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Presumptive Spirits
PRESUMPTIVE SPIRITS
collaboration with Tim Lebbon
WRITTEN IN MID-NINETIES
His speech tended to tail off into a melted mutter, a streamlined stutter - yet almost preferable to the banter with which he'd earlier treated Maude Millet when each word was a splatter-bullet or a hop-skip-and-jump up the bridge of her nose in mistaken identity of eyes for ears. His name was Dukas - not the famous Dukas, but someone else who was not so well known.
His very personality was a series of ricochets off other people. In truth, Maude Millet believed Dukas might not have existed at all without the opportunity of employing her as a sounding-board, echo-chamber or vocal trampoline. His soul yearned for bounce-back, his eyes other eyes into which to sink, his ears to hear other ears listening.
Although he was not only someone else, i.e. someone who was not so famous as the famous Dukas, he was also someone else full stop, someone whom she actually called an Else: someone, she thought, to be tooled up into becoming an Else to each and every self, thus to bend more space into reality. And Dukas, she felt, was a typical Else: the slippery thin lips; the dreamy eyes so drooping with the need to sleep they looked like breasts sagging out; the lack of any real ear-width; the pin-prick nostrils each with one coily black hair on show; the yellow fingers; the even yellower teeth that glinted more than a film star's pearly white ones; the slouching slant of his gait; the plopping paces even on dry days; the eyebrows that met beyond the hairline ... yes, what else but an Else?
When Dukas first discovered a book by an author with his own name, he established that it was essentially a work of fiction, with elements of historical fact thrown in for good measure: but it was done in quite a revolutionary manner: a series of randomly snatched sentences: the whole coming together like a slowly evolving jigsaw puzzle, the middle outwards. To Dukas, the book was oblique and awkwardly cobbled together: but he was convinced that a second reading might have clarified the plot...
But he could not really be bothered.
Dukas was not a seasoned reader, in any event: he had only picked up the book during an uncustomary foray into WH Smiths bookshop for a map of Brittany, since he had decided to escape a rut and take a holiday abroad. The author's name seemed to stand out from the stacks of remainders near the front entrance of the store: Dukas was surely not a common name. The purchase had therefore become as inevitable as an Antipodes for the sun to go to at night.
Reading it for the first time, Dukas had experienced the closest he had ever come to a supernatural experience. Every page he read seemed to have been read by him before, the words leaving dried paper trails on the back of his eyeballs, so that he always knew what was coming and which was the way back. Cliffhangers hung redundant and red herrings paled into insignificance under the scrutiny of Dukas's future memory. The story may have fitted like an inside out jigsaw, but Dukas had the corners and edges slotted together even before he opened the book. For all this, understanding never really came. He read the words, and he knew what was coming next, but as a whole the story was as clouded as his own peculiar judgement. A truth hidden in fog, without direction, lacking even the means to call out for help. Dukas pretended not to mind. With Brittany on his mind, loose ends whipped around in his brain like questing snakes.
"More to life than tales of woe," he told himself. He always spoke out loud when he wanted to get a point across from mouth to mind. In truth, he could not really discern whether the woe was inherent in the staggered words, or if he had read it in. Either way, he felt the book should remain closed until after his holiday.
***
Maude Millet was an obsessive when it came to leisure time; her home was a shrine to entertainment, at which she prayed and worshipped at every snatched opportunity. Books lined the walls like the thickest, most colourful wallpaper there ever was; vinyl warped in cupboards while Maude listened to the wonders of cd music; video tapes became lost among themselves when she failed to upkeep their many-times-scribbled-over covers. In bathroom cupboards, unread tomes mouldered into obscurity, like their long dead authors (for Maude's preference was for antiquated fiction), and on shelves in her spare room, magazines slumped their shoulders at the bowing floor.
All through the house, books and videos and records and cds were piled into mountains of creation. Sometimes Maude sat and contemplated, in awed silence, how many hours had gone into generating her complete collection of entertainment. Millions, she thought, billions. Probably more hours than there had ever been, more hours than there are atoms in the universe. The thought scared her - however contemplative she liked to appear, Maude was a bit of an intellectual hermit - but it also comforted her in dark moments of doubt. It made her think she had got one over on God, because she could count higher.
