long day.  I need to go to bed."

He escorts her to her room, one floor below his.  They say goodbye.  He wants to kiss her; he's tempted to reach out and put his hand on her breast.  But he knows he shouldn't.  And he doesn't.

*

Statistically, Andrew James Crichton was one of those exceptions that prove the law of averages - by accidentally dying at the precise moment he was meant to die - which made everybody else on the plane victims of synchronicity, spear-carriers in the unique drama of self-reality.

*

Soon be over.  Jane notices that the laptop has ceased tapping.

She glances towards the man whose name she'll likely never know.  She can just discern the gold-embossed initials AJC on his samsonite briefcase, its black cuboid untidily tilted on the spare seat next to the aisle.

Probably an executive or maybe a politician.  He probably needs to sleep.  Such thoughts allow her to maintain equilibrium - as if altruism is an aid to safety.

Planes and spiders, her only known phobias, she thinks.  No spiders on planes, though - unless they get in with the food or cargo.  Do spiders have phobias?  Her wandering thoughts are akin to returning to dream, but not quite.

AJC, she sees, is indeed sleeping, just as she must have done when dreaming for real.

Simon too now is sleeping.   Sweet dreams, Simon.  Sweet dreams, AJC - whoever you are.

Soon be over.

*

He should have made a move.  Peter Clayton is only Peter Clayton by virtue of his impulses.  His whole career up to the age of forty has been a series of unexpected moves from company to company, each one a slight jump up the ladder.  His current job in itself comprises surprising changes of plan, with meetings galore abruptly cropping up for the firm's troubleshooter - as he describes himself.  He has sometimes spent a whole week chasing meetings without ever attending one of them.  Ever a more important meeting around the next corner.  Late cancellations.  Sudden appointments.  Chasing crises.  Chasing shadows.  Chasing...

Hang his blood pressure!  Cabin fever, nothing more.

He needs a cuddle.  Roisin now asleep just one floor below.  What a waste of resources!

He hears the sound of long-haul aeroplanes plying their invisible paths above the Manchester hotel.  Their droning - although a sign of humanity - enhances the night's solitude.  He thinks of Helen and the kids, nearly cries - but falls asleep before remembering why he wants to cry.

He dreams of a plane crashing.  He watches from a creeky terrain as it banks steeply, then seeming to splutter to a halt.  No sooner seen, it slices into some far-off trees with a splintering roar.  It is up to him to scramble across the squishy marshes to save any survivors.  He is horrified when he arrives on the scene.  The flaming trough which the nosecone of the plane has divotted is at least a highrise-block deep.  A number of passengers still trying to clamber out, despite the ferocity of the fire: they are flickering shadows, actually part of the living flame.  The plane itself seems to have disappeared altogether.  Surely it can't have taken off again, after allowing the maimed and half-dead to disembark?  The fire-pit created by the crash gradually relinquishes its imitation of a long vertical volcano, but dark perforations and fragile black sculptures of ash still float intermittently upwards from the former core.  He squints into the sky where he can just discern the wrecked aeroplane gliding with the large black birds...

Peter Clayton is woken by a soft tap-tap on his bedroom door, as if someone is typing out a message.  He hopes it's Roisin with her own share of impulse.

"Come in," he says.

*

As he fell, Andrew James Crichton thought: Is this what it's like to die?  Deep azure sky above him, sun shining bright on white clouds below.  To his satisfaction he learned that what he was always told was true: his life flashed before him.  He saw again himself at school, at university; he remembered how he lost his virginity at the age of seventeen; he met again his wife.  He saw through a mist of tears his only child Jane pulled bloodily from his wife's vagina, her first gurgling scream.

Then he fell into a cloud.

As far as he could see was greyish white.  The only direction indicator was the sun, above him.  He couldn't breathe - a burning in his lungs - as he fell.  And finally - a matter of seconds in real time - the white darkened, became red, then black, as Andrew died.

Minutes later his body hit the Atlantic.

And, somewhere else, someone drew out his life's thread, lined up the scissors, and cut.

*

Her bladder full, Jane undoes her seatbelt and stands up.  She glances down at Simon, asleep now.  His head lolls to one side, exposing his double chin.  You really must exercise more, she thinks.  She doesn't want to nag, but she sees Simon in ten years, after his sedentary job has taken its toll: puffy-faced, face mottled with broken blood-vessels, a spare tyre.

She's a little unsteady on her feet, her legs numb from sitting down.  The plane is on a tilt: the windows to her right face upwards into the sky, the sun burning out the blue; to her left, she can see through a gap in the clouds the Irish Sea, grey-green flecked with white.  She can see individual waves.

She walks the length of the aisle to the toilet.  It's occupied.  She stands there, stepping aside to let the stewardess pass.  The stewardess - Jane can read her namebadge: GRAINNE O'HARA, a real Irish name - smiles at her.

 "All right?"

Purse-lipped, Jane nods, smiles politely in return, and watches Grainne O'Hara's retreating back.  Professional to a fault: Jane is just one more nervous passenger.  There are probably many like her.

The toilet door opens and a middle-aged man, with thinning hair, overweight, comes out.  He smiles encouragingly at her as he returns to his seat.

