CERN ZOO

I’m starting another of my real-time reviews. This time it is of ‘Pictures of the Dark’ a collection of short fiction by Simon Bestwick (Gray Friars Press 2009). I shall attempt to draw out the book's leitmotifs and mould them into its gestalt. I shall leave reading the book's Introduction by Gary McMahon and the Author Story Notes until I've read all the stories themselves and completed this review. [My previous reviews are linked from here: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm ]

 

Love Among The Bones 

Only a very few times in a lifetime, you come across a genuinely perfect story.  This is one of those stories.  It works (form and content) irrespective of its presence within any book and of the stories (as yet unread) that follow it - or no doubt the remaining stories will colour this experience later, even enhancing it, I hope, if that be possible.  It needs to be read. And anyone telling its tale in shorthand for a review would not do justice to it, but let me say it is a rite of passage of two young people (barely out of childhood), male and female, with eventual sexual explorations amid a setting that only a genuine Horror story can throw up.  At my age of 61 (and steeped in Proust as well as Ligotti), I sometimes think that it should be difficult now to empathise with such young emotions and to appreciate the gothHorror trappings of this type of genre fiction. And I do find it difficult. But that is the point of the story. Indeed, this is proved to me as the two protagonists grow older within the story... and I envisage their future. The house will always be there. (9 July 09)

Red Light

"I'm one of them you cross the street to avoid."

From the dead bones to a single living bone created by the person who wants it back inside her. Horror Stories in Britain are essentially working class.  Perhaps we are all working class who read this book and and who read the other book I just finished reviewing today. I certainly was a Fifties working-class boy, brought up with a tin bath hanging on the wall and an outside lavatory.

But certain things are beyond my experience. This is a very powerful story. The protagonist here speaks an effective simple common language in his narration that tells the story just as strongly as the more 'literary', textured prose of the previous story which also had a working-class feel. 

A hard childood making him what he is today, sexual abuse within the family, afraid of women because of these highly-charged memories - a baggage and more that haunts him, as today, he sits regularly with a mate in a coffee shop opposite a strange red light establishment suddenly noticed squeezed next to a launderette.  Fears and low life and ginnels and reminders of the past, all crowd in on the protagonist, as his mate seems to be continually attracted to the punishing regime behind the red light.  They crowd in on the reader, too. It's relentless. And you wonder if one should keep returning to this book as if to another punishing regime that one just can't put down? 

"But I couldn't stop it. And I liked it and I hated it." (9 July 09 - 7 hours later)

Death Will Come Softly, To The Beat Of A Drum

I couldn't put the book down, but I wish I could. I was snare-drummed back to it this morning. At least one of the photographs on the cover comes to life in this story. In the current round of the soldier class being sacrificed in Afghanistan, this story comes even further to life, if that's the right expression.

A protagonist -- who chain-smokes and relies on whiskey to assuage awareness of his own predicament within a life he never asked for -- receives a photograph in the post: a prescription for conscription to the army of those who are dead set on scorching the earth behind them. There is an interesting complementary parallel in 'Alouette' / 'The Sleepers' in another book I finished reviewing yesterday.  It's as if I'm in my own loop.  The story's collateral damage. Awaiting the drumming of coincidences to finally stop at the precise pre-determined moment of my death in action.  That's just me talking.  Not the story.

This story itself builds up suspense and paranoiac fear skilfully. The beauty of well-written fiction is that it depends on itself - and can never be spoiled by summarising its plot for a review.  Once spoilers are themselves spoilt, we know there can only be good fiction.

"...the wonderful thinking machine that created OEDIPUS REX, OLIVER TWIST and KING LEAR goes all to cock and loses the ability to distinguish dreams - or in my case, nightmares - from reality." (10 July 09)




Starky's Town

"Where are we? Is this Iraq? Afghanistan? Chechnya? Or anyone of a dozen warzones across the world? No. This is England."

Anyone who is a warzone is a zombie.  A tripartite battle between death, life and the insidious state that is neither.

This is indeed a zombie story with brilliant gory and genre descriptions of a housing estate become a scorched earth for a dead set scenario. A student - filming low life and archetypal urban decay - meets the dangers head on when the dossers morph into the stock half-dead.  Sometimes I thought of Michael Jackson's Thriller. But essentially this is good honest Horror story for its own sake.  Or it could also be seen as a metaphor for our society of the crunched who are forced to walk mindlessly among acronyms.  Another modest proposal for those who cannot make old bones.  A punishing regime for we readers, we slight ghosts in the night hutch, watching via the safe distance of fiction, yet brought closer and even closer by the sleights of Bestwick's hand. (10 July 09 - 10 hours later)

Coffee

Got up early on a Saturday morning to imbibe this story. I can't stop. This book won't let me go, despite saying elsewhere that I would take it slowly.  A half-dead companion piece to the previous story, this one itself becomes "a thin line, pencil-thin, hair-thin, molecule-thin..." unbrokenly mapping a swirl of red vessels in my tired eyes. (11 July 09)

 

 

Vecqueray's Blanket

"...webbed with firework displays of crimson, ruptured blood vessels in the cheeks."

I am getting fed up with saying how powerful each story is.  So no more. You'd simply not believe how powerful, anyway. This one is about a vividly word-itemsed underclass - and about a childish comforter or religious relic or portal - and about down-and-outs who, this time, have not become zombies as such, because as zombies there's a sort of saving grace: they're never real, are they?  Supernatural retribution against bent coppers here takes centre stage, and bitter bitter pathos, and bravery, and a sense that things do exist that never should exist. That sleight of hand again.  Or it's not magic at all but fiction-as-fact.  If I were a different person, I might even weep.  They are expendable soldiers of truth....

I am sure another of the battered photographs on the cover comes to life as a result of this story.  I said publicly elsewhere before beginning to read the stories: "I really don't like the cover, btw. I hope you don't mind me saying that. It's too fussy, complicated and gauche (to my taste) and the text on the back is garish and almost illegible."  Now, I wonder.  It perhaps needs to be itemised / focussed in one's mind, lived with, dwelt upon, like a childish blanket comforter with many infantile years sucking at the corners and besmirching it in the play-pen to make it look used and old, survivable into one's grown-up years, a talisman, a portal or a collection of miniature portals  ... rather than off-puttingly glimpsed in a bookshop. 
It's just the skull.  And where it begins and ends.  (11 July 09 - 2 hours later)



From Those Dark Waters, Where Lost Bones Lie

But fiction power accumulates. It has to be said. Each story stands alone but equally they stand together. This story expresses the pangs of guilt and sorrow when you are estranged from your own children by divorce.  Lost Bones both lie at the bottom of a reservoir of memory and they also lie, tell untruths...unless the reservoir's deeps hide higher truths where shallow lies don't matter.  An evocation of this and more: a day in the countrified sunshine, swimming, looking longingly at other families.  Until you sense a ghost in the making for a ghost story, not quite a ghost yet, but one that is destined to live and breathe in those hidden depths of the reservoir you thought had been a dream. Or dreamt had been a thought.  The bones echo the book's earlier bones.  And your only recourse is to hold your breath....

[If one of those battered photographs on the cover depicts this protagonist in a diving-aid, then it lies.  That makes everything all too easy.  Life is not life without pain.] (11 July 09 - another 4 hours later)

To This Darkness, We Give Light

"He turned on the television. Three of the five channels showed only blank screens or fizzing static." 

Power-cuts. Vodka and roll-ups. A story of breaches (or as Allen Ashley calls them: reality rifts) - with intruders who leave scorch-marks on the pavement. A population striving to mend the breaches by breaching the wartime dictum: "Loose talk costs lives".  Someone was surely on the point of praying, even if their hands were only glimpsed through the grille of a passing freight train. And if they're praying, all hope isn't lost. Interesting that one of the few TV channels left broadcasting is showing repeats of 'Dixon of Dock Green'.  Many of the streets that one walks today are the same black and white streets Sgt. Dixon once patrolled.  We're safe in his hands, at least.  And I defy anyone to watch 'Casablanca' on its regular Christmas afternoon slot without bursting into tears.  A story in a book that can truly speak to us during days of credit crunches, MPs' expenses, broken teachers, pointless wars and swine flu.

[Is the yellow portal on the back cover a blanket 'breach'?] (11 July 09 - another 90 minutes later)

 

 

Welcome to Mengele's

"Then you come up to the fifth house on the right, crunch your way up another gravel drive and press the bell, whch plays the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth."

Literally anything goes via à vis the sex drive. Russell T Davies providing a trampoline skin for your every bounce. Dirty stuff. Not sure how it fits into this book.

Not working-class, but Thatcher cottaging. (11 July 09 - another 3 hours later)

[later] Ah, I see, it is a metaphor for the credit crunch (eggs in a basket) and cosmetic surgery to the putty point of becoming icons or anagrams for psychological-real (eg. Princess Di --> Id?) instead of just acting them out on the reality/unreality 'Big Brother' of life. And in the new light of a new day, the DoctorWho --> Torchwood  is again transcended. Each day has its own remix. (12 July 09)

 

 

The Hours of the Dead

More reality breaches - or not quite. I daren't say for fear of spoiling the end.  This story could be spoilt. Spoilt by over-sickness. A sickness sickeningly described, so that the sickness actually sits on the words keeping them down for fear of them becoming the sickness itself ... or fighting sickness with sickness, so that only sickness can win.  May the better sickness win. Also a very effective parallel with the book's earlier urban decay / zombiefication now cast as sickness. But that takes away from the sickness, giving it a literary purpose.  After all, when you get the sickness - and you will, we all will - there'll be no reality breach to suck you back to normality, no pretentious philosophy of text-management to deter the sickness from lasting forever so that even death is not a cure, no possible eschatological suicide pact with literature or literary theory to ease the pain.  At the end of the day, words won't help.  Not even Bestwick's.

But some may say this is a Horror story, just horrors piled (if expertly and evocatively by an arch Horror fiction manipulator) on more horrors.  And they'll say that what I've said above is mere extrapolation from an unextrapolatable text. Well, make your own mind up.  I have. (12 July 2009 - 2 hours later)

Jindivik

"Some of you might already know the meaning of the name; if so, keep it your bloody self for now. This is my story; I'll tell it my own way; and in my own time."

This story is a bloody masterpiece. Both in or out of context of this book. Nuff said.

That's not intended to diminish the worth of the other stories read and as yet unread about which I've already said and will say more. It just seemed right in this instance. (12 July 09 - another 4 hours later)

 

 

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

A Proustian review through the sense of taste. A childish memory of one's own real childishness that permeates onwards through so-calld maturity into the memory itself as if through a stick of rock - a journey in the snow, a car radio with static except for back-to-back goldie oldies on one channel, an inverted dream vision of what I infer to be an archetype of James Stewart's 'It's A Wonderful Life'.  Inverted, because a sweet tooth as nostalgia becomes a nightmare. Acid drops, then eyeballs with pure white whites and no blood vessels.  The Milky Bar Kid who became Michael Portillo.  But the story is even sadder than that. This book is full of regret and guilt that our own-created monsters carry for us in case we forget, of the once erstwhile permanence of self, of the destiny of bones when we anticipate that self dissolving like a bitter sweet in the mouth...  (12 July 09 - another 90 minutes later)




The Slashed Menagerie

"...it's hard to be superior when you're gasping and yelping your way to a climax."

I can't believe anyone would be allowed to publish a story like this one. Hidden right in the middle of the book in the hope that nobody would notice. It's probably the most outrageous story I've ever read.  This is true, even with the thematic excuse of thrusting a working-class protagonist into a world of hooray henries and of depicting timelily the cruel outcomes of various wars upon the soldiers who barely survived them and of paralleling zombies and urban decay with the goriness of war ... plot factors in tune with the previous audit trail of the book so far. 

A tour of this Home for those injured in war - and their bones (still in use) on full show .... and the wicked games upon the residents played by those in charge .... nothing will give warning enough to unwary readers of this story.  I suspect even Sir Charles Birkin would have blanched.  Although he's probably in there somewhere.

I refuse to believe this story has any moral high ground or scope for philosophising about at all.  If you can stomach it, you are no doubt worthy of sharing this book's family of stories along with others of your kind. This one is the big test. Unless there are bigger ones yet to come? I dread to think. This one is framed so that it is entirely inexcusable. Social satire is in one of the cages being beaten black, blue and red by unadulterated horror and onanism. I don't think I was sufficiently prepared for this story. It contains a Zoo of Zero tolerance.

[With my involvement with the 'Only Connect' school of thought, I am intrigued by the reference to E.M. Forster in this story. It doesn't seem to fit. I mean, how did this literary figure deserve to be implicated with this unspeakable plot? Anyone help?]

"'Excuse me,' the keeper said. 'I do grow prone to philosophising. This way now.'" (12 July 09 - another 90 minutes later).


The Loving of Ghosts 

This is a most beautiful story of a dying war, a war of vague or alternate-world resemblance to a 20th century World War, a slowly returning soldier from the trenches, who has the skill to summon the presence of his loved one along the way, a physical ghost worthy of May Sinclair.  This story is perfectly composed, timed, a genuine literary gem.  The visionary width of this book ever grows.  Comprising harsh instinct and subtle maturity.  It seems to make sense in hindsight of many things that need an ability to travel here in spirit to clarify their previous existences.  Meanwhile, ‘The Slashed Menagerie’ is in the Diary Room talking to Big Brother. (12 July 09 - another hour later)




Never Say Goodbye

"What had I expected? Bones, of course. Little or nothing more."