***
Maude Millet disliked the name Dukas. She disliked the tatty cap without which he was never seen. She disliked even more the green overcoat he wore by day and slept beneath by night. But she disliked most of all his suicidal chain-smoking. Indeed, even in his sleep, this habit must have subsisted hot pace for the simple reason that the bedside ashtray - which he tipped out into the chamber-pot before retiring - frequently contained a pyramid of crushed dog-ends, come morning. She had him down as someone not worth even the most cursory attention. She kept a diary, hidden behind her cd collection, a diary filled with his daily doings, as some sort of proof positive of his worthlessness.
***
Colonel Merchant Mannion, on the other hand, did not keep a diary nor did he stoop as low as to be seen spying on Dukas. He was an Establishment snoop, no doubt. But he kept his distance, making mental notes on Dukas's peccadilloes, a military walkie-talkie and camcorder wielded merely in reserve. Even now nobody knows why an Else like Dukas deserved such in-your-face attention from the Authorities.
The book began to haunt Dukas during the day and, at night, he dreamed of a naked woman who pedalled her feet to the background of a jazzed up Beatles song: her left foot being bare and blistered, the right wearing a jester's elfin jingletoed slipper (naked, yes, bar this one item of footwear). He fancied this woman, which was strange. In real life, he couldn't bear the sight of naked women. Not that he was anything other than asexual.
Latterly, however, waking became more an act of self-disgust than refreshment and rediscovery. He did not wash the sheets, but threw them in the dustbin and bought new ones by the dozen in the shop next to WH Smiths. Crisp linen, crackling as he smoothed it across his bed, the fold-lines proud. Indeed, the book (dustwrapper and all) followed the dirty sheets into the dustbin. He hoped that would end the haunting and, for several nights, the dream did not recur. In many ways, he wished he had taken the trouble to plumb the book's plot: there may have been an answer in it somewhere.
About the third of each month, Dukas received his bank statement. For a few hours of ritual, he simply sat and stared at it, carried away by its neatness, trying to plumb the audit trail that the computer had evidently had a hand in. "They ought to get a screwdriver to that damn ready-reckoner of a contraption!" he spluttered. He usually ended up by putting it away in a drawer together with the mounds of football coupons he never understood enough to complete.
The house in which he lived was kept clean by a series of womenfolk, who turned up in large coats and felt hats. They 'did' for him.
"I'll just top and tail the bathroom, Mr Dukas," said his latest lady-who-did, "and I'll give the parlour a light going over with the tickler."
A heavy-duty tickler, it had to be said.
She no longer wasted words on him. Once speaking about her son, Dukas had grunted that nobody should bring children into the world. No good would come of it, he had asserted.
So she kept all her family secrets to herself, making them more secret in the process. And eventually she became too secretive to work for Dukas, so he got rid of her and hired someone else. He wanted to ask Maude Millet, but refrained, because he could tell she didn't like him. She called him an Else, which he took to heart and hated; for a while after, he tried to imagine her naked, pedalling her feet to a distorted guitar track. He could not contrive to hear the jingle of her slippered right foot, and the image thankfully faded.
Dukas went on holiday. And Maude Millet, the secret obsessive that she was, hauled out her diary and followed his abhorred cap and coat onto the ferry. And Colonel Merchant Mannion, moustache oiled into an Austrian ski-slope and trouser-creases parting the air in front of him for ease of transit, followed on.
Dukas did not know of the pursuit then, which just went to prove what a gentle existence he really led. As an Else, he was always thinking of things other than what he was doing at the time. Thus, his oft-noted actions were usually the product of mixed memories and twisted intentions. A step in one direction could be a combination of a rection to a previous night's meal and an idea to go to the toilet. Sitting down in a defined way could derive from considering the prickliness of cacti, and the location of his next pack of cigarettes.
And the book written by his namesake fluttered at the back of his mind.
So, as it seemed to Maude Millet that there was order in Dukas's chaotic life, there was in fact none. Her diary became full of jottings and notes of a frighteningly random nature, and the more she tried to read a pattern or shape into his actions, the more confused they, and she, became. It led the poor woman to obsession, so it did.
***
The Colonel, stiff-upper-lipped observer that he was, merely took everything as read. His mental observations were filed and fixed, but never shaken down to be put into any hidden order. He was a walking camera, programmed to record and document for future reference. Whether that future reference was ever made - whether this mine of information was even opened up for working - Dukas never found out. The Colonel disappeared as secretly as he had appeared, so that at no time did Dukas ever in fact know that he was even being followed.