CONTINUED HERE: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/286.html

==================

Published 'Unsane' 1998

­­

Why Jack decided his job in life was to strip those young people he came across late at night in the midst of the city park roads, I can only guess.

­­

          He came close to doing it by means of mind power alone.  But when he got stuck in with fingers, he found he usually enjoyed it.  Not that it was really dirty work, because blood these days is more like water than old-fashioned earth.

­­

          He tore at his victim's outdoor clothes with his overgrown teeth, to get a good peel going;  followed closely by the more lingering work of removing the hugging vests and briefs; then meticulously unwinding the long turban of more fragile underfilm; finally gouging off the pith with fingernails specially nurtured for the purpose. 

­­

          The art was to spill as little blood as possible but, of course, quite a bit would seep from the body's pulpy marshland which lay under the various skins.

­­

          The face was the easiest area, for the nose usually acted as a good starting point, once it had been neatly slit down the bridge; the rest seemed simply to fall away from the cheeks, jowls and jaw, thus allowing purchase on the neck and, thenceforward, the rest of the ripe body.

­­

          With men, the privities were often best left to last.  Then, he would need sharp-edged tweezers and a strange implement that looked like a darning-needle with a point at either end and the threading-slot in the thicker middle.

­­

          True, he could have accomplished it all by telekinetics, but he preferred working his fingers to the bone.  After all, he was brought up on the ethic of hard work by a rather overbearing, if elegant, mother ... who, directly he had been born, had started worrying and teasing at her own frayed edges in the nether regions of her body.  It was as if she rather resented her body having been used as a vessel for the likes of him.

­­

          The day I renewed acquaintance with Jack Skinner, it was winter, so I was muffled up in several volumes of outer clothing.  So, if a description of me was relevant to what transpired, well, I was pretty well insulated against such an intrusion.

­­

          In any event, I could see straightaway that this was a situation I'd always previously assumed happened to other people: a deserted road that wound between shorn lamp-posts through the midst of a disused city park: its direction uncertain, because it did not appear to follow the lie of the land: and a dark imposing figure loomed. 

­­

          But it was no stranger but the boy I knew at school as Jack Skinner.

­­

          I had no idea this was the dreaded Flayer, because nobody had heard of such a monster.  Those poor people whom he had earlier pinked or strimmed or dove-tailed or slivered or filleted (or whatever was the correct word for his various acts of multi-dropped stitches and centrifugal acupuncture) had surely crawled into bushes off the beaten track, to hide their new-found ugliness: wrapped themselves into a ball and painstakingly died. 

­­

          So, such extempore surface surgery was not a familiar crime.  and nobody needed to question why neighbours often hung dirty washing on their clothes-lines.

­­

          Description still eludes me.  But I did shamble home, a shadow of myself;  I crept between the crisp linen sheets I'd only that morning laid and twirled myself into a mummy of bandages, with no loose ends.

­­

          As dream leapfrogged dream, I knew I would never be able to wake up properly.  But I realised that Jack Skinner still roamed the dark parks as well as through my dreams ... and although we were still both but mere striplings, we travelled together—which we do now as one—in search of those of you who do not take sufficient care of your appearance. 

­­

          My mother was always a stickler for dress sense, you see.  I can still remember the meaningful look in her eyes as she sat in the shuffly near-darkness of my nursery with a really huge-looking darning-needle—as she prepared to thread my finer part from its one-eyed head to its deepest root with imperishable cotton.  She was not, however, as possessive as some mothers, I'll be bound.  She loved her Jack with all the goodness of her heart.  and that was all that you were going to get...

­­

­­

... because I was determined to leave myself behind and fully assume the Jack Skinner rôle.  However, there came a day when Jack vanished.  and I was me again.  The first I knew in this new stage of my life was Mrs Panegyric.  That was what she called herself.  I've guessed the spelling—and the pronunciation.  I've guessed her motives, too.

­­

          She was a saleswoman by temperament.  I could easily imagine her on a medicine-wagon, propped up at the front poising a whip over a scrawny cart-horse—and the words Mrs Panegyric’s Haunting Melodies emblazoned on the side.  But her only wares were small jars (like containers for skin cream) filled with a sludgy grey liquid which, if you inhaled its fumes, supplied your head with hankering harmonies and tunes as soft and smooth and comforting as a beautiful woman's inner thigh: mellifluous musings of sound that were as distant from real music as faith was from doubt—and were independent of that particularly intrusive medium which made bed-fellows of ears and hearing.  Or that was what she claimed.

­­

          I met her at an Auction in the local Community Hall.  She took an immediate shine to me and, after a smattering of small talk, told me many secrets none of which, however, allowed me to plumb her true motives.  She was a side attraction which did not participate in the Auction proper—and I helped her sell the many little standing jars.  Not that she really needed help.  I was more moral support.  A sympathetic ear.  Or perhaps someone whom the potential purchasers of her purveyances knew and trusted.

­­

          The whole thing was a scam, of course, which was understandable, if not excusable.  Most people were so confused, they couldn't distinguish an elephant from a packet of tea.  and Mrs P knew that I knew that her “skin cream” pots of so-called music were a scam, since we were in near perfect harmony: two resonating souls who spoke with some bass rhythm underneath the small talk and the false secrets. 