A highly characterised story of a lost sibling, whose body is found in gruesome shape, who said she would exist forever, even past death.  A perfect portrayal of her grieving brother. A perfect portrayal of a Daily Mail-type reporter, and a perfect portrayal of the story's spirit of place...all in a finely worked yet manly embroidery of words.  This fiction really lives, despite the misinterpretations by its own protagonists about what really happened.  Or am I (as a mere reader) misinterpreting their misinterpretations?  That (perhaps disintentionalised) doubt is what makes the thing really really live.  There can be no spoilers for good fiction.  But I won't even go there.  No need to tempt fate as spoilers may lurk unforeseen even in good fiction.  This story, suffice it to say, sits well with the mutilative mayhems and other leitmotifs that slowly form the bare bones of this book's gestalt for me as I head into the last third of this book.

"...the cheap roll-ups he smoked, the cheap whiskey on his breath."  (13 July 09)



Going Under, Flying High
 

"Grief has a taste; it is bitter. So has loneliness."

When I earlier vowed not to mention that any particular story is powerful, because they all are, I had not predicted the cumulativeness of this book's power. This story has the touching physical ghost (as opposed to the essentially different phenomenon known as a zombie) that was prefigured by 'The Loving of Ghosts' but pulling with it all the powers of a zombie built up heretofore by this book. Here, we have cancer as an added ingredient.  More information would instil a cancer into the story itself.  Not a spoiler, but a real word-tumour.  But since when were surface cancers 'tumescent'? This story has it so.

Suffice it to say that this story fulfils a destiny of yearning in the strangest, most unexpected, most horrifyingly pathetic way than any story I can imagine existing in any book.  Plus a deliberate hiatus in omniscience:

"And...and I'm not going to tell you what she said. It was private, personal beyond words: that was the point. It has no need or place here." (13 July 09 - 2 hours later)


[Many of the story titles in the book unusually contain a comma; their own tumour tail built in?] (13 July 09 - another ten minutes later)

 

The Proving Ground

This is not a boyish rite-of-passage, not a 'Family Fishing' or 'The Reach of Childen'; this is something inexplicable. It is tantamount to grappling with this book itself, left alone to read it .... even for a 61 year old like me, hoping to grow up... (13 July 09 - another hour later)

Once

Perhaps inspired by the Saf Dar in Simon Clark's novel 'Nailed By The Heart', this is another story of the true working-class, the soldiers who fight for a living even stronger than the others in our world who also have to fight life itself for a living. Imagine the current Afghan campaign taking place in Manchester, England, with all the tribal and feudal implications and corruptions so easily transposed between the two similar potentialities of warfare scenario.  Just that.  No other implications needed. No pretentious text-management. This is raw stuff.  Another 'proving ground':

"The insults sounded strange; 'scum' and 'swine', like words out of a boy's adventure story. But they hit harder than any obscenity or profanity, because it was as if Jock realised that there are no words. For something like this, you can say nothing. You can only stand on the edge of madness and look into a chasm of the dead." (13 July 09 - another hour later)

To Walk In Midnight's Realm

This is a first for me.  Since starting this project of real-time reviewing, I've 'done' many books in a similar fashion. This story has been reviewed by me in one such review, i.e. in an anthology where it first appeared: as the last story in Beneath The Ground edited by Joel Lane (Alchemy Press 2003).  This was what I said in that review:

 

Well, this is the end of the fiction in this book. Can fiction die? And, if so, can death bring its own fulfilment and reward - a bit like religion if not a religion in itself? This excellent story fortuitously or fatefully seems to act as the chief symbiosis factor between itself and all the other stories - especially with the book's first story ('The End Of A Summer's Day'). It gives further hope to that earlier story or at least some underpinning to its foundling or changeling of despair - acting as a positive force towards reunion in utter darkness. As if each end of the book wraps round and falls into an eternal lexic love.
This last story has two dramatically important suicides plus a brother/brother relationship (one being a 'rock' to the other (Cf the previous story)), a relationship that lasts beyond the death of one of them, a love between a man and a woman that also outlasts death (necrophilia?) plus a mighty Jules Verne-like vision beneath the ground of a Welsh mountain plus a horde of zombies plus a theme of Religion versus Rationality represented by the tension between two characters plus Babylonic (inter alia) sculptures made from the stalagmites and stalactites plus racial undercurrents plus social class undercurrents (down and outs etc) plus much more that echoes the gestalt of this book for me -- all blending wonderfully into a thrust of fiction that sheds light as well as more perceived darkness on the journey we have just travelled as readers. It has a prose style capable of carrying the weight and responsibility upon its 'shoulders'.
My recent review of another book concerning "I" narration and its author's response (and it is also relevant, for example, to 'Lost and Found' and 'Empty Stations' in the book I'm currently reviewing here) has taught me not to worry about the apparent artificiality of such an "I" narration appearing, say, in a letter from one character to another in the style of highly-honed artful fiction (as it does here). It works. This story works very well on many levels including the accessibly horrific.*

I have just re-read it. It remains just as good. It seems to be the perfect blend for this book's zombie and physical ghost themes - the cruelty of death in contrast to the ultimate perseverance of love, but the author and we readers having to fight a war to reach that goal of perseverance, aided and abetted by various soldiers of reality and unreality, have and have-not -- or synchronous shards of random truth and fiction...

With the previous book in which this story lived, we had somehow reached that goal. Here, in this new book, we are still trying to reach it and, of course, we may never reach it with three stories yet to read.  A miracle, though, how one story can be two different stories. (13 July 09 - another 3 hours later) 

Drop Dead Gorgeous

"Sadness has a smell, thick and rotten..."

A monologue by a cynical barman in a Singles Bar.  The place actually reeks with cigarette smoke (so possibly a 'historic' document).   This is the more upwardly mobile side of 'whiskey and roll-ups', the nouveau riche who may have been brought up with a tin bath and an outside loo come to pair off (in Thatcherite times?) for sex and the warding off loneliness at least for a moment.  But that's just reading things into it.  This is another piece about the half-dead, or should I say, undead?  Just by evidence of giving the finger, there's not much to choose between them.  Regarding our 'goal towards the perseverance of love' identified in my comments on the previous story, it looks as we have just had a set-back. A credit crunch, literally. (14 July 09)

 Touch The Dark
More breaches, more reality riffs. Another protagonist as refugee from Thatcherite Britain, once an architect, now amid the urban decay and human suffering depicted by this book with metaphors coming and going, pulsing, strobing, now in a high-rise with possible non-Euclidean angles, and 'black static': the Suicide Machine.

'The Machine Stops' by E.M. Forster as published in 1909 was a meticulous metaphor for the modern Internet, believe me. You won't need my word for it, if you read it. This story, also. The voice here speaks to you from within the very Web of the Machine. Thank God for print as buffer.  Also 'Twilight' by Allen Ashley as a complementary read...

'Touch The Dark' is full of anguish .... and speaks of a sacrifice to the darkness that you touch for the sake of one of those attractive strangers in the night who keep at bay your own loneliness and despair...at least for a single flash of 'black lightning'.  Perseverance pays off.  Even the perseverance of Suicide.

"Perhaps he'd said a quick prayer before he pulled the trigger. No-one knew." (14 July 09 - 2 hours later)


 

Close My Eyes

I have to be careful here. I could give you my theories about this story, compare it with the previous one - but it would spoil it. Much like 'Jindivik', to which I could also compare it.  This story makes me fear that one day I shall forget my own Dad's recent death. Makes me wonder why I spend so much time within this Machine planting memories of me. This may be my last real-time review. One day, I shall possibly spend time looking for a link but never finding quite the right link so as to delete everything. (14 July 09 - another hour later)

 

When The West Wind Blows

My mother always told me that I should not pull a face since, if the wind changed, my face would stick that way.  Well, the wind has changed. This story is an empty coda, a crude mockery of itself. It has lost its soul. The story itself is a zombie. Staccato sentences without what I earlier described above as 'finely worked but manly embroidery of words'.

But the book remains a genuine masterpiece. The book has stuck that way because the wind has changed.  And in many ways this wind-of-change story, in itself not a masterpiece, somehow makes the whole book perfect.  My earlier sightings of the 'perseverance of love' was futile. I think I knew that at the time. 

The protagonist in this story also struggled for the 'perseverance of love' by exhuming his dead wife Sarah to protect her from those who wanted to be zombies.  You see, as the world cracked up with plague, war, feudal tribalism etc. there came an army of near-zombies (only quarter-dead instead of half-dead?), creatures that wanted to be full zombies by seeking out the truly dead like Sarah to supplement their existence via metabolism and communion.  And Sarah was truly dead, still is, despite the words put into her mouth by the protagonist's monologue, and addressing her as 'you' when she's dead.  And the words put into the protagonist's own mouth by the author. And the supposed intentions put into the author's mind as he wrote this story, i.e. put into his mind by a reader who hadn't yet read it till now. 

This last story itself is a suicide soldier-of-fortune opening a 'breach' for this book's very own wendigo ... its very own saf dar .... its very own jindivik.  

The last bone in the coffin.

"The unthinkable never becomes thinkable; it just happens, and you're left to deal with what's left."

END (14 July - another three hours later)

7 July 2009

THREE

Cern Zoo

Continued from here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-brother-summer-2009.html



More strange goings on. Marcus shows the gristle in his nostril then barters cider to see one of Noirin's nipples. Sree is OCDing over Noirin, too. And Lisa - sincerely, in my eyes - takes Sree under her wing. Sree's bambi eyes. Oh bamboo. And Marcus - boo! How cool he really is.
Angel becomes pragmatic. She is still a Juliet of the Spirits, though.
I can't really decide between Halfwith and Caironwithout.

Did you like the bum-faces, Marion? What a shower, eh!
Isn't Halfwit - who I hope stays - a bit like Leslie Phillips?
I'm gradually going off Noirin (like Angel is going off her) but she's not actually done anything yet to put me off her - only what she might do in the future!
I think Sree is basically teasng everyone, including us! He's a professional HM. Those Bambi eyes are simply manufactured.

I think Cairon did a great interview. His whole BB image, in hindsight, made a sort of crazy logic...

Angel is a queer fish. Not yet fathomed her to the innermost Russsian rag-doll. I don't think she's fathomed herself. Her attenuation was hardened by the KGB. She's trying to harden Sree.
I don't know whether it's because the world I'm recently watching in the BB house has no rhyme or reason in itself or because I can't understand much of what is being said or mis-scrying a modern way of life beyond my own old-fashionedness.
Angel and Charlie - a new romance? Or have I got that wrong?
Apparently, Marcus has "seen things he should never have seen". I wish I'd never seen him!
Are they tattoos on Halfwit's back - in Chinese script? Is it a secret message carried by BB's mole?
Sree, I'm becoming more and more convinced, is a professional HM. Strobing between self-assertion and self-abnegation. Playing every instrument in the orchestra of emotions.
Lisa as LP Hartley's Go-Between. Well, I don't think I can manage much more craziness.

"I don't think so, Sonny Jim".
I think everyone's now caught up with Halfwit's Leslie Phillips imitation.
BBese is just as incomprehensible to me as Russian! As is Sree's behavour.
Noirin's turned nuggety. Her iconic doodle is now upon a hardening mask. She has a good point: you can actually do what you like to antagonise people in he BB house (short of threats of violence or racist taunts), because the cameras protect you...
Sree is acting as if he is a catalytic mole on behalf of BB...
Angel's hard push of him into the wall is now followed by her knuckly fists nuggeting into his back in the guise of massage.
Marcus didn't get all his Russian phrases right, despite his outright crowing that he did. He said funky music instead of country & western, according to the translated subtitles.

Thanks, Marion. Angel is either Greta Garbo or a vampire bat in disguise readying herself for attack - the Russian Kiss was just a preliminary in this deadly mating-dance.
If Sree is not an emotional catalyst planted by BB, then I'll draw Noirin's erstwhile face-doodle on my own face for ever more. Think whom Sree has teased / taunted /tempted so far. Most of the summary programme is geared to his doings every night.
The slightly dense wolverine is, meanwhile, doing all that Sree wants of him by rising to various baits -
A blooming King Halfwit I was perfectly pitched by BB on his Royal (solstitial) and actual birthday - and the others melded well with the spirit of time and place thus attuned. Reminded me of the festival in 'The Virgin and the Garden' by AS Byatt.
Kris is surely ambivalent? Dogface's is perhaps just one of the kennels he sniffs at.
Karly is becoming - in a quietly gradual way - a force to reckon with as both an intuitive and a beauty.
But nothing can outshine Noirin's smile. Even better revealed in its full glory as a butterfly from the iconc chrysalis of a now magicked-away doodle-face...that will haunt the doodles and graffiti webbing our archetypal dreams.