***
Maude Millet made herself known, of course. Dukas could tell her a mile off, regardless of the increasingly bizarre disguises she lumbered herself with. She was the only one not looking at him and being obvious about it. The ferry crossing to Brittany was rough and ready, and every time Dukas slipped onto deck to expunge a newly- bought plateful from his guts, the woman was there before him, puking her own wasted meal, spying on him retrospectively.
Back home, Maude Millet's reference point about Dukas stemmed from being in league with the local shopkeepers, who kept her apprised of all his purchases. Around such knowledge she could create little stories for the children to whom she might one day give birth. She was certain that, even now, they heard her voice tinkling out about Dukas (like a fairy's lower-case voice):-
" mr dukas always buys baccy on wednesdays, after matinée pictures, his bacon on thursday mornings, and saturday, he obtains the rest of the week's groceries, including alcoholic bevvies, more baccy and oodles of thick creamy yoghourt. By tuesday, he's fresh out of matches and pot noodle, but he can't replenish his scullery, since this is the day for raking out under his bed and any other corners where muck may accumulate."
Maude Millet knew that muddle-headed sleep had now quickly overtaken her little listeners, thumbs in their mouths. Thus, after kissing the empty pillows in turn, she left the house to the dark baby-sitters on the landing and went off to visit her friend who lived a few winding streets away.
***
Suddenly, the phone rang. An abrupt call to attention. The ring itself, however, was slow and unrhythmic, handset seeming heavy: a long-distance call, unaccountably went through Dukas' mind: from Australia it seemed. "Who?" Dukas asked. The line was crackly, making it difficult for both parties to hear each other: could he have put it to what he jokingly called the earless side of his head? Something about wanting Dukas to come over ... to help another Dukas run a shoeshop in Australia: all the rage there: Aborigines entering the city from the bush in droves: all needed shodding: why not keep the business in the Dukas family? So serious, it surely must have been a joke.
Dukas put the phone down, when he thought the conversation had naturally come to a conclusion. He often found finishing a telephone call difficult. How many times was one meant to say goodbye and which of the two parties was meant to say it last?
Later, he could not remember whether he had actually agreed to dig up his feet by the roots here in England and join the venture in Australia. Better take a chance ... and do nothing. 50/50 he would be right. At least the incident had cleared up a few imponderables.
***
The town was more familiar as a football team than a place where people actually lived. But people did, and so did Dukas. Its small shops were famous for at least a radius of five miles. The butcher (the other side of WH Smith to the linen shop) had a sign swinging outside above the door, a manufactured haunch of beef dripping red when it rained. The awning emerged from the wall like the back of a striped deck-chair above the baker's window, wherein gingerbread men, fresh from the kiln, sat upon the heels of unsold loaves and stared out at the window-shoppers. Midget clothes dummies, with no clothes on.
The knickerwear shop (opposite WH Smith) only allowed womenfolk such as Maude Millet to enter, for nobody else, including Dukas, was able to appreciate the various frilly items: the brassières that sculpted as well as held, the corsetry that had real human-bone ribbing (expensive at that), and the high denier stockings which, as if bank-robbers had abandoned them upon their victims' faces, sported countless designer fish-eyes and convoluted ladders. The fact that the bank thus robbed was the branch at which Dukas kept his account was neither here nor there.
Further down the road was the ironmonger where they rivetted sheet iron as well as supplying ambidextrous screws.
***
And, indeed, there was someone else deemed Else. Someone late to the game. A man called Claude had spent twenty years from the end of the second world war, raising his family in the leafy suburbs south of the town centre. Then, in 1965 (when the film 'Rosemary's Baby' was being made), he died from a mysterious complaint, whilst debating with his daughter the relative pros and cons of the Beatles. The doctor who examined the body said it was premature old age ("But he was only 42!" remarked the distraught widow): so a second opinion was sought and, being a doctor manqué, Colonel Merchant Mannion (or his visible double) was consulted, only to diagnose a reasonless death. Claude (Mannion maintained) had died for nothing. By all logic, Claude should still be alive. That seemed to make Claude's widow happier, who could then get on with the rest of her unhappy life. But Mannion's motives had always been questionable, especially to himself; sometimes military pragmatism drew a veil over personal autonomy, and Mannion was nothing if not duty-bound. His aspiration to doctor-hood was merely subconscious betterment. Though he'd never admit it to himself.