­­

          She had promised me a share of the takings.  Nothing had been put in writing, but the likes of Mrs P exuded honesty.  That's why so many punters exchanged their recession-diluted earnings for her china phials of sweet sweet sound—without testing them first.  You see, we told the poor suckers that the full benefit would only come with the very first sniff and, for full enhancement of effects, such an act needed to be held in the quietness of their own bedrooms.  Subsequent sniffs would simply supply second-rate reverberations—but that did not matter since the first sniff would have its own snowball of echoes rolling from here to death's door.  What a hoot!  I pitied, yet scorned, the sorry simpletons who stashed their vaselets within inner pockets and traipsed home for a snort.

­­

          Despite such a sting, we had no belly-aching punters traipsing back to the Auction Hall.  Perhaps, they were ashamed of being gulled.  Or the punters were still studiously sampling snifters from their urnlings, desperate for the effects to start—and, by the time, they surrendered all hopes, Mrs P and I, like Jack Skinner before us, would have scarpered.  Or the punters are keeping it for a special day, like Christmas.  Or they intend it for a secondary sucker down the line.  Or a gift for a small child's special birthday.  Or, even, the punters were hypnotised by Mrs Panegyric, beguiled into honey-bee sounds of bewilderment, besotted into belief.  Or the damn stuff actually worked!

­­

          Yet, I lie because—as the auctioneer's repetitive exhortations to budding bidders minimalised the music in day's random noises—we did have one belly-acher who returned to our stall with his screw-topped vessel clasped in his sweaty palm.  Not a complaint so much—rather someone seeking clarification as to our claims.  He told us that his hearing had suffered from a noisy case of tinnitus for many years: a disorder to which, I understand, those more long in the tooth are prone.  He was indeed older than Mrs P and myself put together.  Having sampled one inhalation in his bedroom, yes, music had come, he said, as if the chronic tinnitus was being tuned by angels and remixed for harp—the organic clash and clangour and intermittent tinkles harmonised and transcribed in some heaven he hadn't believed existed, until today.  But, why did it make him also sense that his life in the here and now was a dream?  He had previously  trusted that reality was something you could touch or see or smell or hear.  Now he had a nagging doubt.  He sensed an encroaching non-existence of self.  Why had we not warned him about such a side effect?  Was it dangerous?  Had his tinnitus filtered the full effect?   Was it all caused by the poxy ointment we’d saddled him with?  Or, more likely, was he still suffering from last night’s skinful at the Duke’s Head?

­­

          He shrugged on realising he was talking to himself and slowly shambled from the hall.  Mrs P had already vanished, you see: going, going, gone, to the sound of gavel-strains.  But all this of course was now hearsay and I couldn't even guess my own motives, because there was nobody left to guess.  Naturally, I would have refunded the punter's money from my own pocket had I myself not earlier snatched a surreptitious sniff of the stuff, when Mrs P was off for a P.  

­­

­­

...and talking about bodily seepages, during those dim and dark days when mothers-in-law lived up to their reputation and lavatories were non-flushable and the stink-carts came to collect people's doings once a week from the creaking oaken tank where they were all depostited pro tem and history was no longer dependent on primary sources and ... well, let me tell the likes of you, there was one day I remember in particular.  (But who knows if I’m me or you or someone quite different, so bear with me, please, during such presumption of first person narrative power).

­­

          Well, whatever the case, I had a bit of a problem when I suddenly realised that the garden wall surrounding my house, at the height of a full grown African elephant, badly needed tusking over with lethal bits of glass (in case of burglars or pesky do-gooding ne'erdowells)—and during breakfast that very morning, I recalled the day before when I had inadvertently swallowed a jagged piece of dismembered tumbler (about as large as an old fashioned half-crown, if I'm not too much mistaken) that had previously been dropped into the frosted flakes by some careless, if not malicious, member of my family.

­­

          I had already evacuated my bowels twice (or was it thrice?) since then so, as you of all people can appreciate, I had no option but to rummage through the septic tank for it.

­­

          There was an input hatch at the top and another at the side towards the bottom for the lavatory-man to shovel it all out into his shit-pans.  I considered the most efficacious method was to climb to the top and gently lower myself through the hatch up there, into the soft consistency.  The tank had not been cleared for over a week (because the lavatory-man had been on sick leave) so it was all pretty stiffened together—but I managed to wedge myself down, with a sort of breast-stroke manoeuvre amid the squelchy friction, meticulously examining each turd as I went.  Some were conjoined and some had taken a turn past the mush-by date but, nevertheless, I was pleased to see that they were all mine or at least my wife's—pretty sure, anyway.  But, then, you can surely empathise with my shock upon encountering a whole clutch of them, like bad bananas: a dead giveaway that my mother-in-law had been sneaking a use of my lavatory! 

­­

          I had of course forbidden her to do so.  I'd told her in fact that the canal at the end of the road was good enough for any joblots from the likes of her.  and she'd promised faithfully to squat down there with her cronies.  But here they were, plain as a pikestaff, foreign turds in my tank!

­­

          I was quickly pacified, however, for, nearby, I found the shard I'd shat.  I wormed back to the top and raised it into the air with a flourish.  The sunlight caught it a real treat.  I felt good, as if the world was OK, after all.  Every one of God's creatures was in its rightful place.