Yes, a classic BB, Marion. Ambivalence I feel is the watchword, but an ambivalence with a proud positive feel about it. A bit like good fiction.
Love them or hate them, we have some textural characters that defy easy fathomability like naturist Angel, catalytic Sree, Kris/Charlie, Halfwit, Noirin and Karly - and yes, the wolverine (amenable to befruiting in the stocks).
The early sight of a winner for me was Rodrigo but he has not really since figured although he does dress up well as a girl, if that's an asset in life or not?
Even Dogface has a tension between naivety and the modern cynicism of a page 3 model type.
The butchered animals in the Tudor kitchen are a good test for self-questioning in the light of modern life's tipping towards overbearing Health & Safety and Vegan lifestyles etc. while all manner of atrocities caused by humans on humans continue in the world without cease.

Quote: "Norin looked like the girl with the Pearl earring;"
Thanks for confirming something I think I must have thought sub-consciously before you suggested it!
Angel frothing at the mouth as she strums vigorously.
The wolverine's Greensleeves- an avant garde masterpiece.
Sree is a mixed-up individual - or a very clever actor.
I'm beginning to like Karly more and more, and Kris less and less.
Sad to see Angel and Halfwit up together for eviction. But as I think you imply, Marion, we don't know half of it, if one just watches the summary programmes.

You've said it all, Marion. Very astute and perceptive and poetically creative in the expression of. Thanks on behalf of all your readers here. I notice the views of this thread go up by 2000 each day, currently standing at 210500.
Between your yearning for real males and mention of the wolverine's pan-scouring shower, I said: "What about Marcus'? But of couse, Marcus is a special case. He is all you say he is.
Angel described herself as a cyborg. HMmm...
I've often mentioned the Shakespearean influence on BB, but, with Angel and Halfwit, we have gone wholly Dickensian. (No suspicion of Tennessee Williams, this season).

Only 11 hours have elapsed and the total is now: 211376.
Angel in her silver mask hovers around the washing-up like something from a Bergman film, as they argue about her. Later (tonight ready for eviction) more a Fellini film with her Noirinish doodled moustache. Rodrigo at last showed a bit of bite. And, earlier, the wolverine in his black bin-liner and Jekyll-spray hair really looked the part from Dead Set. When he's evicted, he'll probably eat Davina alive after gutting her like a Tudor rabbit. It's a shame Angel has to leave. She is truly crushed by some things. Halfwit continues to remain a Wholenut. The only true-to-himself self in the house. And if Sree has any more dye in his hair it will probably jump into the wolverine's wild mop and have a pillow fight with empty speech-bubbles.
PS: Dogface got into Diary Room knots with time loops and time warps. I think she thinks Kris is Dr Who and she his new companion but only when they've viewed the evidence that time travel may hide in some bizarre SF fashion about courting-in-hindsight.... Could only happen on BB.

Angel is gone - the walking Art Installation and intrinisc Mystery Play. Or was she just another charlatan? Another prestidigitator of ectoplasm and mirrors. Once dead, alwyas dead...at least in our memories. She was right about Halfwit's articulation of speech being a rare commodity in the BB house. His shepherds, wolves and sheep circling round him to hear his brand of beatnik beatitude.
I seemed to slide over Lisa's presence yesterday as if part of me at least didn't want to latch on to considering her behaviour. A familiar. A hen-cockatoo.

CONTINUED HERE: http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=80029030&blogId=499585105

Nemonymous Part Three (gold coin)

Subtitled A Megazanthus for Short Fiction and released in April 2003 with cover art by JaNell Golden.

• "The Bluest of Grey Skies", Michael Kelly
• "Practice", Jeff Holland
• "Genie", Tamar Yellin
• "Gerald and the Soul Doctor", David J. Brown
• "Otterwise", Lucy A. E. Ward
• "Sirens", Brendan Connell
• "The Rest of Larry", Monica O'Rourke
• "The Ballerina", Lavie Tidhar
• "Shark in a Foggy Sea", Colin Hains
• "Scrounge", David Mathew
• "Twilight Music", Regina Mitchell
• "Mobile, Phone", Brian Howell
• "The Small Miracle", Rhys Hughes
• "Digging for Adults", D Harlan Wilson
• "Insanity Over Creamer's Field", Joe Murphy
• "Warp", Len Maynard and Mick Sims
• "Sleeping Beauty", Tom Williams
• "Lucia", Paul Evanby
• "In the Steam Room", Tamar Yellin
• "Chemo", Terry Gates Grimwood
• "The Place Where Lost Things Go", Jorge Candeias (translated from the Portuguese by Luís Rodrigues)

 

Nemonymous Part Four (Glass Onion): A Megazanthus for Parthenogenetic Fiction and Late-Labelling was published in May 2004 and comes in completely white covers, with no lettering on the outside save for the words "nemonymous part four" on the spine.

• "Apologising to the Concrete", Jay Lake
• "Creek Man", Jamie Rosen
• "The Death Knell", S. D. Tullis
• "Determining the Extent", Adrian Fry
• "Embrace", Keith Brooke
• "The Frog's Pool", Jetse de Vries
• "Generous Furniture", Trent Jamieson
• "Leaves Like Hearts", Rachel Kendall
• "Like a Slow Motion War", Allen Ashley & Andrew Hook
• "My Burglar", Gary McMahon
• "Maledict Michela", Brendan Connell
• "Nocturne for Doghands", Joe Murphy
• "The Painter", Dominy Clements
• "The Rorschach-Interpreter", D Harlan Wilson
• "Sexy Beast", Tony Mileman
• "Vole Mountain", Andrew Hook
• "The Withering", Bruce Golden

Nemonymous Five is designed in red, being a Dickian version of the old-fashioned memo books which can be found in the United Kingdom. "NEMO BOOK," as it is titled, was released in July 2005 and contains the following stories:

• "The Robot & The Octopus", Tony Ballantyne
• "Driving In Circles", Iain Rowan
• "Running Away to Join the Town", Paul Meloy
• "Solid Gold", Rachel Kendall
• "George the Baker", Anonymous
• "The Hills Are Alive", S. D. Tullis
• "Huntin' Season", Monica O'Rourke
• "Well Tempered", Neil Williamson
• "The Scariest Story I Know", Scott Edelman
• "New Science", Gary McMahon
• "Soul Stains", Robyn Alezanders
• "Grandma's Two Watches", Lavie Tidhar

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

Nemonymous Six doesn't actually exist, and it probably never will. "The Non-Existent Edition," as it's dubbed by the editor, was announced in May 2006 as existing in the tradition of stories such as 'The Vanishing Life and Films Of Emmanuel Escobada', 'Four minutes thirty-three seconds' and 'Mighty Fine Days' (in Nemonymous 2) and 'The Painter' (in Nemonymous 4), plus the blank cover of Nemonymous 4 and other features of previous editions.
Nemonymous Six is a drogulus.

 

Richard Strauss wrote Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. Many think he is related to Johan Strauss of Vienna Waltz fame – but nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Is anything further from the truth than anything else? Truth is relative, some seem to believe. A moveable feast. A convenience. Their whole life is geared – at least subconsciously – to the fact that Truth is a matter of opinion rather than an intrinsic, unswerveable incontrovertibility. Life would be a misery if strait-jacketed by a so-called certainty of truth. Life is best when one can shift it about on the table, its various facets changing with the light or the angle of viewing it – ballooning one minute, shrinking the next. Truth can fall off the table and creep about of its own volition, now a rodent-like truth, later a ghostly truth, sometimes merging with the carpet itself or becoming just another indistinguishable aspect of its pattern.

 

Music can carry an intrinsic truth, however, an ineluctable noumenon of its own. Not the music itself, but an emotion in its weave that no listener can avoid. Nobody can compare that emotion felt by one listener to the emotion felt by another. Reality is only viewed via a single mind. Your mind. That is the only truth, your relationship with your own mind. A mind that can only be the same mind that observes it.

 

So, dear Richard Strauss, how can there be more than one last song? Perhaps, the last song becomes the next last song that becomes the next last song that becomes the next last song, or halfway through the song, then halfway through the rest of the song, or halfway through the rest of the rest of the song, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, with the listener moving from mind to mind, self to self, last song to last song – and we can therefore live forever, square-dancing inside a sound-woven song-space with four unseen, unreachable corners.

Written yesterday as a speed-writing exercise at the Clacton Writer's Group and first published here

CONTINUED FROM HERE


The Terror of the Tomb (1992)

This was a major re-write by a 1990 DFL self of something written by an earlier DFL self in the Sixties. Fundamentally, a sort of absurd horror story or a MR James pastiche or something more concupiscent between the two! It tells of someone investigating grave-robbing in a Sussex village and the subsuming of the Self. The village “had one long main street, where the pubs and bank-fronts huddled close to the gossip shop and the pork butcher’s. But, unlike other country communities, it had back streets and sunless alleys more fitting for a run-down city...”

There is also a Fish Station “where those that can’t breathe in air end up for a while.”

Not forgetting a pub:

“Beneath the Sign of the Dogs that Whine
Their tongues and scissors flicker;
Within the inn there grows a skin,
And the stew is crusting thicker.”

One would forgive neutral observers wondering if the pub was a cover-joint for another scar museum? (1 June 09 - another 4 hours later)






 

Todger’s Town (1999)

A quilted story that is another of those long dubious ‘shades of emptiness’! Actually, this is a really strange one. It has all the hallmarks of early period DFL. Part of an erstwhile Toilet Mythos, here we have a lavatory-man who “had worked man and boy as a stink-man: clearing the tanks of the rich and selling the produce to the poor.” Full of Lovecraftian references - and Cthulhu monsters roosting on the roofs of working-class ‘back-to-back’, ‘two-up-two-down’ and ‘tunnel-back’ houses, some of these houses with pretentiously overgrown porches sprouting from the front doors. Grovellings and Guttersnipes. And larger-than-life characters and anachronistic Christmases. There is also a terraced road of houses where the lavatory-chain flushes have been placed in the houses next door to the toilets they flush - and imagine the neighbourly squabbles ensuing...! It’s a hoot and a half! Not to everyone’s taste, no doubt.

I earlier tried to wring out a leit-motif aiming at the optimum-last-thought-before-one-dies concept threading this whole book - and here we have just one example:

“...his Mum told me he had died sitting on the lavatory-bowl. I actually received the impression from her that she was annoyed as she had only just finished his laundry. / I knew that Todger always liked to sit on the outside toilet for as long as possible, strumming his double bass. Quite a drawn-out affair, the only peace he got, I suppose. Lavatories were in his blood. I dropped a single rose into the bowl that had borne his end.”

And if that is a spoiler, I apologise.  (2 June 09)

Tom Rose (1991)

This is nearly as long as my quilted stories. I remember being surprised (and very proud) when it was accepted by Alan Ross of ‘London Magazine’ for the London Magazine Anthology: ‘Signals’.

It is one of my strongest, strangest stories that I have long since fallen out of love with. About a magician / drag artist performing in a women’s seminary – implicating bodily and religious concupiscence, ghosts that play the ‘Battleships’ game with the story’s protagonist, mixed with gentle unspoken love between two of the seminarists plus a richly textured, often irregular spirituality. The story is both poetic and grotesquely absurd. I now find it difficult to grasp. It is either my best story or my worst. Looking at it coldly today, I sense it to be on the brink of returning into my favour as a reader, but I continue to be wary of it as its author. Its sometimes beautiful, sometimes clumsy prose never ceases to surprise (even shock) me on each re-reading. I intend never to read it again after today.

“The gaps in the text nagged at her, but before she could fill them in, she saw crouched shapes at the back of the hall, shifting in shadows. Like beached monsters trying to prime their dark flesh for easing back into the giant womb of death: as if they were foetuses of ghosts.” (2 June 09 - 2 hours later)





Top of an Angel’s Head (1996)

 Two dreams paralleling, feeding into and feeding from each other. One a liaison in a Hodgson-like ghost ship scenario. The other an affair of the same couple in a boudoir-scenario amid fairies. The result of this interweaving of images is one I cannot interpret or evaluate, merely describe. There are echoes of the human heads of previous stories in this book, some of which were smuggling ambergris. Also tissue like that on show at the Scar Museum. The story seems to be lending its own specific weight to some still slowly evolving gestalt... Is this collection a novel, after all? A rhetorical question in a rhetorical review.

“She smiled and went to the side of the room where she had evidently left the breakfast tray. She brought it over and I breathed in the fragrance of rose-hip and hibiscus tea—on which floated blossoms—and delighted in the plateful of steaming rashers that—she told me—hid shy eggs beneath. A hunk of lightly toasted bread, with a skewer in its centre bearing black olives, floated like a full-masted raft in a basin of warm milk that was gradually growing a skin so cultured that it looked like the top of an angel's head.” (3 June 09)




 

Uncle Absolutely (1992)

Another story that I’m told by some of my friends is their favourite one in the book. That sort of information from me should have no place in a review.  But as I develop this review, I feel I should not withhold anything – as well as simultaneously trying to be objective.  Meanwhile, this story is based on some of my childhood memories of living in the Essex seaside town of Walton-on-Naze (in a house called Olive Villa) between my birth in 1948 and 1955 (when my parents with myself moved to Colchester). However, the Uncle character - who is so uncertain of himself that he answers everything with the ritual and incantatory use of the word ‘absolutely’ - is created specifically for this story. Everything else seems more or less real. The Uncle somehow makes it all seem even more real!