And his motives in this particular pronouncement stemmed from a knowledge far deeper and grubbier than any possessed by the curious Maude Millet. Claude - on the surface little more than an Else who ran an ordered house and family - was more than simply himself. He was the Else, something extra, a deviant Else. Claude's very existence was a towering Essence-of-Else, the Platonic Form of Elsehood, a condition which Mannion had recognised in Claude soon after the end of the war, when as a young whipper-snapper Mannion had been recruited by the Establishment as a recorder of other peoples' lives. A recorder, but an observer too, one who would know everything, but actually understand very little of the full import of what he knew.
Claude had used to work in a basement room, beneath the place which was now WH Smith. Mannion knew what Claude did, which was all the more reason to gloss over the unreasonablness of his death. The room, measuring thirty feet by thirty, was peopled by all manner of grey, grim individuals with faces pasty-white from their constant immersion in the nether regions of the town. Their fingers tapped out a rhythm of lies, twisting words into whole new convolutions with an audacity which would have shocked the most outrageous wordsmith. The product of their labours piled high on desks, analysed and agonised over by their superior, another establishment nob by the name of Hamlet (he lacked a rank, being way above even that of Prince). Mannion, it was true, didn't know exactly what they did down there, these men and women, seemingly prisoners of their typewriters. He assumed that, under the principle of infinite monkeys, they were endeavouring to produce some random masterpiece. He knew enough of his superiors, however, to realise that this would be no casually amusing or entertainingly tragic piece.
So, Claude's reasonless death was not as meaningless as Colonel Merchant Mannion was inclined to make out. But for the poor man's wife, the theory seemed to hold. The hint of something within her - Claude's final gift, perhaps, in a year when devil-children were all the rage - seemed to make it all the more bearable.
***
Maude Millet had been to see her friend, a spinsterly creature who seemed to understand Maude's faltering love for children who could never return it. Indeed, this friend was about as substantial as the children, being nothing more than a shadow living among invisible cardboard boxes, tucked away years ago under an abandoned allotment shed by an elderly gentleman long since departed. The boxes had once held onions, but the taint of their presence had faded to a sensory memory. Now, there was only the continuing stench of mould and mouseshit to answer Maude's strange litany:
"Dukas, a strange name, foreign sounding, like a sorcerer ... or maybe his apprentice, who'd know? But this Dukas, ah, now this one, must be undertaking an apprenticeship in being boring, uninteresting, bland and ordered. He is truly a nothing, you understand. Tatty cap and a dreadful old coat. Everyone in town wants to tell me about him, so that I can make note of how tiresome he really is, so that...so that...maybe one day, I can warn the world about him."
Maude drifted off, watching a pair of robin redbreasts fighting to the bloody death over ownership of an overgrown allotment. Her friend under the shed sighed wetly, and Maude glanced down.
"That's what I'll do now," she said. "Show someone my book. That'll surprise the blighter. Oh my, is that the time? I"ll have to get back, the children will need feeding."
She returned home and turned on the lights. Her children were suddenly sitting up in bed, awaiting the next part of her tale. She did not disappoint.
***
Dukas took another call that night. A deep voice, like an old well, scratching past a fuzzy beard.
"Hello, I was wondering if you could give me a reference," the voice growled.
"Who? Me?" Dukas stood in a state of shock and lit another fag. His ashtray overfloweth.
"Well, you see, I'd like to be an apprentice fish gutter, but there's so much standing against me. I feel that your recommendation couldn't help but sway my prospective boss in the direction of my employment."
"Well," Dukas said, frowning. He suddenly remembered what had happened in Brittany with startling clarity; ironically, the clear memory made him light-headed, like a ponderous hangover.
"I'm another Dukas, by the way," the voice said, "and I've got a book belonging to you." The growl slid into a laugh, and back again. Dreaming to most of the town's inhabitants was just as important as the relatively few hours devoted to real life. Dukas dreamed more than most since he had been brought up on sleep. "Get as much as you can, lad," skidded the voice, "for it'll do you a power of good, a dress rehearsal for death - 'cos endless nothingnesses without any dreams ... well, you can imagine how soul-destroying death could be if you let it be dreamless. And about this here book..."