­­

          I descended from the tank-top—a bit of a relief really, for the stench was becoming a trifle heady—and I quickly found a ladder, leaning against the garden wall at its most vulnerable point, climbed it and embedded the broken glass proudly at the top.  The first of many, I hoped.

­­

          But then I happened to glance towards the canal at the end of the road.  I was irritated to see a hippopotamus wallowing in it, as if it didn't have a care in the world.  I immediately scrambled down from the wall, without preventing a slight incursion upon the integrity of my left shin, ran to the house, ignored the irrelevant remonstrations of my wife  and telephoned the local zoo.  They couldn't understand what I was trying to say, as none of their mothers-in-law were missing.  Or was it me who couldn't understand them?  Or perhaps it's you who's the sucker, a bit like the man in the olden days who looked at a giraffe for the first time and said he didn't believe it at all!

­­

          There’s many a way of podding peas or skinning a cat or cleaning an angel’s face, but only one way of ending, namely death of all collectivities of consciousness.  In any event, the zoo never did answer my phone call (that bit was fiction) because, in actual fact, all I heard was polite muzak-while-you-wait at the other end for the rest of someone else’s existence.

­­

­­

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“To skin something, either apply a skin or remove a skin.  Both are equally valid.”—(Rachel Mildeyes from OCCAM’S RIZLA)

­­

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Published 'Sundown' 1998

We talked, having unexpectedly been thrown together and then abandoned by two friends ... to stand - or, rather, sit - guard over all the luggage.  And Sadie smiled as I exercised my skills of word power in her hearing.  And why I use words in an attempt to make Sadie and I as tactile as two soft dummies thrown from the nursery by an obstreperous toddler - rather than abandon us to the more two-dimensional gossamer of memory - is really because, like all people, I have pretensions of existence. 

            Whatever the case, the meeting was a snatch of time which turned out important in the context of my whole life or, rather, my whole life to date - having stretched on, it seems, for centuries since those events although, in reality, probably only about ten years, if at all.  Indeed, I was not present at the natural conclusion.  And the reason why our pair of friends committed suicide remains blurred; the answer surely lies somewhere amid the events surrounding the luggage alongside which Sadie and I were consigned - by those very friends called Trevor and Teresa - to spend several hours' vigil.

            If the plane had not had such a delay, we would not have been abandoned so long in idle prattling.  Our two friends had departed for a concert in the park which both were earlier sorry they were going to miss.  So the glitch in travel arrangements, shortly after we met up at the airport, was, in fact, a godsend for fifty per cent of the party.  But strikes do not often bring good luck and, in the end, this particular strike (of flight controllers) was no exception to that perhaps shaky rule.

            I cannot possibly remember the whole trend of my conversation with Sadie, nor the exact words used even in the bits I do remember.  She was one of those people who said things without first engaging the brain.  Not exactly fleabites of small talk, but flighty, without being frivolous - friendly, if flirty, yet decidedly unpromiscuous - precariously the sensible side of confused. 

            She spoke about the permutations of where we four had originally met.  She felt her face, as if her carefully concealed signs of encroaching middle age were breaking through the crushed aspirin camouflage.  Her teeth were peculiarly long, two in particular, but not startlingly so to warrant mention or, even, notice.  It is strange that I remember her teeth at all.  Sadie's teeth were, in effect, not her most striking feature. 

            As I trudge back through the foggy creeks of the past, I seem to visualise her face emerging from the bright-backed arena where the luggage of bereft travellers was scattered about like soft furnishings.  It was a face with which any man, especially one as sensitive as I thought myself to be at that time, could fall in love at the drop of a sun-hat.  Words defeat me, as usual.  It is best to let them have their head.  For, as a writer, without words, I am nothing. 

            Disrupted from my pointless revery, I heard myself talking.  "Trevor?  we knew him at University, didn't we?  Flat-mates and all that."

            "Same with me," said Sadie.  "I sat next to Teresa in maths - and we hit it off - somehow!  Next thing I knew - a holiday.  Not in contact for many years.  Talk about blind dates.  Still, I'm sure we'll get along like wild things.  You and me, I mean.  Nothing to worry about with the others.  Trevor's so easy-going anyway.  Teresa tells me she can wrap him round her little finger.  I like men I can get my teeth into - not the wishy-washy sort.  But I've had my fill of holiday romances.  We'll be able to swim and dance and things.  Nothing too heavy..." 

            Sadie pointed towards a couple who were kissing and cuddling nearby, making their luggage bend into shapes it was not intended to.  I nodded.  I imagined Sadie in bed.  I had a phobia of women who could potentially undress you to the bone (and beyond!) and, if there was ever one who could flay you to the soul, Sadie was the primest example, in my eyes.  I was thankful that she sympathised with my need not to get too heavy. 

            Neither of us, it appeared, were ready for a full-blooded affair.  That duty could safely be left in the hands of Teresa and Trevor.  Neither of us, too, would mind being makeweights or, even, lightweights.  As I nodded, Sadie smiled - and I winced upon sight of those two fine teeth as sharp as her painted finger-nails.   She must have taken my expression to be a sign of disagreement.

            "I hope you didn't think..."

            "No, no, of course not."  I was pleased to be able to shake my head at her inference.  It was good to be on all fours.