The ending is poignant, a poignancy enhanced in the sense that it also proves words in this book are more important than the things they describe, thus working to make those same things seem more real as things ... if one can ride the rollercoaster-paradox embodied in that claim! And I too have a soft spot for this story.

“A swing in the large garden which took its own volition from a ghost that was mugging up on childhood.”  (3 June 09 - 2 hours later)

Valedictory (1993)

An old man on an island (in a scenario and ethos similar to that of ‘Big Ship, Little Ship and Brown’) says goodbye to a girl for whom he has been guardian (her having reached puberty and thus unwise for her to remain with him,  now collected by a galleon of strangers as if they had always been destined to arrive upon the very first striking of her clock of womanhood). Unrequited love and lush fantasies of tone. It suits the fading identity of the I-narrator as it ploughs through the plot of life towards its end, with the head-lease author (me) generally controlling the dimmer-switches (sometimes erratically up and down in ‘brightness’) of each story’s protagonist’s or narrator’s character and soul.

“The oar-slaves abruptly took up crooning. Their shanties made me hide my eyes for fear of tears showing. These were songs of the soon to depart. To the knowing, each stanza told of the route and even the destination.” (3 June 09 - another hour later)




 

The Walking Mat (1993)

This is one of the longer stories in this book, but, unlike many of the previous long ones, it is not a quilted story. It seems organic. A definite ‘genius loci’. It seems to summarise some of the leit-motifs still homing in. It is a man’s return to the half-sunken novelty hotel where his wife died at his hand on honeymoon. It is about the nature of a gratuitous act. It is of a dual symbiosis where one of the participants dies in the process. It is of the evolution of selves. Tripartite wars. The optimum-last-thought-at-the-point-of-one’s-own-death. It is of interaction and dialogue reminiscent of ‘Effervescent’, ‘The Chaise Longue’, ‘The Scar Museum’... It is of many other things I can no longer grasp.

I have been developing a huge amount of self-doubt as I progress through this experimental (‘intentional fallacy’-inspired) real-time review of ostensibly my own book. But one needs to factor in randomness and synchronicity, truth and fiction. Yet it remains essentially pretentious, and if I believe that an author is just as able (or unable) to critique his own book as other so-called independent reviewers – why have I seen fit to interpolate personal anecdotes throughout, i.e. anecdotes about the writing of some of the stories? Perhaps the answer is in the end of ‘The Walking Mat’: an ending of re-enactment and role-playing. If that is a story-spoiler, I apologise, but it is necessary for me to make this ‘self’-important observation in the context of what is fast becoming an important event in my writing life (i.e. this review). An importance I did not predict when embarking a week or so ago upon doing this (on the face of it, crass) experiment. I suppose it is significant that at the outset I speculated upon this review taking months or even years. And here I am, today, nearly finished!

“The hotel was expensive. Not so much a sea-view as the fish-eye itself.”  (4 June 09)

'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONCLUDED HERE

.

CONTINUED FROM HERE


Salustrade (1993)

Hmmm – actually, this over-long story is better than I remember it ... just! Perhaps Karl Edward Wagner did have a point after all when he chose it for ‘Year’s Best Horror Stories’. I have great respect for him and his fiction and his editorial work. Therefore, I shall hold fire on this story. Make your own mind up. I’ll just itemise the high points (for me) then: an assisted suicide beneath a pyramid of second-hand books, some apocalyptic visions and the language used to describe them, a strange relationship between a pair of twins (perhaps, paradoxically, the ultimate tripartite war!), Salustrade as the highly-strung, imp-like ‘gladiator’, the steampunk SF scenario under a gothic city and the Padgett Weggs finale.

It’s perhaps that some of these high-points don’t make the grade as amenable jigsaw pieces! This story crams in so many DFL emblems it makes the task of this real-time review discovering the book’s audit trail of leit-motifs (leading to an eventual gestalt) either too difficult or too easy. Never in between.

“The books around her were nothing but memories, too – mere pages of live thoughts that were all but dead. How could the bone of one finger split into a ‘V’? For a book to live, though, must it not in fact become such a ‘V’?”  (27 May 09 - 2 hours later)

Scaredy and Whitemouth (1994)

This one seemed far better than I remembered. I remembered it as a pedestrian story of a blind girl called Aspen – and her two cats – and someone called David whom she visualised. It is about those things. But the ending came as a complete surprise and the innuendo of some people ‘seeing’ more things by feeling their way reminded me of various processes I’ve experienced when doing these real-time reviews. But that’s not the real reason. This was a story that genuinely touched me as if I’d never written it. The Narrator this time was not on a dimmer-switch, but I, imputed author become the unconnected reader, was dimming and brightening in a slow-motion strobe as if in some process that could only be envisioned by a real blind person. I almost could answer the question: who empathised with whom? Almost. 

[Perhaps one needs two people to try empathising mutually so as to allow a missing missing-wall to be found by a third party as a chink of light through which he or she can ‘read’ both parties far more clearly than they could even ‘read’ each other and themselves. A three-cornered dance ... or a tripartite war’s surrender or peace conference.]

“Aspen had dreams in her sleep. Blindness couldn’t prevent that. She saw the places she visited during the day in precise detail, down to the assistant at the underwear shop with pitted face, toothbrush moustache and tape measure round his shoulders.” (27 May 09 - another 4 hours later)

The Scar Museum (1996)

A somehow logical treatment of a protagonist who runs a Scar Museum and stays in hotels in Spa towns so as to cull as many potential exhibits as possible from the inhabitants – paralleled by a metaphor of life’s scars extending to real scars on the mind’s surface, a mind that can also be culled. It tells of his well-narrated encounter with two women and with a pig-like dog called Tussle. And there is a guest appearance by Padgett Weggs in his dosser role. It all makes eminent sense. And fits into a growing hypothesis that this collection is really a novel...

Read as a separate story, it works, too.

It makes unbelievability the new believability.

Some strange expressions like ‘unworld-famous museum’ and ‘undesigner-rip in the jeans’ take this concept of against-the-grain truth into a realm of even weaker tissues of lie. (28 May 09)

Season of Lost Will (1991)

“Freda often thought out loud after her memory started to go. If she could but know where it was going, that might have helped.”

This story has become devastating. When I first wrote it I was around 20 years younger than I am now, and it wasn’t quite so devastating to me then. It is a story of misunderstandings and memories as one grows older as a married couple. It cleverly centres round a mysterious Christmas Card that arrives every year. Time attenuates into a scar of its former condition. Which is best - to lose something or never to know you had it? Then slowly and unenthusiastically queuing behind crazy people for the emergency exit from life’s auditorium.

“The great miracle about it all, he thought, was that people lived as if they were immortal, but knowing at the back of their mind all the time that one day, one unexpected day, they would pass on. That was God’s con trick. What made it more absurd God would never put in an appearance to have the last laugh.” (28 May 09 - 4 hours later)

Second Best (1993)

A densely word-packed flash fiction about Simple Simon and the Pieman and Jack the Giantkiller in a tripartite dream. A ‘bony-meat haven’ or a ‘slight ghost in the night hutch’ or ‘wishbone substance of shadow’?

A question of philosophical identity. And just another piece to fit into the jiggery-pokery that is this book.

“‘The only giants left to kill are ourselves.’ – Rachel Mildeyes.” (29 May 09)

'WEIRMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED HERE.

 

CONTINUED FROM HERE


Dognahnyi (1991)

This is scatology as an incantatory and deeply-textured language of religion OR a blueprint for one of humanity’s sewer systems to work via the innards of various giant birds...

Internals and externals in symbiosis.

A tripartite war between life and death and the insidious state that is not really either.

 

“...it had inserted its sting in his crookback, thus putting down roots towards what it considered to be its sexgoal; the throbbing mush of the host’s heart.” (24 May 09)

Effervescent (1995)

“It was as if the truest reality was within herself, which it was her duty to release, for the benefit of others. In return, they gave her the sweet distillations of themselves.”

That seems to bear out my first attempt at a leit-motif for the hindsight of this book so far.

This story, too, seems to be far better than I remember it to be. A commune with some participants lacking sense as well as senses. The Dinner Man... A police raid. There seem to be inner truths here galore. A story that needs to be worn ... and visualised, too, as if you were in the story yourself as a blind person.

“Raspberryade was a euphemism...”

“Twilight often summoned stragglers from their late-lyings, who subsisted simply because they’d forgotten to die.”

“The law didn’t like late-risers.”

“...her tongue was almost a second soul. She even could taste with the ends of her teeth.”  (24 May 09 - 2 hours later)

Egnis (1995)

Just for the record, this was the one story I wrote a number of years before I started seriously writing and submitting stories in 1986 in which year I had my first story published (‘Padgett Weggs’ – that also appears later in this ‘Weirdmonger’ book).

‘Egnis’ is a strange story, to say the least. About John Egnis staying with his two aunts by a lake resort, his family of wife and children elsewhere, some loose connections with Pepys’ diary, drug smugglers, and guilt – and some really passionate prose that I recall (self-intentionally!) was painfully carved out in the raw old days before I got into my writing rhythm. 

Re-reading it coldly today, I sense it is about the ‘internals’ and ‘externals’ of character within a Trojan Horse as part and parcel in a quest for a ‘literary’ meaning more meaningful than the reality it reflects.

“...in an unsubtle little girl way, as she tried to sleep, as she tried to recall the face of her father, as she finally succumbed to the same sleep her father slept, without dream or hope of waking.” (24 May 09 - another 2 hours later)





Encounters With Terror (1995)

A man’s rite of passage from childhood, denoting his various encounters with Terror, ever drawn back to a ‘present moment’ of being caught short in bed during the Nursery Night. Yearning for a Proustian mother’s kiss ...plus a crush on a servant girl. Paralleled by his toy clock-work train going in circles ... a tripartite war of life and death and something that is neither - as echoed beyond and within this book’s context. Many of these stories suffer from their shortness of the writer’s breath... A question of taste.

“The corpse of the soldier Francis had just killed groaned in death as if it were a fitful nightmare he sleeped. The belly gaped upon wriggling innards as if these were new sexual organs the corpse wanted to be fondled and loved.” (25 May 09)

 

Find Mine (1998)

A letter to ‘you’ disguised as a story so that when it’s published its intended yet unknown recipient can read it. The ‘synchronised shards of random truth and fiction’ certainly come into play here. And a tripartite war between love and hate and something that is a combination of both.

As an aside, did you know that when you wake up tired and drained even after an apparently good night’s sleep that’s when you’ve been visited by a vampire who’s just had a party in your soul...

SPOILER: “So as to avoid readers of this letter skipping to its end, before reading it as a whole, I’ve decided to conceal my epistle’s valedictory in this particular paragraph.”  (25 May 09 - 2 hours later)

 

 First Sight (1995)

A flash fiction of a wink. An eye-patch, when hanging up, looks like a spider with all its legs running into one. Eyelid wing. And someone subsumed by self-harming upon discovering the nature of one’s identity as narrator.

“He revolved like a clown’s head on a seaside pier with a two-way neck...” (25 May 09 - another hour later)

'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW IS CONTINUED HERE.

by the Clacton Writer's Group Yesterday

Of all possible futures, he chose the second tomorrow to die. It was a pity, because the first tomorrow held a much more interesting way to expire. On the third day, he was still alive and he was puzzled how he had survived both deaths on the previous two days. Shit, he said, waking up. I don’t want to live to die again. It’s only a dream perhaps. But no, it had to be faced, he had to die, there was no escaping. All that remained to do was to decide when, where and how. Perhaps another little sleep, he thought, snuggling back beneath the duvet.

 *

 Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, for all eternity, until the sun dies in the sky and the sea engulfs the land. Only then, and this is just a remote possibility, only then will MPs stop fiddling their expenses. Then you will find they will be fiddling with something else, equally annoying. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but who fiddled when the sun burned out and the earth turned to ice? “I will,” said the frozen earth. Perhaps Ray Mears will know what to do. I’m desperate for a cup of tea.

 *

 I cannot have scrambled eggs for breakfast three days in a row! That’ll stop the diarrhoea, It had better be All Bran then, with just a splash of milk and no sugar. Toast and tea would be a better idea. “A better idea still would be simply let the imagination take you on a rollercoaster – or perhaps a roller-toaster!” the kipper on the engine said.

 *

 “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” the radio announced, in the corner of the old pub. The news was often about ‘today’, so the regulars stared into their beer and wondered what disaster awaited the world after today. “Tomorrow – tomorrow – tomorrow – isn’t that next week?” the landlord asked. “Don’t worry – next week will soon be last week!” Everyone in the pub shrugged and turned their attention back to their beer. Now, that would be a sight for sore eyes, possibly even Olympic standard of synchronised shrugging.

 *

 Tomorrow, I determined that she will appreciate me more than she does already (which is not very much!) But then yesterday she didn’t know me; so that’s progress. Perhaps tomorrow I will not know her, with a bit of luck. No, I didn’t mean that – well, not much. I just want to be appreciated for what I do, who I am. There again, because I do know her, that helps me become what I am now and, without her, I would be someone else, possibly even someone that she would like. On the other hand, knowing her, she will not like me tomorrow, however determined I am determined to be that she will like me.