***
Maude Millet's supposed female friend opened the door after hearing the agreed secret sequence of knocks by Maude Millet upon it. And, just before entering, Maude Millet scanned the street to see if Dukas were hanging about. With the all clear, they could talk freely, at least for a while, until their mentor, Colonel Merchant Mannion, arrived to compare espionage notes. And Maude Millet spoke of the days she had pored over the map of Great Britain, to plot the seaside towns which ringed its coasts. One day she intended to visit them all starting out at Jaywick Sands and returning to there from the opposite direction. The inferred friend reminded Maude Millet that people who actually lived at the seaside were different from normal folk. Listening to the sea had a decidedly soporific effect and tended to make people moon about on cliff-tops dreaming up myths and constructing legends that are nothing really more than the call of the gull or the breathing of the tide.
If Maude Millet spoke about piers, crazy golf, strolling along the promenade, big laughing twirling clowns with mouths where coloured balls could be popped in, clifftop romances, shady lodging-houses, big ferris wheels with the cradle-chair you inhabited always at the top, pink candy floss, the ghost house where the joyful shrieks soon turned nastier than the real frights, bent teeth in dodgem shunts, characters who had never known love loitering by the bandstand in the park, abandoned beach huts, cheap cd markets ... if she spoke about such matters, Dukas did not listen because he was busy following Colonel Mannion. Such was Dukas' guile, the Colonel thought he followed him.
***
Dukas moved to this same town (where Claude lived) from a dubious part of the country in 1964 and set up home on his own in the more industrial streets, north to northeast of the town centre. He had a terraced twouptwodown, with straight steep stairs, although the alleyway down the side supposedly made it a semi-detached.
Doctor Mannion, the one who had examined Claude's body, had a much older sister who happened to live next door to Dukas and, despite this being the start of the permissive age, she and Dukas established a relationship "over the garden fence" - but no further. When Mannion visited his sister - just before Claude's death - he was introduced to Claude who was then working as a ledger clerk at the local shoewear factory, the railings of which could be just about seen at the end of the street. The railings of which could be just about seen. The railings of which...
***
Dukas believed that there was someone else accompanying him along the track of a dream parallel with his own. This person was there to watch over him as he slept, teasing out dreams for Dukas by whispering sweet nothings in his ear, leading him hopefully into endless summers long gone. And, as the dreams progressed, this sleeping invigilator took up a rutted file and smoothed the dreams so that he could enter them, without the necessity of the town's reality changing at all ... hopefully.
If it all went wrong, however, re-entry was hell to pay. There was someone else with whom he took it in turns to share dreams, and this happened to be a dream version of his latest lady-who-did (Maude Millet's imaginary friend, that friend with whom she discussed the seaside visits) and this lady stopped Dukas exploring those shops of the town through which he wanted to browse and maybe purchase a frilly item or a coal scuttle or a ripe cut of brisket beef...
This particular lady-who-did was a stickler for keeping to the rules. Dukas had to follow her into a grocery shop, where a friendly enough fellow had nothing but tins of processed peas past the sell-by date on his shelves, which they ended up having as midnight feasts.
He wanted to go into the cobblers, where the model with a hammer poised above the shoe-last would smile and welcome him into another dream.
He wanted to go into hat shops, where they served fairies as well as people like Dukas, and where there were cash canisters zooming along the ceiling on taut piano wires.
He wanted to go into coffee shops, where his dear departed grandmother would buy up a whole tier of colourful jam and cream cakes, just so that he could choose the one he wanted (usually the coconut pyramid).
He wanted to go into the knickerwear shop, above all, so that he could change his pants for prettier shop-soiled versions.
He often woke with a start, reluctantly returned from the exile of dreams ... only to find himself trapped for a time in yet another one.
***
Dukas' whole conversation and character were akin to double book entries, neatly circumscribed, meticulously balanced and woefully irrelevant to any "buzz" that the Sixties began to sound off. He stayed in the town another 25 years, despite some call to go to Australia. Mannion's sister died in 1972, because, as Mannion had predicted, she became someone beyond her own means. Claude must have been a bit like that, too, which, in hindsight, could account for Claude's death: his mind had to find more space. People of that generation in England (even refugees) had constructed expectations beyond the ability of their own nous. Death was the only way to broaden the mind for such folk. Death or dreaming, and that was something which Dukas had years to perfect.