            Night came suddenly to the airport (despite the blinding lights), with people sleeping on their soft luggage or, at least, fitfully dozing, including Sadie.  The air clung more sultrily than ever, as if the sun had greedily retained the heat for itself whilst it was up and about, but now had selflessly relinquished such heat to its worshippers. 

            There were some shapes still unsleeping, pantomiming about - children too fractious at the holiday's delay, or dwarves slowly circling in apocalyptic games of ring-a-ring-a-roses, some silently tilting back and forth on human see-saws.  The various items of luggage assumed prehensility - but I guessed it was my imagination (or a dozing dream).  

            Later, when the other two were still missing, I took it upon myself to open Trevor's trunk to see if I could use it as a makeshift bed.  It had looked more like a coffin during daylight hours.  I peered into a chasm that swallowed me, a sleep too deep...

            It was daybreak by the time Trevor and Teresa returned from the all-night open-air concert, a little disappointed at having been part of a screaming teeny-bopper audience, whilst having originally expected a more sophisticated event.  They had little dreamed that their favourite group - from a heyday too distant to call anything but an elaboration of nostalgia - would stoop so low as to prejudice their artistic integrity by reconciling so many common denominators in such a brazen fashion.  However, this was completely forgotten when they discovered that Sadie and I had vanished, their two trunks with us.

            The rest of the budding passengers still lolled asleep across their own version of belongings, some with hard corners pressed into their lower backs like makeshift examples of mediaeval torture.  Even the highly strung children were flopped over like slaughtered puppets.  Planes turned over engines in useless attempts at take-off - or so it seemed, in the half-drugged realms of wingless Heaven to where Teresa and Trevor had long since drifted, after administering devices to each other so typical of their earlier romances with needles.  One old-fashioned puncture too far.

            Indeed, like Sadie, I was not present at the natural conclusion, so cannot be sure of what eventually happened, or even if they died at all. So, I have invented the final scenario, in the hope that I may hit on an odd permutation of truth here and there.  To wallow in meaningless words is far better than the strange slow-surging fluids that others of my kind usually feed upon.  I am now a fly-by-night in the guise of Sadie - ever since I slipped on her body as if it were my favourite comfortable dressing-gown discovered long-forgotten at the bottom of a trunk.   You see, the most satisfying, if hardest, task for the imaginer in the art of imagination is imagining the imaginer.

published 'Rubber Stones' 1997

Suzie's were the best parties going.  And the ones with the least hangover.

          In fact, I always felt that there was someone invisible forever tidying up behind the celebrants, so that any residual clearing-up following the final fizzle-out was often quite unnecessary.  When I broached this subject to Suzie, she shrugged, as if to say "don't look a gift horse in the mouth, nor even think about it", evidently fearful of it fading.  And, of course, all the actual guests themselves did finally fade - even those who had temporarily made shifty shake-downs on Suzie's floor rather than negotiate the hard bends towards their more rightful homes and plumper pillows.  And, yes, no hangovers.

          However, Suzie would later collapse for a day and a half in a crumpled huddle with her teddy, vowing never to run such a gig again.

          But, she always did.

          Suzie's shindigs were legendary.

          There was one I remember more than any other.  I was about the first real guest to arrive, as usual.  Well, I liked to help her in the preparation, skewering things for nibble plates, blowing balloons into suggestive configurations, cueing jive music on the tannoy, bleeding radiators, decentralising the heating, starting off piles of wintercoats on the beds upstairs, spirting toilet ducks under various rims, filling the hall with infectious laughter, unclogging the keyholes...

          Naturally, I'm only joking.  Somehow, Suzie's ground-plans were full steam ahead by the time I arrived, however ridiculously early I happened to be.  On the occasion in question, I turned up twelve hours in advance of the official party start-time and, even then, most of the nibbles were out on plates and the optics primed and the living-room cleared for the disco and, yes, I nearly forgot, there was one other even earlier than myself: Chick Louis.

          Canoodling Chick Louis.  I'm sure he must have had a crush on Suzie.  They were smooching in the conservatory when I arrived.  Her lipstick was smeared over her face, as if she were a naughty cat-girl caught licking  the jampot.  Chick Louis smiled guiltily as he unmanhandled her.  I think I must have arrived in the nick of time.  Poor old Suzie.  Still, she gets all she deserves.  A party impresario must learn to expect gatecrashers.  And Chick Louis was the worst gatecrasher of them all, not even having the courtesy to gatecrash surreptitiously.  A gatecrasher coming early was bravado taken to extremes, in my book.  But Chick Louis is a digression, I fear: almost a gatecrasher in what I have to tell.  Indeed, the subsequent events, at the widest stretch of the imagination, could not be laid at his door.  The trouble started much later and, if I am not too much mistaken, Chick Louis had already departed with a nibbleable floosie of a buxom persuasion, with whom he could exercise his canoodling to his heart's content. 

          No, I'm afraid Suzie blames me for what transpired and it is no good me trying to implicate Chick Louis simply by saying he was at the party, too.  Alibis are rare beasts, at the best of times, and masturbation is not necessarily the optimum method of obtaining one.