 *

 Once upon a time, the day changed once and then once again. The night was very confusing as well and didn’t get dark. Tomorrow will be better, he thought on the third day. I’ll wake up in my own bed and it will be the weekend. His end, as it turned out, was not weak at all but quite strong, in very rude health, as they say. The rude health, as it turned out, was his downfall. His end, as it further turned out, was even better than expected because he dreamt how Shakespeare would finish it with a “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow this too too solid flesh to be or not to be perchance to dream" before once upon a time started his life all over again.

 

 

 

 

(written today and first published here)

 

My shopping lists tend to be eclectic as well as quite lengthy. However,
the day I visited Colchester with my elderly Mother and her walking-stick,
my list was much shorter than normal, but equally eclectic.
 

But that trip must remain a private one – now completed, with the
peshwari naan bread consumed and the new carpet slippers fitting feet
and well worn about the house.
 

So, we’ll leave that shopping list of two items to become another fiction of
history, just a non-event eventually to become a false memory of
something real. This is as much of life (now, then or forever) that
one can manage.
 

Time itself, if not eclectic, is very lengthy. But one simply allows it to slip
by without the consciousness of recalled choice: too easily oiled by non-
stick serendipity or fast-fading existence.
 

Sadly, my story is therefore about a man whose need for naan bread and
slippers was as fictitious as the need to be himself. A nothing dreamed
by a nothingness.
 

His beloved mother became a dead silent ghost by his side, even if, at
best, her walking-stick could still be heard clicking along Colchester’s
pavements. The comforting familiarity of her shrill voice echoed from the
past ... or pre-echoed a time when she, as another ghost, shadowed an
earlier self that was even less real that she would become.


The man’s responses were slightly out of rhythm with the real man he
surely must once have been – out of rhythm but synchronised enough to
foster a feasible belief in himself. 


The slippers were too soft to make sound in the comfort zones of
Heaven. 
 

But I was now less than nothing – not even a fictitious ghost. Only
crumbs of communion bread and a tattered shopping-list in the otherwise
empty wind.


And Naan became a new mystical word for Nothingness.

 

 

 

 

My Readings aloud: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/df_lewis_reading_aloud.htm

 

 

My reviews: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/recent_reviews_of_books_by_dfl.htm

 

 

Cone Zero: http://weirdmonger.blog-city.com/cone_zero_under_way.htm

 

Entry Three HERE.
-----------------

ENTRY FOUR


“I ran a new dialogue programme yesterday.”

“It always seems to me that any dialogue that doesn’t actually take place in real life remains inevitably fabricated when, say, used for fiction or drama or even a philosophical Socratic-like dialogue...”

“Yes, you’re right but this programme is the best on the market and the resulting dialogue can be very realistic – so realistic indeed that the conversation that the dialogue represents virtually took place.”

“Virtually?”

“In some cases, not only virtually but actually.”

”A real conversation?

”Yes, like this one.”

“I see. Please give me the dialogue you said 'I ran yesterday.'”

“Here it is as a transcription. I’ll read one side of the conversation you the other. I did two copies for convenience.”

“OK.”

“I'll start.”

“Go ahead, then.”

“Are buildings ghosts in disguise?”

“Does Time to be Time need to have matter as well as mind in motion?”

“Are all statements questions in disguise?”

“Are all Presidents precedents or were they always part of destiny even before they were born?”

“Premises not conclusions?”

“Living in a huge imposing white building rather than in a tiny tradition of backward terraced tunnel-back?”

“Prime binaries?”

“Do negative thoughts always begin IR?”

“Irreligion, Irrelevance, Irate, Irony, maybe, but not Irreducible...”

“Stop, this doesn’t sound like a real conversation to me!”

“Hang on, are you the doubter or am I? I think we’ve got out of order.”

“The two towers reflect upon themselves in the Manhattan mirror of time – waiting to be rebuilt by tunnelling back...”

“Who said that?”

“Not me.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

”Life goes on, whoa.”

”La, la how their life goes on.”

”Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace.”

”Molly is the singer in a band.”

”Desmond says to Molly girl I like your face.”

”And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand.”

“Sounds like an old song.”

“I ran, I ran, I ran...”

“...a dialogue programme that never ended...”

“...as any real dialogue becomes just another knot...”

“...until the ligature so tightly tangles it strangles the words even before they’re actually used...”

“Oooggee...Oooggee...”

“Who said that?”

“Who said that?”

 

 -------------------
Entry Five HERE.

 .

A Multitude Of Sins

The brown dress was hanging on a white curtain. Diana  peered through her eyes, wondering if she could ever face wearing it again. Not that she often sported curtains - except, perhaps on ‘silly’ days, fanciful days, dressing -up days.

The last time a large expanse of white material - such as this curtain -  had been required was when Abel Martin had put in a special request for a bridal tableau for some artistic ‘happening’ in which he was then involved along with an actual famous artist called Calli - as opposed to Abel himself who was merely a would-be artist. For ‘artist’, please read ‘ponk’, thought Diana, as she transferred her attention to the mirror.

As she looked at and into her own eyes, she sniggered. For ‘happening’ please read ‘space mission to meet the Martians or any extraterrestrial life forms recognisable as Martians’. The white curtain had served as a very useful disguise for the silvery insides of machines that Abel and Calli had discovered in the most outlandish places around the city - making the whole contraption eventually resemble a robot about to get married. Or a Wellsian device that even playing fast and loose with Time would not have been able to concoct.

Diana now customarily hung her next-day’s dresses on this very white backdrop of a curtain as a makeshift hanger, following its return from a rather lukewarm reaction from the ‘artistic’ folk that Calli had dragged to view it. She turned away from the mirror’s gaze, which had caught her in a pose which made her think that the nightie she had worn all night was becoming rather threadbare and needy of replacement. The brown dress, too, had seen better days. The rather large similarly brown urn - squatting upon a similarly white table cloth that was draped over a small trestle-table close by the white curtain and brown dress - was something which, only the night before, she had planted with long dry grasses, sprayed out like water in a fountain. It was wonderful what one could do with very little money.

#

Abel Martin was naturally poverty-stricken, bearing in mind his quite all-consuming and impractical ideals vis-a-vis art and what he saw as the purpose of art, i.e. creative exploration of the paranormal and things Ufoesque. Diana (state benefits reliant) was equally broke, she knew, but she was far more clever. She would often find a charity shop newly stocked with cheap frocks. Or with ornaments that merely took a few pennies - like the brown urn in question, where she did, indeed, deposit her tiny five-pees: now, no doubt, piled at the foot of the grasses like sleeping silver mites.

Diana was quite a hefty girl, well past her mid twenties, and she often thought she would be left on the shelf, like objects that never escaped some of those less favourite charity shops she hardly now visited. She pitied the charities which these shops served. One in particular had a few scrawny books, smelly shoes, wickerwork contraptions which were made specially for the shop by the charity’s prospective beneficiaries and, worst of all, a shopkeeper who had a word or two to say when you proffered a big note which required lots and lots of clinking change. Diana’s friend Lucy had worked in there during one of her more altruistic periods of getting buzzes from helping people other than herself. Lucy bedsitted upstairs, in fact, but hadn’t been down to visit Diana for some time, as a result of a petty row with Abel (and, thus, with Diana) when Abel was, one day, ensconced on Diana’s bed, hatching ‘happenings’.

Lucy was younger and with more modern attractiveness than Diana. This morning, apparently, was an occasion of renewing friendships. Lucy, forgetting the curt exchanges on the stairs that had characterised the two girls’ relationship for the last few weeks, rapped on Diana’s door. The walls and floors in the block were so thin, she knew Diana was up and about, even though the latter’s activity had so far been dedicated merely to staring at herself in the mirror.

“Hello, I was not going to trouble you, Diana, but...”

Diana had opened the door to her, merely by reaching her toe out to push the wonky handle. She must get Abel to mend it or perhaps he knew a less ‘artistic’ man who would.

“Not seen you for ages,” interrupted Diana meaninglessly. Heard her, yes, but not seen her. When girls fell out, they customarily fell out either for a few minutes or merely forever. Here, they’d, strangely, fallen out for a few weeks. A sort of no man’s land of falling out.

“Well, yes, I know. Not seen Abel around for a bit.”

“He’s with Calli, somewhere abroad. A convention of happeneers, I believe.” Diana laughed at the turn of phrase which she herself had just invented. Lucy joined in rather desultorily before embarking upon an explanation for her visit from the outer reaches of upstairs: “My father’s coming for the weekend. He wants to stay, he says, and you know I have no room upstairs.”

Diana had a flat, Lucy a bedsit.

#

Calli was a frogmarch sort of bloke in a goatee who nobody could quite pin down. Abel was the opposite. So gullible, so see-through, but femininely attractive to both men and women, dependent on their ‘persuasion’. Diana was a big-busted woman for her age. She often had bees in her bonnet. Lucy was guileless - pretty with it, owning, as she did, a sensitive face (along with slim legs and pert breasts) - but her sensitivity did not extend to understanding other people’s feelings. Hence her forthright attempt at extracting a favour from Diana - with regard to her father’s impending visit - immediately following a weeks-old row which the two girls had not yet even made up. Lucy’s father had just split up with her step-mother, Lucy explained, as if straightforwardly understandable reasons for asking the favour exonerated her bad behaviour vis-a-vis same-sex peers such as Diana.

Dealing with men, for Lucy, was, of course, a different kettle of flirting.

“Abel’s flat is empty,” smartly put in Diana. “He and Calli will be away days and days. Something about a big push. So very very paranormal, it’ll hit even the nationals. Bigger than Roswell or a brand new Picasso nobody knew about...”

Lucy was used to Diana’s half-humourous, half-serious attempts to describe Abel’s activities - the most famous being when he and Calli (and someone called Arthur Clun) had travelled to the furthest star systems and back again. Pity they hadn’t brought back any evidence of their journey, though, as Lucy had said at the time. The story had died a death, like most stories, anyway. So, since having taken all such Abellian Calliana with a pinch of salt, Lucy proceeded with her own comparatively petty concerns:

“Abel’s flat is too far. Dad wants to be here in the centre, in case he gets a job here.”

Lucy was thick-skinned, ingenuous, tactless and so forth - but, despite this, she tended to get her way. Diana, in view of the heavy hint that Lucy’s father would be staying for more than just a brief weekend, scooted into the kitchen, saying: “I can’t have anybody long term.”

“He’ll go as soon as you want,” assured Lucy.

“God’s honest?”

“Yes.”

“OK, Lucy, as long as you underwrite that promise.” And Lucy zipped off to phone her Dad.

#

Diana was struggling into her brown dress, cursing the fresh ounce which seemed to have fastened itself like a slug of flesh to her frame overnight. But that was better, no doubt, than spreading itself uniformly across her already sizeable buttocks. In any event, an ounce was better than a pound. She already had a barely perceptible gold coin threaded under the skin of her left cheek to match the nose-ring and navel-ankh. The white curtain she kept drawn, as she could not bear daylight most of the day. Not that the weave was thick enough for her taste in darkness. White was better than some of the examples of even thinner black she had seen in other flats and bedsits scattered about the block. Lucy’s drapes were little better than nets. But Diana hadn’t been invited to Lucy’s little bedsit for meaningless ages. Anything might have been changed there since then, such as new pelmets.

#

The University Town in central Europe where Abel and Calli were attending a Convention of Theosophical Art was quite close to the Danube. Indeed, Calli - who was quite flush from having recently sold an illuminated script to a Hollywood Film Director who wanted to do a remake of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF A THIRD KIND (but this time with real aliens!) - spent several fortunes on cruises from Linz to Vienna and back again. This was quite useful, as he wanted to incorporate genuine classical music into his ‘happenings’. The local classical connections were manifold. Anton Bruckner, the great Austrian composer, had even played the organ once in Linz.

Archibald Terence Calli was a force to be reckoned with and his ‘artistic’ peers (many of whom were attending the convention) wondered why he suffered a hanger-on such as Abel Martin. A number suspected that Abel was Calli’s Tadzio. (Just as many failed to draw the connection, having not seen Death In Venice - not surprising when even Thomas Mann had not seen it.) But those who thus suspected shrugged their shoulders and wondered why they had bothered to succumb to a homophobic mindset which most enlightened people had eschewed.

Sexual innocence was a new fashion, the heady days of permissiveness and promiscuity having, by now, dwindled to a rather more passive, less energetic era of monolithism or, at most, casual couplings between various permutations of gender mix. Yet, none of this conflicted with the new-born innocence. Sex had ceased to be important and was in no way attached to human feelings of guilt. Thankfully, it had even ceased to be enjoyable.

#

Calli stalked around the campus, Abel in tow. He was in a temper. The coach which he had arranged to take them (and a select few of the other delegates) to Vienna for the day had not turned up - and it was beginning to rain. A phone call on CaIli’s mobile had informed them that it had broken down. A haphazard ‘happening’ which even Calli could not countenance. Perhaps if he prayed hard enough, a replacement would be quickly found. Prayer, after all, was the New Art - and this time round it did tend to work. He and Abel, joined by a few others who were not self-conscious enough to worry about how they looked, fell to their knees outside the University library and droned on one long monotonous note, whilst, allegedly, listening to Mozart’s Requiem on their headpieces.