Dukas objected to being followed. He had always objected, but viewed it as something of a twist of fate, like the way his teeth grew in his head or the angle of his dangle. It was merely a part of his life, attached to his existence as firmly as a billion barnacles glued forever to pier stanchions around the country's coastal towns. So long as the incessant observation did not interrupt his day to day enjoyment of life, he was content. He could still smoke, though there were those who objected, so he was happy. He revelled in his lovely creamy yoghurt, and positively exploded with desire when he discovered its use in Indian cooking; so, he was happy. Fresh newspaper in his hand, sticky bun in his pocket, the park surrounding him and lending him a semblance of privacy, Dukas felt like he was on top of the world. If he put his mind to it, he could even imagine the watchers as security men (and women, of course) keeping a covert eye on a Very Important Person. After all, in this town where WH Smith was the main megastore, there was no one else to think about.
The time he did object, however, was when his shared dreaming became fair game. And his latest lady-who-did, duster in hand and tickler aggravating her excessive nostril hair, fled his place to impart false wisdoms to Maude Millet's eccentric imagination.
***
Brittany, as always, preyed on his mind. What he had seen there pecked away at grainy bits of grey matter, coalescing sometimes into great, complex systems of conspiracy theory and secretive underground compliance. At other times, he could not see the clear picture, as though the scene was hazed over by his endless cigarettes. But memory told him the truth, usually. When dreaming didn't steal it and distort it, casting it aside like just another nightmare to be forgotten and forgiven in the light of the next day.
He had found someone Else with his own name. Interest tickled, the memory of the old book still fresh in his mind, Dukas had tracked this person down to a small shop on the outskirts of one of the many small, welcoming French villages. He'd had every intention of confronting them with the coincidence, but his chance had been scuppered when he approached the shop. Sitting on a fountain across the road, gaze averted in such a way as to attract full attention, sat a woman. She was the image of Maude Millet, even down to the notebook and the stub of pencil tucked behind her ear. Dukas paused, confused, but could still hear the hurried clatter of Maude's footsteps way behind him. This woman, then, was not her, but a simulacrum of her, cast in sunlight and exposed as a watcher by her attitude and dress.
She was watching the Dukas in the shop, of that Dukas was sure. Noting him, Nothing him, allowing him no space to breathe or dream or expand into anything other than an Else ... or, even, to die.
The sight had disturbed Dukas all the way back on the ferry. Ever since then he had been unamused at the constant, indirect haranguing. Until, finally, he decided to take charge. With an old exercise book with lines the wrong way, and a pencil he had not used since his school-days, he sharpened the dulled lead on his crooked teeth and wrote down a make-believe observation. He added an impossible time, a risqué comment, then dropped the paper into the pavement grating in front of WH Smith. Let them make of that what they will, he thought.
Behind him, Maude Millet gasped.
***
One afternoon, all the shops in the town closed early. Signs were flipped over from open, shadows invited in as blinds were drawn and dusty lights extinguished. Maude Millet wandered down the street with a vague expression on her face, unable to confer with her snitches, notebook empty of times and dates. Her children had stayed in bed that day, flat and insubstantial, and her stomach ached with something akin to memory. The only sound in the street was the steady rumble from beneath WH Smiths, where Dukas had once bought a book about Brittany. More lies, it seemed, were needed now. Lies like Colonel Merchant Mannion arriving at Maude Millet's house at exactly the moment he should have arrived.
These typical backstreets of a largely forgotten inland town were fraught with a past that could only really be remembered from within a contrived future. Tardy children who had been to the park to play on the swings but had fled because of a dribbling man lurking behind the bandstand, ran down the street and, a split second later, ran down the street again in the same direction. There used to be shops further down this street on the left, including WH Smith, within sight of Maude Millet's house, where Dukas used to get his shopping, but now everything was lengthened out ... and the lines, along which the terraced houses ranged, grew to a point much further along.
Later, Dukas passed Maude Millet's house, ignoring the three faces (two women and a man) peering down at him through the net curtains of the bedroom window - and he continued along the street, with the point of perspective drawing no nearer. Later, he found himself passing Maude Millet's house from the opposite direction, but now all the curtains were tightly drawn upon the assembly which the Colonel must be conducting within: a circle of three, hand in hand, around the pack of saucy cards from Clacton-on-Sea.