          Whilst I was trying to order my thoughts into some semblance of logic, Suzie was jabbing her pretty nyloned legs to the sound of the Bonzo Doodah Band - in the company of a gentleman I did not recognise.  Not that I could expect to be acquainted with the whole gamut of Suzie's entourage, yet it was a trifle weird that the man in question did not even look like anybody feasibly subject to human suzerainty.  Alien, no.  Foreign, no.  But, yes, with an otherness sufficiently other to make him seem someone different to what he actually was.  How can I describe him better?  He was someone else.  Yes, the chap was an else.  Come to think of it, I've met a lot of elses in my time.  Usually thin-lipped and beady-eyed with a tendency to undergrunt after every word.   And Suzie was definitely jigging with such an else.  So, she needed rescuing.  She was stricken with glee.  To be in love with an else is worse than onanism.

          I made a scene of intervening.  I already wore my wintercoat (retrieved from the pile on one of the beds upstairs).  I had been on the point of departing after making the odd curtsey of politeness or two towards the hostess.  Yet spotting her entrammelled by an else was too much for me.  I steamed into their grapple, all guns blazing, the Captain on my bridge cursing wildly at the suddenly storm-tossed seas around my hull. 

          The else simply punched a hole right through my face.  Didn't he know this was a gentlemen's excuse-me, I asked with an apology of a mouth.  If it had not been for the thickness of my wintercoat, I would have suffered injuries that might have laid me out messily in several different rooms.  Nevertheless, becoming a corpse was, at first, hangover enough.

          Yet now, I, too, could assume the role of an invisible little helper.  Suzie simply being unaware that my ghost became chief mischief-mender somehow added to the pleasure of clearing up for her after each bash. 

Published "Year 2000" (1997) 

For years now, roughly twice in each of them, Clovis has shuffle-footed his battered shooting-brake of a van into town  -  and he has always been struck by the large house silhouetted on the high hill. He could have sworn that the hill seemed higher with each visit, whilst the house itself remained in the same stage of distant dereliction.

The town was one not normally passed through. A traveler could only visit on one road and then leave by the same road. Clovis was not entirely certain, however, whether that had always been the case. His memory often played him tricks. He was half-con­vinced, moreover, that the place might have at one time been positioned near a short-cut to London. The town’s buildings were rendered in checkerboards, often with the doorways partially set below the raised street level, the pavements being back alleys in their own right The town’s name, Rosehearty, felt at odds with its nature.

Clovis had business in Rosehearty.

The populace wss unusual in its proclivity toward such confectionery as boiled sweets, fudge and chews - and indeed, towards saucy seaside bric-a-brac. Despite Rosehearty’s proximity to the coast, there never were any tourists to speak of.

Clovis was a free-lance confectionery salesman and purveyor of novelty knick-knacks and specialist prophylactics, bringing choice brands of sweets to Rosehearty, touring the corner shops (of which there were many more such shops than corners, in fact) and re-stocking the neatly arrayed jars with jaw-breakers galore. He was particularly intrigued by the type of shopkeeper to be found there. Some wore smudged overalls as if grown in them like loose second skins. Others were round-faced individuals who had plenty of confectioneiy jokes to share. Also there were narrow-elbow fellows who weighed out a quarter of lemon sherbets and then told the cus­tomer the story of how these sweets lost their innards in the last dandruff shortage. Inscrutable chumps in red-stained aprons did a roaring specialist trade in beetroot-flavored gobblers.

One particularly nondescript man by the name of Phyck sold throat sweets  -  which, indeed, looked like tiny throats torn from slightly less tiny living creatures. Clovis wondered who supplied Phyck with such dubious delicacies, because it certainly wasn’t Clovis, and, in any event, such ‘sweets’ should have been sold in a butchers shop. Or so Clovis believed.

And, finally, there was Clovis’s least favorite sort of shopkeeper; the squat, gleamy-eyed variety who did their business by dropping the sweets (<I>plop­ plop</I>) one by one into the home-made triangular paper bags, rather than in scoopfuls.

Most of all, however, it was the house on the hill that stirred the hackles of Clovis’s fancy. So much so, on his last visit to the town, just before his planned retirement from the trade, he determined to climb up to it, in the hope of selling off his closing down residues, gone-past, best-bys, long-term returns and remaindered runs.

The path was long and nettly, the underfoot being particularly treacherous. But, by late after­noon, he had made sufficient progress to spur him to the summit Eventually the house, itself in the typical local checker work, reared above the ragged edge of trees, a lugubrious sight indeed. The window shut­ters hung by the skin of their hinges. The roof appeared to sag around the protruding tent-pole of the central chimney stack.

He rapped upon the slightly sticky front door, which felt like hardened black treacle. He raised his eye-line to the top attic windows, suspecting that any inhabitants (if they could breathe at all this far up into the sky) were peering down to see who was unsea­sonably visiting their lair. But nobody could be seen, except the frayed frills of weather-worn curtains, flapping in spite of the stillness of the ensuing dusk.

For the first time ever in the vicinity of Rosehearty, he sensed the heady tang of the sea upon the roof of his mouth. He had never seen the sea when visiting the place, nor indeed, questioned its where­abouts. The inhabitants were not obvious sea people, merely close to the coast by accident rather than design. And, notwithstanding their loose tongues on other topics, they could never be drawn by outsiders to talk about the sea, nor, for that matter, the house on the hill.