But many stories were apocryphal. They were p art of the New Art: an attempt to summon real ghosts and monsters. Calli had even invented that new era of Sexual Innocence to match the fictional themes in his multi-cultural, multi-media, multi-discipline extravaganzas. The broken-down coach was, of course, spurious.

#

In London, folk were faced with the more common attitudes of greed, lust and death, attitudes that had prevailed since year dot. Lucy’s Dad had by now arrived and ensconced himself in Diana’s spare room. To say he was not an easy person was a bit of an exaggeration in understatement, but he was a relatively ordinary, even passingly handsome, bloke of indeterminate years (although he surely must have been significantly middle-aged to be Lucy’s Dad), looking quite as much as if a famous hearthrob Hollywood actor had been hired to play him, slightly uglified, dumbed down and aged up.

It wasn’t his appearance that perturbed Diana, but something else that seemed to happen when he was in the vicinity. Not exactly his overt behaviour (entailing though it did, coming in at all hours, making rude noises both voluntary and involuntary, monopolising the TV, making large eyes when Diana passed through the room in her absent-minded fashion of dressing-down &c.), but more the implications of insanity that underlaid his small talk. She could otherwise have lived with the chauvinism.

“I hope you don’t mind, Miss,” he said, “but at night I sometimes have particularly nasty dreams ... some of which come out in real life, if you see what I mean. Nothing to worry about. They soon pass and I hope they won’t wake you up.”

He looked quite serious, staring at Diana from the wash-basin (a strange installation in a living-room), his brows creased, eyes wrinkle-fanned in manly concern - but he was mindlessly kicking the skirting-board, she noticed.

“What do you mean, they come out in real life?” she asked, belatedly dreading it might be a faux pas thus to ask.

Realising his own respective faux pas, he quickly added:

“It’s only me shouting out in my sleep.” He laughed, at the back of his throat. “That’s how dreams make themselves known. People screaming in their sleep.”

Diana shrugged. He’ll be talking about somnambulism, next. Then, God knows what. Bad enough with Abel and his artsy-fartsy paranormal ‘happenings’. Now she’d been landed with Lucy’s damned father. And Lucy wasn’t even a proper friend. Humour him. Best idea (for now). And the silence was indeed screamingly funny.

#

The next incident that persuaded Diana that she had taken on more than she anticipated in offering her spare room to Lucy’s Dad (despite his informal injections of cash that were decidedly more than peanuts - thanks to Lucy’s influence) was when she inadvertently spotted him out and about in a suburb of the city she did not usually frequent. Why she was out in that neck of the woods was nobody’s business. Abel had phoned her from Vienna wanting her to go on an errand - and ley-lines, fruitful bisections of serendipity and geomantic forces having loosely been mentioned (by Calli, via Abel, to herself, none of which she really understood) did not prevent her, in her typical unquestioning Diana dogsbody fashion, from travelling right across the city to check out a carved spider’s web in the architectural intricacies of some ancient underground station’s exterior facade.

She was somewhat confounded when she spotted Lucy’s Dad holding forth - on the Opposite pavement from the station - to quite a crowd of passers-by (now become onlookers). The voice was so loud, he actually gave the impression of being a religious fanatic or, simply, a typical lunatic (released into the community’s care), one who couldn’t keep his gob shut, albeit quite articulately. She kept a low profile whilst she ear-wigged, remembering, as it happened, quite exactly what he said without the aid of her notebook (this being one of her natural skills).

She needed the notebook for diagrammatizing the mission on which she had been sent by Abel. But that could wait.

The speaker was not interrupted by his makeshift audience. Indeed, the man who Diana knew as Lucy’s Dad must have possessed a natural authority - stemming, no doubt, from his dubious good looks, nut-brown actorly voice and felicitous turn of phrase. His grey locks lent distinction, too. Lucy’s sexiness derived from him. That explained a lot, thought Diana, beginning to feel one of her more prurient moods, despite the quite unsalacious subject matter of the man’s diatribe.

Have you ever wondered, dear people? I have. I’ve wondered good and long. About why reality is so goddam ordinary. Existence, the comings and gongs of your day to day life, those petty concerns that not only shorten your taking up the valuable time in such a short short life but also shorten it with the grinding down upon you of the stress which such concerns create. A double shortening. You know something? Life is full of undercurrents that most people ignore - assuming they’re aware of them in the first place, which they’re probably not. Undercurrents which are only the very beginning, the initial tiniest clue to far bigger things, that grow bigger the further you delve. Things that are so huge, so utterly utterly huge, the human mind can only conceive of a microscopic part of it. But not only huge. Frightening, too. Gorged on terror. Bone-deep. Soul-deep. So deep, it’s beyond even where your worst fears can reach. Not even the inhabitants of your various incarnations, however evil, can possible reach the truth. The truth? That you’re living a lie. Always have been. Always will.

He continued for a while, as some onlookers dispersed, others, surprisingly, stayed, through, perhaps, some hypnotic quality in the voice or rugged attraction in the eyes. Diana decided that she was spying on something she was not intended to know about. It felt as if she were betraying Lucy. Despite, everything, she had a concealed softness for Lucy, ever since that night both had succumbed to events that both now wished to forget. That last argument - and consequent not-talking-to-each-other-for-weeks - had not really been centred upon Abel Martin. That indeed was a lie, some happening Diana now believed she had concocted, to absolve an undercurrent of guilt connected with pretty pretty Lucy. They say good looks run from Fathers to daughters, Mothers to Sons. Diana’s own big-boned Dad was dead. He’d made a handsome corpse, when laid out by the undertaker. Pity about the rest of him.

#

She returned to her flat - relieved at least, that Lucy’s Dad would not be there (for how could he be?): she had, indeed, hopped straight on a tube while he was still letting off about ‘artistic undercurrents’, which he went on to call them before the evening’s inevitably dwindling onlookers turned back to passers-by.

Diana was quite perturbed to find Lucy there. She knew she had given her a key, should there be any emergencies, but surely that did not give her the right to come in willy nilly and to try on her clothes. She had done it before. Diana remembered at least one squabble centred around such thoughtlessness. But was remembering the same as predicting? Diana shook her head, its long brown hair wild. Another day, another silly, fanciful, dressing-up day, it seemed:

“What you doing?”

“I’m sorry - it’s as if I had to.”

“Had to?”

Lucy stood, half-into the brown dress which she had removed from the white curtain, her face reddening as she tried to explain the inexplicable. If either girl could fathom the deja-vu elements present, it may have been easier for them to embark on actions without any element of guilt attaching. A crime once committed, if committed again in identical circumstances of time and place is somewhat exonerated, no?

Diana’s mind was racing, as she saw Lucy’s delicately lace-trimmed bra was so brief.

Speech, dear people, needs nothing but the words and nothing outside of what is actually said. The explanation of my theory, therefore, will, today, be uninterrupted by scene-setting or, even, questions. I shall simply launch into it, as I have already done with the words about speech above, and then launch out of it before you have the chance to know what has happened. Indeed, a being’s most significant sign of humanity is speech.  Once upon a time, speech developed s/owly but, at least, it did develop and, only in rare cases, did it remain in the realms of animal grunts. But, now, children are becoming less and less innocent with the onset of an increasingly modern civilisation. Their eyes become cowed with experience, as if they can foresee the sex in which they’ll be forced to partake, by gratuitous choice or by love or by lust or by rape or by a combination of any of these. Speech is part of this process, that and self-awareness, body-awareness, gender-awareness,  genital awarenesse - even before puberty. No wonder a sparkling infant soon becomes dowdy and bleary-eyed - with sorrow and sadness underlying the veneer of its happy-go-lucky speech. Another factor, too, is madness. You may feel the impossibility of self-madness. You may look at drunks or lunatics or any of the fringe people in the streetmouthing obscenities or simply shouting nonsensical noises or grunting like animals. Indeed, as a side issue, have you noticed how even ordinary, clean-living folk are now more prone to mouthingg uncouth words? Anyway, you may be confident in your own sanity but, then, completely unpremeditated you find yourself shouting out - angry, say, at how the waitress is late with your order or, simply, the stress of an increasingly modern world finally takes its toll with you - and that is merely the beginning of uncontrollable madness taking you over as the language of speech once slowly took you over when you were an infant...

#

Arthur Clun was among the delegates in the Middle European convention. Theosophical art was only one discipline covered (that and its concomitant areas of multi-religious prayer, exploitation of Dada, Jungian derivatives such as synchronicity &c. &c.) but Calli, with Abel still in tow, was keen on broadening its prospectus by hindsight. Deeply cerebral ‘happenings’ did not take place, as Calli would have wished. Even the well-advertised ‘hot’ air ballooning was cut short by untoward sagging of the mental heat. Arthur Clun, an entirely straight transvestite from somewhere on the London underground map (that was all he would allow people to know), was heavily into supernatural (as opposed to the more philosophically tenable ‘paranormal’) literature and things Gothic. He even went to the Benefits Agency to claim he’d lost his latest giro whilst dressed like a black-eyed punkess.

Horror stories, as Calli classed CIun’s interest in the macabre, did not seem to be appropriate (to Calli) in a movement about truths. Dracula, Frankenstein, Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood et al seemed to be a notch or two short of the intellectual mark, particularly in their own unashamed acceptance of being fictions. True, all ‘truths’ needed to have their own in-built ‘fictions’ to dilute them, set them off, give them a backdrop of surrealism and so forth in order that any resultant ‘happening’ would not be too rich in mind-blowing reality; yet, self-confessed fictions-for-fiction’s-sake were merely required by passive homebirds to eat up time with cheap thrills (as opposed to Clun’s even cheaper frills), instead of watching telly. To Calli, Vampires were only silly fancy-dress games with black cloaks and plastic fangs. And Arthur Clun was simply corrupting the ‘purity’ of the convention’s aims by lacing its frothy , heady cocktail with stage blood.

Clun was mooching round the campus, large illustrated Poe under his arm. He unashamedly accosted other delegates with talk of ghosts and zombies, i.e. the latter’s quest for the former, or vice versa, as result of (to Clun) obvious reasons. Calli and Abel squatted on the wide Battleship Ptomekin steps of the campus quadrangle. The former was, of course, indulging in further arrangements via his over-used mobile. Something about ordering more balloon skins. Abel twiddled with tweezers, regarding a pretty elusive splinter. Clun (who had met the pair before in various conventions and probably knew them more than his tentative hovering had portended) finally made his approach and squatted himself beside Calli and Abel.

“How you lot?” he asked.

Calli scowled from behind his mobile. Abel merely adjusted his pose so that his trousers were not quite so tight as he spread-eagled further down the steps. Clun was not currently in regalia and, in fact, presented quite a reasonable masculine archetype, though there was a token hair-ribbon in his ponytail. His skin, where visible, was patently shorn of any natural hairy rind.

“Anyway,” he continued more shrill-ly, “I believe my bedroom here’s got a ghost of some kind. I woke about Midnight by more than just silence. It was so very very silent, I nearly screamed out loud. Yet, I did see something, Calli. I did. I did. I saw a background, wide and white, with a brown figure upon it. Other way about, white on brown, I could have believed more easily as a real ghost of tradition. Yellow wall-paper, maybe. But white? You see, brown shape with white backdrop is quite a novelty in the annals of uncanniness. Do you want me to input all this what I saw into your next formal happenstance, dear Calli? I’ve got the details.”

Clun pointedly ignored that Calli was pointedly ignoring him. Nevertheless, he tugged a notebook from the back-pocket of his slacks.

#

As Abel’s absence abroad extended beyond its expected extent, Diana felt more and more mentally lethargic. Disturbed. Drained. She felt too ill to leave the flat. Lucy’s Dad did help with the shopping, acting also as a go-between regarding Lucy’s renewed frostiness towards Diana (and vice versa). Nevertheless, typical women’s ailments seemed to hit Diana harder than most. She felt as if she were sleeping in a bed of slime, half-dream, half-waking, half the time. The only times she went out was to deal with any business related to her State benefit. There was a kindly looking gentleman behind the toughened screen, one with round face and grey beard and pensive glasses. He must have seen how drained and pointed she was becoming, transfiguring, almost supernaturally, as she fast diminished in both soul and body, becoming the typical pasty-faced dependant. Surely he must have realised she was lying when, time after time, she maintained she’d lost her giro or not received it, a ploy she used so that she could eventually cash both original and replacement. Didn’t seem like stealing, in the odd reality she inhabited.

It must be awful for that gentleman to deal with people like her.

Yet, to him, she was not typical at all. Most others insulted him in the foulest terms, one or two even becoming violent towards the screen, if not him. One day, he saw Diana in real life, i.e. without the screen between, amid the natural setting of a supermarket. She made signs of ignoring him, but he found himself, against his better judgement, nodding, even smiling. She was with a man looking old enough to be her father. But she claimed benefit as a single person. Was this person she accompanied what the jargon called a ‘partner’? A ‘partner’ with an income? Somehow most words were fast becoming indefinable, like his own life. In any event, he tried to turn a blind eye to the possible contravention of the benefits system as represented by this possible ‘partner’ with whom he’d haphazardly seen her.