That eccentric trio must have summoned Dukas from the ether to their rapping-table. He was to be their Raging Captain, their Red Indian, their little Creature of the Shadows, their Dark Minder on the landing, all wrapped into one. They told him he would make their fortunes, when they pitched and struck tents from seaside resort to seaside resort. He was their version of Gypsy Rose Lee. They told him to swing a pendant above the optional futures. And there was nothing he could do about it. He was, however, determined not to be a seaside novelty act. He poked the pendant down his throat and expelled one great wave-covered sea of unconsciousness.
***
Eventually, Mannion introduced Dukas to Claude's widow in 1973. This was against Mannion's better judgement: but Dukas and Claude's widow had so many disappointments between them, Mannion thought such disappointments would give them something in common.
All three of them (Mannion, Dukas and Claude's widow) were watching news items concerning the Watergate affair on the TV in Mannion's town flat. Nixon had evidently been grassed by a foot odour powder salesman to a mysterious inhabitant of the White House tape library. Unaccountably, however, Mannion's mind was elsewhere, speculating that the death of Claude and that of Kennedy had not been poles apart: except that Kennedy had been shot.
"I never liked that Nixon fellah," drawled Dukas.
"I think all Presidents need to be ruthless and devious, otherwise, he will not be able to do his job properly in dealing with foreign powers. Nixon's crime is being found out," said someone else, indeed, a near pukka Else, previously unnoticed.
Claude's widow was silent. She knew this meeting had been arranged on neutral ground, for some diplomatic form of match-making. The age difference, Mannion felt, was possibly a problem, Dukas now being 42 and Claude's widow in her early sixties. But that would not matter: she kept her figure well.
The repercussions of that meeting fan outwards, even today. Still, Mannion should not blame himself, for even the smallest action could set different cog-wheels turning in the vast machine of random fate.
***
Dukas turned his head away, as his lady-who-did struggled into her deep-boned corsets. She was off to get a heavy-duty screwdriver, she said, from the ironmonger.
He heard the distant crowds chanting obscenities at the football match - no doubt the visiting team had brought their own followers by the coachload, for there would only be nobody to watch. And maybe no home team to play against, either.
Dukas tried to get out of bed, but the dream had him out of his head instead.
When his lady-who-did, in real life, or as real as it can be believed to be, arrived, she started straightaway mucking out. She no longer needed approval from the man whom she knew as Dukas, for it was the house that was now all important ever since he had become bed-ridden. She had a nightmare last night, but like most dreams, she had forgotten not only its content but the fact she had dreamed it at all.
As soon as she had upturned generous doses of disinfectant into the most vulnerable parts of the house, she sat down at the kitchen table. She had infused herself a nice cup of piping hot tea. She liked it strong.
"Well, it's been a day today, so far, hasn't it?" she mumbled to herself.
She heard creaking upstairs. That nice Mr Dukas turning over. He was always happy.
"Wonder when he'll pay me," she muttered to the reflection in the spinning surface of brown. "Three months it's been and no sign of a brass farthing. But it's such a pleasure to look after a fine house..."
She beamed round at the sparkling walls but then glared at the weeds that she could see out of the kitchen window encroaching upon the crazy paving. A wind picked up and the tree towards the end of the squat garden cast a moving skeleton of light across her pinched features. She flicked it away as if it were a cobweb.
The creaking upstairs grew louder. He was no doubt dropping cigarette ash on the sheets, she mused in growing concern.
The milk had gone off in the tea. She blew a raspberry and, in getting up in a hurry, accidentally knocked the high stool to the floor. Having flushed the tea-leaves down the sink, she shook a fist through the window at the weeds ... and at the rubbish that was threatening to clamber from the dustbin.
She trod upstairs to see if Mr Dukas had escaped from his bed for any reason. She would also take the opportunity of emptying his chamberpot, a job which she hated since it was unwieldy to carry and the strong yellow fluid usually had soggy cork-tipped dog-ends floating about in it. She discovered that he was indeed still safely swaddled in winding-sheets.
He woke with a start ... and stared, as if he were seeing his lady-who-did for the first time. It seemed he could not breathe properly, for he pointed down his throat. He then fell back and lay peacefully sleeping.
"Mr Dukas, what's the matter? Lungs a bit dicky, this morning, eh? You shouldn't smoke so much in bed, makes brown stains on the ceiling." She pointed up at the tell-tale archipelago of marks.