Not that Clovis was especially interested in the sea, even when he had been reminded of it by the rare screech of gull or the relentless undergrunting of rather inefficient fog-horns (which could do, no doubt, with a suck of Phyck’s throat sweets).

There was no front door, after all, merely tangible darkness. Clovis walked through, realizing that his own body was past its sell-by date and anything could happen.

The house, stacked over with all manner of chim­neys, roosted like a battered hat upon the hill’s hump. Brooding above the town, it caused the inhabitants to feel more than just a little persecuted. Apparently, Shumble Hall, as the house had always been known, was an architectural shipwreck, but nobody could be certain about its condition since the path which an­cient maps once showed starting at the end of High street was nettled over.

“Perhaps the proper path is on the other side of the hill,” was one suggestion on a day when nobody had anything better to do than chitter-chatter. The speaker resembled Phyck himself.

“Don’t be silly, the sea is on the other side,” countered Wagger, the town clown. And Wagger removed a gobstopper, to allow freer speech, breathed deep, crystallizing the salt in the air (upon his outlan­dishly long nostril-hairs) ready for use as seasoning upon his Mum’s stew come supper-time, and then spoke of amazing matters. He pointed with his pipe. “Last night, when I was the only one up, the moon was wide open, rising like a yellow balloon above Shumble there.”

Most of his audience did not conceal their loud jeers, because all knew that the geography of the known universe made it nigh impossible for any moon (let alone a full one) to appear in that quarter of the night sky. But Wagger did not pull his punch-line. “I also saw a chimney smoke....” He blew a bubble of soot from the end of his pipe, as if in demonstration. “I saw it come out against the moon....”

“It must have been a ghost, Wagger.” The others guffawed, as Phyck tried to humor him. Then just as they split up amid the mumblings of dusk, lips still fresh from Wagger-baiting, they all saw a large blotched yellowy bubble slowly expand from Shumble Hall’s tallest smokestack. In utter disbelief, they shuttered their red-rimmed eyes with their lick-fingers, as they ducked under the checkered lintels for their lardy bread and acid drops. Wagger screeched like a demented gannet His words were garbled, but, they possessed the same rhythm as “There she blows!”

That night, whilst the townsfolk of Rosehearty moithered in their truckles, all they could hear was the distant swell of the sea. Wagger was out scouting for signs of life on the moon, which his mother had once told him when he was a baby was a blunt pineapple chunk. Phyck was spitting things out into his chamber pot.

Meanwhile, within Shumble Hall itself....

The ladies, flounced up in great variations of ball gowns, sported ruffs and frills. Their ribbed showy corsets led tucks and pleats towards the most accentu­ating bodices. The nodding bustles and multi-layered underskirts rainbowed the polished woods of the dancing floor. They also wielded gossamer wings upon their backs, woven with slender bones. Furthermore, tantalizing skeins stretched between each of these ladies like the finest sugar-glass: beating like fans to cool their ardor whilst they waltzed from one set of leering beaux to another. The brilliant chander­lumes shone along the avenues of bobbing dancers as they took reflective rhythm from an ensemble of elbowing fiddles, sparkling silver flutes and trem­bling drum-skins. Candy floss was being served at the bar where a contraption also extruded endless sticks of seaside rock. One silken-breeched footman crouched in the great fireplace, sending invitation messages tied to party balloons up the chimney.

Into the midst of such scintillations of sight, sound and sensuality, there tottered Clovis in yellow waterproofs, scratching his head and blinking his bleary eyes. He looked as if he had just disembarked from some godforesaken trawler in the Minches.

“Lummee!” he expostulated. “I must be deader than a door-nail, but I didn’t reckon on Heaven being like this. One moment a common commercial traveler and the next right up to my neck in this right old Malarkey.

Abruptly, Clovis’s privities began to itch and, with the habit of years, he mauled at his flies to staunch the irritation. Then, the big stand-up clock struck its own version of midnight! His sea-proofs disappeared in a flash, leaving him nuder than a fish -  to reveal broken glass embedded in his groin, jagged shards of it splintering into the tenderest parts. A fine lady, previously unnoticed by Clovis, skimmed off in a right old huff – since the glass condom slipper he wore was far too small to fit.  Or was it because she knew what sizeable pleasures she had missed with the real Prince Charming?

Meanwhile in the town below....

Wagger frequently kept watch upon the dark­ened hulk of Shumble Hall. He ruminated on next to nothing, whilst gently chewing what could very well be the end of the line in yellow bubble gum, and he blew a fragile shimmering globe of it, growing more red than yellow.  And the shopkeepers of Rosehearty dreamed of new dreams and old jokes, of other Hansels and other Gretels, amid the rather inefficient fog horns of their snores.

The Jinx

 Published 'Zine Zone' 1997

I'm sure you'll want to hear from me about certain events - events that probably affected you more than me - even if my word is easy to doubt following those lies I once told you, all those years ago, about loving you. Or is it that I think you need my side of the story before you get your own - if that were indeed feasible? Yet words seem to confuse issues. What we need are more smiles and kisses. But here goes with words.

Like myself, you no doubt tend to believe the latest pack-of-convincing-lies ... a belief which, in many ways, is like life itself. A mood is ever the current one, isn't it? And death the final certainty. Indeed our happiness at that time, short-lived as it was, did not entail, by necessity, eventual unhappiness.