Diana didn’t even know the kind gentleman’s name. He never wore a name-badge in his booth at the Benefits Agency. He ambled off with his trolley, determined to forget the whole incident. After all, he would not be allowed to smile next time she appeared behind his screen. As well as the inevitable latest in a series of giro losses, duty would make him check whether she was actually ‘living-together-as-husband-and-wife’, a technical term covering a multitude of sins. Then, dependent on her answer, official surveillance would begin to happen.

#

I find the River behind the tall residential towers. Happens to be a surprise as I walk upon the zigzag tiles of Deptford Wharf. I see the pyramid -topped tower, brown against white sky, across the water, with flashing light warning off stray aeroplanes from its outlandish height. I also see a swelling dome as well as the ghost of some bulb-topped spire freshly transported here from the willowy banks of a sibling MittelEuropean river. I topple upon a bench of neatly gashed black iron, from where such ingredients of the Docklands complex opposite are not exactly eyesores. More like heartaches. Why? That’s the teaser. Having had a bitter row with my daughter yesterday evening, dear people, about her partner (one who, j’accuse, tends to depend on things happening rather than artfully making them happen) and having said a lot of cruel words I didn’t mean (because I do love her), I forgive those responsible for the eye-line upon the opposite bank. They probably didn’t mean it, either. And that’s that, I suppose.

#

As she watched, she felt watched herself. Tears webbed around the site of her eyes. The man who could easily have been her own Dad didn’t seem to know how physical passions could be creatively channelled these days. Walking away did not allow her to ignore the empty crowd. Even architecture failed to stay aloof.

(Published ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ 1998)

ABIDE WITH ME (three stories)
(1)

The words did not remind me of a funeral, funnily enough – they reminded me more of a wedding. I suppose the resonance of ‘bide’ with ‘bride’ helped.

A bride with me. A long-lasting commitment between two people to each other in the sight of God: intrinsic with ‘abide’: the real word that the famous hymn used. A hymn commonly sung at the F.A. Cup Final in an ancient Wembley, its towers symbolising patriotism as well as nostalgia.

But at a funeral there was only one commitment in the face of God. A commitment by the body in the coffin, its bones broken to fit. But that person, as symbolised by that body in the coffin, was already gone, its life spent, its commitment perhaps already made at the point of earlier death. These are thoughts about him that went through my mind when I re-heard the hymn. Thoughts about him when I only thought about the hymn to write this.

Long before that there had been stories concocted between me and him: a book of stories entitled ‘Only Connect’, a collection of dissimilar plots and words and styles and attitudes and other indefinable qualities between two dissimilar people, radically dissimilar people despite being father and son, yet connected by fictions that they had written and blended together when both had been alive, and not just one of them alive.

Yet if this were a ghost story, a fiction in itself, then maybe, just maybe, a collaboration would still be possible, a true resonant ‘connect’ via the original ‘Only Connect’: via the veil: a blurred area overlapping life with death. But fiction is fiction, it can never be real, however based upon reality it seems to be.

Mum and Dad. Bride and Bridegroom on that day in 1945, now divorced by death. Then in a 1970, a new Bride and Bridegroom, thee and me, as yet undivided by time’s slicing blow. Yet we are all groomed for death. A death that we all pray is yet another fiction. A disconnect between truth and plot.

I heard the distant cheering before the throng fell eventually silent for a full-throated hymn to sound out across the rooftops and then into our own distant room via the wire sculpture on the chimney. Then silence as yet another fiction fell into place with its inevitable ending.

(2)

The blob expanded as my throat grew less constricted. And the blob, by expanding, became less dangerous, less horrific. Its initial appearance had indeed been a startling sight – a tiny slick expression of slime balanced perfectly like a jewel at the end of Adam’s nose. I had been rather disgusted by the way Adam ignored it as, I knew, all the time, he was fully aware of it. My throat had originally tightened through terror.

Disgust turned to this eventual terror as a result of an abrupt turn of his head during a moment of silent conversation as we listened to someone entering the front door downstairs. The wobbly bead of green substance fell upon his bristly chin whereupon it began visibly to bubble within itself as if fired by a self-perpetuating force of thought. Only tiny internal bubbles, as it was merely a comparatively tiny bubble itself containing them.

“Who’s that coming?” he asked.

I assumed it was my wife Evelyn who had let herself in, despite my having changed the locks earlier in the day. She could climb any tree, as they say. “By the way, you have something on your chin,” I said.

I was gob-smacked. I couldn’t believe I was so frightened by the sight of an ordinary snotty dewdrop upon such an ordinary face. Adam was a friend of mine because he was so ordinary. Not scared to snort or fart, burp or stomach-bubble in anybody’s presence. My life was full of extraordinary people (like my wife), so to be with Adam was a breath of fresh air. It truly was.

Adam had been telling me about ordinary matters all morning, to take my mind off my own marital mishaps. He told me of the football match. The TV programme that he and many others no doubt had watched in common last night. The prospect of going round the pub together. Good solid blokey things. Nothing strange, nothing untoward, nothing deep, nothing, indeed, crustaceous or blobby.

I sat staring in disbelief as the green polyp settled into the grain of his chin, as the footsteps, slowly, wound their way up the tenement block’s stairway from the front door which had sounded nearer than it actually was when it had been slammed by the person rising towards us by a piecemeal legwork of no particular recognisable rhythm.

It was with some relief, as I have already indicated, that I saw the blob was swelling, growing bigger, only to fall in dangling daredevilry like a string of identical blobs from the chin towards Adam’s lap. Only to regroup as a single discrete blob. It was as if increasing size was a diminishing force. As if it would soon burst and disappear as a spray of misfired infections. It was now not horrific at all. I grew less and less frightened.

The thing just squatted there upon his trousers and exercised itself without now even appearing to be on the brink of self-destruction. I sighed with relief, for my own throat had relaxed and was able to breathe more easily. Indeed, I amply felt I was all throat.

I could handle size. I could handle anything big but I couldn’t handle tiny beads of sweat or gobbets of stale marrowbone jelly or finger-pinched coughed-up pellets of pus.

Adam smiled, knowing that I was more relaxed, despite the heightening footsteps outside. He patted the thing as if it were a pet. He had by now placed it on the floor. He offered me to stroke it. He wiped his hands down his trousers as if to remove a slick residue.

“Off to the pub then?” He smiled.

I could depend on Adam to bring things back to the run-of-the-mill, the bread-and-butter of life, making me feel better, and thus able to block off the shuffling and shambling directly outside my flat door. It couldn’t be Evelyn. She’d’ve walked straight in. Like Adam, she did not stand on graces.

Perhaps Adam had already ordered the curry, which usually followed our visits to the pub, rather than preceding them. And then we usually ate out rather than have a delivery at home. Vindaloo before drinking was almost sacrilegious. Like singing ‘Abide With Me’ to rude words at the FA Cup Final.

Adam laughed. He squatted on the floor alongside the ‘thing’ that by now had grown as large as him. Like a real Granny Smith, huge and overripe, having outgrown her usefulness as an apple.

If that person shambling outside my flat door was either who or not who I thought it was, who was I?

I was not frightened at all because it was me that was frightening. Or perhaps extraordinarily frightened, without knowing I was.

(3)

Once upon the train from Nottingham to St Pancras, I often glimpsed up from a book called 'Travels in the Scriptorium' to read the passing landscapes. I took for granted that the sunlit fields and lakes between the gaps of losing concentration from the book were typical of the East Midlands area; indeed not only did I feel it was typical but also was that very part of England. Well, naturally, what other feeling could an instinctive traveller like me have? I did not question it. Only hindsight has since given me cause to question it: gradual hindsight, a slow dawning upon me that the landscapes I glimpsed so casually during glances from my book were odder than Britain could ever be: glimpses of foreign lands: an unexpected, unwanted holiday abroad - but an unwanted holiday is hardly a holiday at all.

How I later knew such glimpses were a Fantasy of Britain, I still wonder. But this was the East Midlands proper and I was simply imagining that the views from the train window were foreign ones, lit by a sunshine that today freakishly brought out the natural colours as if they were painted by an artist. This caused me to gain momentum in losing concentration from the book 'Scriptorium', one of those typical fiction works I customarily enjoyed: enjoyed in a serious way since, one day, I wanted to be a writer of fiction myself.

*

I seemed to have always imagined myself to be a character in my own body, but following the experience just recounted of today's train journey, I decided I was wrong. The body was something one could not control; it was something that imposed thoughts and wants quite divorced from the mind within it and, thus, affecting that same mind in an unruly fashion, indeed making that mind into quite a new character divorced from one's own naturally wanted character - and this had likely been happening all my life: a permanently unwanted holiday from the landscape of me.

(unpublished)

Published 'Writer's Block Magazine' 1997

Donald used to enjoy Patience. Especially the clock version, where he dealt out the playing cards in a circle of twelve piles, with four in the middle. Since Mother “went away”, it seemed even more important to “get it out”, play the game to the ultimate turn of the card. Of course, it was a pity he would not be able to run to her in the bedroom to brag of his success, when success eventually came. A pity beyond tears.

Mother used to sit up in a bed whose round wooden knobs at the four corners gradually, over the years, grew bigger than her head. The bolster pillow was double-ramped behind her so that she could eat properly, a thickly knitted bed-jacket slung around the scrawny shoulders and tied with a precarious ribbon at the hollow of her neck. There was a tray which Donald had painstakingly made from a chest-drawer, fret-sawing the wooden sides into curves to fit over the shape of her legs. She often left a gutted egg-shell in a bone china egg-cup together with a few toasted “soldiers” which she had not dipped into the yolk.

“I very nearly got it out, this morning, Mother. The last King was three cards from the end!” Donald often used to say.

“Oh, I’m pleased, Donald. Perhaps next time you’ll be able to go all the way.”

“I certainly hope so, Mother. I’ve never done it so far. Do you want me to take the tray away now?”

The conversation was not exactly the same each day, not word perfect. Reality slipped a notch at each turn of time’s corkscrew. Yet, Donald had not succeeded in this game of Patience during his Mothers lifetime.

Today was a different story. He could not credit the ease with which the cards were slipping away from the clockface. No Kings so far and he was at least as much as halfway through. The cabinet clock in the corner of the parlour slowly struck nine.

He cursed. The next card was a King. Of Diamonds.

Donald placed this King with its back to the meticulously tatted tablecloth, staring up at the blistered ceiling. The object of the game was to go to each number of the “clock”, guided by the numbers on the faces of the cards turned up, Jacks being eleven, and Queens twelve. Every time a King was re¬vealed, Donald had to resort to the middle pile for the next card – so when all four Kings had turned up like bad pennies, Donald’s game was lost. Why he needed to summarise the rules in his mind was not so much because he had forgotten them, but more a ritualised enactment, a cipher, a mantra, a mandala, a fortune wheel...

“Well, how are you today, Donald?’

In Donald’s ears, the King of Diamond’s voice sounded bright, if ingratiating, scintillating like a cut-glass crystal vase.

“Not so bad,” Donald answered, under his breath.

“Have you found the Queen of Diamonds yet?’

“Yes, she sends her undying love, but you can’t see her at the moment, seeing she is face up under old Jack Spade.”

Such conversations constituted the ritual of innuendo. Donald was always a bit odd, his Mother had often thought, with a sigh of world weariness, as she listened to him talking downstairs on his own. Or, at least, that was what Donald thought she must have thought. She used to play cards too, nip and tuck with a patient death.

The parlour was deep from ceiling to floor, and Donald sat upon each chair in turn, as if to enhance the party atmosphere. His bones cracked as he lifted his heavy body from seat to seat.

Mother had frequently told him that he was putting on too much weight in the wrong places. She had taken out his trousers, her needle flashing in the window-light. This activity reminded her of the days when she was a tailoress, with clients who were gentlemen of good breeding, whose trousers needed special care and attention. They wrote down their measurements for her on pieces of paper, rather than have to say them out loud and, later, she smiled whilst sewing in the bespoke crutch-panels. Some even allowed her to be directly involved in the measurements.

“I wondered when you’d reach me,” roared the rubicund King of Hearts.

“You always turn up like a drunken priest for last rites,” said Donald, as he placed this King upon the King of Diamonds. Two to go, and he was about three-quarters through the “clock”. Would this be the day of getting out?

Donald was never to hear the cabinet clock strike again. “What’s a fellow to do if he’s no longer wound up?” the clock complained, wondering if it would ever swing the pendu¬lum as high as this again. The whole house had gone to seed ever since Donald’s Mother had “gone away”.

As Donald flipped over the bottom card at the three o’clock position, he found it was the King of Clubs.

“Hiya, Duckie, want to scratch my black cherries?”

The lack of subtlety shocked Donald, cringing in case Mother heard it from upstairs. But, no worries, Mother was never to hear any¬thing again, ever since the kind men helped her “go away’. Forcing too many yolk-soaked bread-soldiers down her throat, Donald must have known, would bloat her heart. But he did have more time for himself now.

He placed the third exposed King upon the other two. Suspense killed. Excitement was time all screwed up. There seemed to be only five cards left scattered randomly around the clockface. He may “come out’ at last. If only the final card in the middle was the King of Spades. He was tempted to turn up its cor¬ner for a sneak preview. But, no, he must play the game, without cheating to the bitter end.

Mother had made pairs of trousers for the Kings, too. The one for the King of Clubs was the most challenging. She did not know whether he “dressed to the right or left” – but nobody understood bespoke tailoring terms like that any more. Mother was indeed the last real made-to-measure cutter in the world. He cringed at the snicker-snacker of her blades.

After the crashing and whirring of gears, the cabinet clock miscounted the hour by give or take one strike. Spent springs and a yellow pus-like oil spread across the car¬pet, as if a cyborg berserker had been sick. The penultimate card was...

The King of Spades sprung up, its black shovel-blade ripe to slice. It topped the egghead with a splintering crunch – but only gradually did the brain slither out – painstakingly – leaving Donald’s extremities with a tortured conscious¬ness long after the moment of death itself. And the corpse’s curious fingers mechanically turned what would have been the very last card ... only to discover the scissor-tongued joker who should have taken out of the pack before the game started.

.

Chapter 50 – Beginning

 

The end of the novel (bar the Epilogue) and the beginning of a new life. As near perfect as perfect can be inasmuch as revenge is spurned and repentance embraced, in more than one context...and in this world of ‘Odalisque’ where Surrenity seems the more natural love, a life born from two women, born via pain and happiness, is the perfect ending. An unconditional (un-footnoted) catharsis.

 

Again quotable quotes teem so I need to restrict them:

 

No revenge, in all my life, had left me happy for more than a brief period. 

 

“Mistress, you honour me as no slave was ever honoured before. Nothing would give me greater joy than to carry your child. If I may be allowed the surgery, I’ll take the chances gladly.”

 

“My only worry is how Tuerquelle would feel about having a person as a half sister.”

 

This book’s ground-breaking concepts also teem and insulate us against easy condemnation of things we think we don’t understand but this book often makes us understand:

 

When night came, aware that this was likely to be my last time for several weeks, Passibelle, Honeyminge, Gusibelle and I all shared Lady Isobel’s bed. Group sex involving a person and four slaves requires a great deal of care, if no one is to feel neglected – to be candid, it usually seems more trouble than it’s worth. On this occasion, I was glad to have the complexities of four other people’s feelings with which to contend, as a way of taking my mind from the forthcoming operation.

 

Much gynaecological sense of suspense and risk in this chapter, and impending destiny:

 

Smiling over my shoulder at my friend and my bond locker, I passed through the front door, and down the steps. Thence my way took me through gardens in full flower, and past Fiona who, as always, sang wordlessly to the plants. A green painted door in a red brick wall, on which clematis ran riot, took me into the quiet of the vet’s compound. Elisa Downtree sat on the step of the whitewashed surgery – the venue for my more intrusive gynaecological examinations.

 

This passage below is very wincingly empathic. A definite highlight of prose.

 

Awakening to bright morning sunlight, Giggli was handing me the medicine glass again – this time, it tasted bitter. Fully immersed in dream, now, nothing around me had the air of reality. When the next dose of cordial arrived – it could have been seconds or weeks later – my mouth seemed too swollen to receive it. Making a supreme effort, I gulped the liquid down – after that, oblivion took me.
Then I awoke, seemingly seconds later, without any definite sensations. My first thought was that Eliza Downtree had changed her mind, and not performed the operation. Lying on my back, I wondered what was happening until, levering myself up, my belly came into view. A large piece of blood-soaked gauze, taped into position, revealed that the vet had cut me open.
Not long afterwards, the pain began – as though someone had danced upon my stomach, whilst my arms were ripped from my shoulders and inexpertly replaced. 

 

Some of our favourite characters rally round with reminders that this is an alternate world (but one that often seems realler than our own):

 

Lisa-Louise, Jane, Diqui and Barguin all appeared at my bedside – and even Tipsi came, taking a break from her duties at the Imperial Spa. Jane, who was working on gynozoa science, told me a great deal of how I could carry Lady Isobel’s baby, but unfortunately most of it was beyond my comprehension. Lisa-Louise’s studies were taking her into an entirely different field – to do with the properties of light and chemicals, and how they could be combined to make images in an art, lost since the Old Time, called photography. While grateful to be told about such things, I wasn’t sorry that my other visitors restricted themselves to topics that were easy to understand.

 

And this wonderful sentiment in the context of the novel:

 

No symptom could dent my delight – carrying my mistress’ daughter is the most wonderful thing in the world.

 

The last paragraph is perfect, of course, but I was about to identify a possible typo (‘harmonise’ to ‘harmonised’) until I realised that the present tense subsumes the past tense at this point. A master-stroke. Or should I say a mistress-stroke?

 

A moment ago, sitting at this desk, pen upon the paper, I felt my new daughter stir inside me. On the other side of the room, Tuerquelle, Passibelle and Hartlisse, flicking feather dusters at picture frames and ornaments, harmonise with a wordless melody.  Beyond the half open window, rain has left glistening droplets on nasturtium leaves, now sunshine breaks through the clouds. Perched on a fork handle, a cock blackbird calls – four high pitched squeaks, before a burst of glorious song.

 

 

Insertion of ‘to’:

“Another was a licence have gynozoa produced

 

Didn’t understand this;

The University is where they’ve done to the gynozoa research, mistress. 

 

I don’t think there is anything wrong with this split infinitive but I thought you should be made aware of it:

something it seemed better to neither confirm nor deny.

 
===============================

 

Word docs of the actual chapters are freely available to readers of this blog.

The links to all Chapter comments by me are here: http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2008/06/odalisque.html

Chapter 49 – Coronation

 

This chapter is full of quotable quotes. I’m tempted to quote the whole chapter! It’s beautifully written (as ever) – but at an overdrive of style that combines simplicity and complexity, fitting for readers seeking cloying texture or for readers seeking sparkling limpidity or a reader (such as me) seeking both. No mean feat.

It represents, I’m sure, the first half of Tuerqui’s own epilogue, explaining to whom the book is aimed as primary reader (i.e. to one of its own characters as this reader!) and this in turn explains some of the style, content, omissions (self-censoring?), possible inconsistencies etc and the ‘subtle punishment’ that inexplicably codifies earlier reprehensibilities of taste etc

It tells of many things, a coronation and of tying up gradually loose ends and loose emotions. And more than I can put into words!

 I can do little better than give a sample of passages below (and look forward to Chapter 50 and the Epilogue proper – that the author has already led me to believe are now in waiting to be commented upon and apocryphised into these loose footnotes of footnotes that I call comments).

 

 

“I’m sure we’ll meet again,” said Lisa-Louise. “Follow your star, sister. It was a pleasure to ride and fight with you.”

 

“There are words, Tuerqui, but they’re not enough.”

 

Jane had been persuaded to join Lisa-Louise in taking up one of the newly-founded Empress Berenice Scholarships[1]  to study sciences at the University.
[1] The Empress Berenice Scholarships, designed to promote the empire as a centre of learning, were set up within days of Nadine’s defeat. Those awarded to Lisa-Louise and Jane were probably the very first of them. Endowments in the will of Berenice I ensured that the scholarships have continued until the present day. The annotator, in her early days, was a beneficiary of this excellent scheme.

 

 

The institution of protective slavery had been codified under the Statute of Slavery Protection. Under its provisions, persons under protective slavery orders could not be branded, although they were usually tattooed. They were immune from slaughter as blesh, and could be assigned only to a limited number of types of work – specifically excluding any sexual use. Gardening or horticulture were the usual occupations of those enslaved under these provisions. Less often they were assigned light industrial work.

 

With sudden realisation, and sick panic, I recognised the newcomer as my poor murdered mother. Struggling towards waking, I all but emerged from the world of dream. Then, soothed by the gentle touch of the goddess and my daughter, I allowed them to turn me so that I could look upon my mother’s face. She was transfigured with astonishing beauty – even her slave harness gleamed as though formed of precious stones.

 

The following day, pleased to be assigned to some hard work, I was donkey stoning the front steps, whilst Tuerquelle followed with a bunny cloth. 

 

Considering my mother, happily harnessed in the World to Come, perhaps she was a victim of fairy mischief, rather than me.

 

My mistress, who has kept her promise to correct my errors, deserves what praise there may be for this book. Were it permissible to think such a thing, I might sometimes have considered that she whipped me less than my prose deserved. My half-formed thought, here, is clearly wrong – as it would be a great wickedness for a slave to disagree with her mistress, and I hope that I’m never guilty of such a thing. Clearly, if I ever doubt her judgment, it’s because I’m an ignorant bondling who knows no better.
     Deeply fulfilling as my life at the University of Pain is, most of it would make a wearisome narration. It would be vain to attempt the history of every time I’ve donkey stoned the step.  More interesting, perhaps, are the many times I’ve taken a tumble in my mistress’ bed. These are set out in sufficient detail in my pillow book, and do not belong in this place.

 

Lady Isobel, Tuerquelle and I travelled to the coronation field in the beautiful carriage drawn by high stepping platinum blondes. 

 

We arrived in the late afternoon, as the sun’s rays caught the splendid scene almost horizontally. There were hundreds of tents, all but the largest of them brightly coloured – no two alike. Over each floated a banner picked out with metallic threads, gleaming like sunbeams upon ruffled water. Dwarfing all others was Berenice’s great black tent, but even that shone as the light caught its satin panels and sombre embroideries.
         On a flattened hilltop stood a curious structure, the function of which I couldn’t yet imagine. It was a huge framework without canvas or silken covering, an enormous horizontal hoop supported upon a dozen or more lofty pillars. The construction seemed to be filled with a spider’s web. Subsequently, I discovered that this was formed of stout cords, although – from a distance – they seemed gossamer threads.

 

“An oz-dredge, mistress?” Tuerquelle asked, her eyes already grown round with wonder.
“Yes – an oz-dredge, sweetheart. It lives beyond the edge of the world, nests in the golden fruit trees of the sun, and will eat only sapphires.”

 

To my surprise, I found that my gaze could meet Berenice’s, so assured was I in my slavery. 

 

Turning from the throne, I found myself simultaneously frightened by Berenice, and liking her. 

 

 

I think the author agreed earlier that ‘discernible’ is preferable to ‘discernable’ that appears in this chapter.


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

 

Chapter 48 – Ending

 

It says ‘Ending’ and in many ways it feels like an ending with both climax and artful anti-climax. Yet, the thickness of the book still remaining after this chapter seems to belie this being an ending proper.

 

Tuerqui in climactic reunion with those she has sought is underplayed but satisfying – perhaps in tune with something said elsewhere in this chapter:

 

The things that needed to be expressed most urgently didn’t require words. 

 

and this telling item of dialogue:

 

“We are not tub-luggers!” Lisa-Louise protested. “What we are is a bit complicated, but we’ve come here to warn you.”

 

and

 

“You know about Tuerqui?” Lisa-Louise asked, clearly puzzled.
“Everyone knows about Tuerqui, ma’am,” the lieutenant replied – now according Lisa-Louise the respect due to a superior. “Isobel Ironhand’s lost love, snatched away by pollygoggers. Why, there’s even a song about her.”
Private West began –
The Ironhand lady weeps tonight
Fair Tuerqui is out of sight…[1]
[1] This song was a lilting ballad, very popular and widely sung during the civil war.

 

 

Reunions may have been underplayed but the chapter’s subsequent ceremony isn’t underplayed at all, as prefigured here: 

 

“No, I’m too excited, and she looks too tired, to do that today. In any case, her re-harnessing must be an occasion. Let her remain in personage for tonight, and tomorrow we’ll have her formal investiture into slavery.”

 

Footnote below reminds me of the bath device  in ‘Big Brother’ TV reality:

 

[1] During the final years of the Surrey democracy, communal bathing became increasingly popular. Large baths were widely used for political, military or professional conferences – as well as for sexual activity. The great bath in University House was designed to accommodate a dozen people.

 

Colours and a stone (reprise of the earlier ‘knowing’ stone?) in two separate passages:

 

Seemingly without thought, we seated ourselves in rainbow sequence with Lady Isobel at one end of the table, Lisa-Louise to her right, Modesty to her left – Tipsi occupying the far end with Jane on her left and me on her right.

 

“The stone,” Fiona replied, “when you hold it up to the light you get dappled purple on the white sheet… where you turn it over… But the clear one is best… It doesn’t look much, but it makes rainbows, all over everywhere…”

 

A potential claim for the whole novel in its effect upon its reader is expressed by Tuerqui in another context:

 

Never before had I felt myself so utterly possessed.

 

And in a coda to this ‘ending’ chapter, there is a Shakespearean-like ‘climax’ of goriness and catharsis with bodies left lying about, where Tuerqui’s weapon training is exploited in action.

 

The first sentence in this chapter brought me up short by ‘blood stained’ – so I think below should be “...splashes - that were probably blood - stained the...”:

At our feet, dark splashes that were probably blood stained the once polished, rough and splintered, floor. 

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