I may not even send this letter but if I do, you may put it at the back of your mind where forgotten memories flourish. You see, I haven't lost my touch for words, however clumsy the words themselves are. Yet it is perhaps my words against yours, as it were, but can you believe either of us? You'll even doubt I'm writing this letter at all, despite my signature at its end. Is that the case? If so, it would have to be from someone else pretending it's written by me? I'd have to get the body of it word-processed from this rough draft to carry off that little ruse, there being no hope of forging my handwriting for such a length. Simply the end signature will take eternities to get the tails and loops just right, in any event.

No, you've no real confidence in being able to comprehend this letter? But you'll have to believe what seems natural by the time you've finished scouring its contents .All I ask is that you simply reserve judgment till the very end, when you can compare the signature to that appended to the previous missives I sent you - all those lovey-dovey ones with pierced hearts from the hey-day of our happiness. I expect your signature is a template of your unsullieable soul.

Anyway, do you really want me to nanny you in this way? I recall us exploring your mother's wardrobe, to see if we could find evidence of your father's strange hobby.  The smell of mothballs, the deeper-than-usual coat pockets, the dark dresses – all were signs of something like forgotten memories: signs in the end, of nothing. What we were really intent on finding, you and I, were your father's tie pins and cuff links, his wire rings and prongs - not to speak of his surgical umbrellas, steel enemas and iron mouth-stretchers. The stigmata represented his signature, didn't they? Every tail and loop in place and recognisable – even when we came to identify the stigmatised body itself, one gloomy autumn afternoon, in the bright mortuary.

"Did your father have plastic surgery?" was the official's first question, point blankly ignoring your evident distress and wondering how such a tall corpse could have fathered somebody as short as you.

"Plastic? No it wasn't - plastic," you answered, without really thinking, your eyes still locked upon the corpse who'd once given birth to you. The body's eyes were coppered. Nose bent out of joint by the fatal accident, without breaking it, incredible as it may seem.

But this was all subterfuge, as it turned out. Your mother's wardrobe of clothes, ranked like starved orphans, strung like faceless body-puppets, was the very clue we had missed. With your father dead, we could now concentrate on factors that had been too obvious not to miss. Your mother was indeed party to your father's tricks. Their marriage actually hung on mutilation. Why the rents, otherwise?

Yes, I lied when I told you it was me writing this letter. Death being the only certainty, I needed to unpick the wire stitches of alternate generations. Pirouettes and harlequinades, cyborg primadonnas, whatever, none were my idea of deja vu. Black-hearted beads and corrupt pearls fixed on spikes were more owner-friendly, however, than dolls that blindly hugged you to death. Smuts for eyes, blade-chains for alabaster necks, giving birth to metal meat-hooks was never fun.

Yes, you understood it even before you began - and, yes, without a sneaky look over the page - that there was no signature at the end. Nibs and quills, without fluid for words, you see, may only quicken a midget marionette's finger-joints. Each with a ring, echoing those rings piercing other parts. Guardians of the orifices, making my already thirsty womb dry as a bone. And my mood ever at the tail-end of hope, when I see there are no kisses as well as no signature.

Published 'Dreams & Nightmares' 1996

"It's easy to imagine the subject of this painting being alive.  Merely look at the face, the brown eyes shining through near tears, a hint of blusher on petal cheeks, shapely lips on the point of moving in speech..."

The guide indicated a large oil painting in a gold-studded frame, mixed sprays of flowers subtly overlapping the abstract margins.

"The girl it depicts, as you can see, has been wonderfully caught, no older than it takes to have the beginnings of womanhood in the lines of her dress.  And, indeed, the dress is a work of art in itself: drapes of creamy silk edged with the frailest lace that paint has, in my view, ever conveyed, and a bodice of finely embroidered tulips.  See the undulating curves created by her legs, as she sits inside that marvellous dress, all part of a dream that the artist has, perhaps inadvertently, captured with merely a few instinctive flowing movements of his brush."

The guide's words brought out details of the painting, summoned them, in fact, from invisibility - if only for a few fleeting seconds.

"But I suppose it only makes it sadder, with this being such a living image of beauty with brown eyes, that she is now dead - scientific examination having proved it was painted at the turn of the century."

A lady in the audience, one holding a Henry James novel, sobbed.  She seemed to have a similar hairstyle to the young girl in the painting: natural undulant curls of rust-brown hair, its heavenly composure dependent upon the deft positioning of lemon-white ribbons, neatly concealed beyond the abstract margins.  The guide strained to see who had sobbed, but the crowd had closed ranks.  Nothing for it, but a tentative continuation...

"The artist?  He - or she - remains a mystery.  The painting is unsigned, undated, with no documentation to give it provenance, in a frame unlike any other, depicting an angelic composure that, to my mind, fits no known fashion of social history and, so, I'm afraid we can only stand and gaze in sheer admiration."

The crowd began drifting off piecemeal, the sobbing lady among them.  Most recalled nothing within the frame except a rather self-conscious still-life in yellow flowers.

"Only those with brown eyes are able to see Heaven."

The guide muttered these last words, before becoming an indistinguishable part of the departing crowd.  And, at night, there was nobody left in the Gallery to witness the meeting of  composure and decomposure: a pair of abstractions walking proudly hand in hand.