Such a shame, for he was once such a gentleman. A bit like her son would be when he was older. She knelt beside his bed, to pull out the chamberpot whence it was customarily kept under the springs.
"My, Mr Dukas, you've not done anything in it!"
She stared into bone white and saw no visions of the future there. She was used to reading the yellow lees in his chamberpot - could read them better than tea-leaves. So, today, she was at a loss...
She then discovered with gut-wrenching horror that her dear Mr Dukas was threaded from throat to belly-bottom by a huge plumber's screwdriver - and it must have been his death in real life that had made him wake with such a start. After all, Dukas was merely the Sorcerer's Apprentice who hadn't yet mastered his tools nor turnstiled his parts 'gainst the need for night-letting. The trouble, aslso, was that Paul Dukas, the French composer, lived and died in Paris, not Brittany. But that must have been someone else. Dukas' lady-who-did suddenly did not, for how does one when there is no one for whom to do?
She fell to her knees in a snowdrift of paper, realising as she writhed that she was already destroying the only evidence connecting the mortified Dukas with his vanished attacker. On the papers, footprints sat bloody and incriminating. But she had twitched once too often, and in a whirlwind of grief the marks vanished forever into randomness. Perhaps, she thought, with an unfamiliar depth, spectrographic analysis of each and every atom in the room could reveal, by the application of chaos mathematics and a planet's supply of luck, their previous locations. But then she realised that this was her world, that there were more atoms in this one small place than the whole universe, and God took a step back in awe.
She cried and mourned the death of another boss, not once wondering at the presence of such a huge tool. The point in her brain where dreams were made, whether naturally or by demand, shivered and twitched in agitation. This point was angry that there were no more dreams to have, but also sad that its previous partner had now slipped somewhere wholly different. Dreams and memories were mutually exclusive components of a rounded life.
The spitted Dukas was left with no option but to dream. He dreamt of a hundred faceless people below a grey street, tap-tapping away on an infinite number of typewriters; stormy seas and green smiles; telephone calls from far away, claiming ownership of a book never read and, perhaps, not yet written. And all the time, the plumber's tool parting him up the middle did minute adjustments. Eventually, he thought, he may be tightened up and fit for anything.
***
His lady-who-did stumbled her way downstairs. There were scraps of paper clotted to her aboriginal feet, decorated with words she did not wish to read. They flapped there, like a chicken's useless wings. The bannister had begun to grow again, sprouting shoots implanted in its genes but paused at the whim of a carpenter. Now, the hall resounded to the amplified creaks of stretching wood, and smelled of a pine forest after a light summer shower.
She made it into the kitchen before she saw what was becoming of the house. The nooks and crannies had taken over, forcing themselves into all the places where space held sway. The old, wide hallway had become a muck-infested nook, the living room a cranny. The disinfectant she had spread around earlier - though how much earlier she was beginning to question - had killed dirt in sad black patches. Feeling sorry for herself, and even more sorry for the dirt, she went down on her hands and knees and dreamed of a time when all this was merely a part of her job.
Mr Dukas would still be upstairs, then. Waiting for her to finish the chores, so that much could be done if need be. Now she was only doing it for herself, and raised as a good honest lass, this was something she was painfully unused to.
She wondered what he had been dreaming when the tool had cut him short. If she knew, she reckoned - if she had stayed with him - she would know a lot more of the twists and turns of life than the long, straight road she had travelled. No side streets, not even a white line, because there was never anyone coming the other way. Never even a service station, or roadkill, or piles of lipstick painted dog-ends in the gutters. Long, straight.
***
Later, after Mannion had left for good, Maude Millet found out a painful truth. ddd cds were silent. Too perfect with the soundlessness of approaching death.
Dukas, too, had been seen passing down the street several times, always from the same direction. Mannion had told them of the time Dukas had gone out with Claude's widow. Her son - her final gift from Claude, deposited the night before his pointless death - had stayed with Dukas for the night, and Dukas had even refrained from smoking his regular twenty fags. Pity there was no way in for either of them.
Time had been a failure, Mannion had said, because Dukas could not drag himself from the niche he had made in life. A cleft rarely referred to, let alone filled. That of fall-guy. Mannion had left then, and said goodbye to Maude with a finality that begged no questioning.
And she had known, then, that she was even less than she had always assumed. Her constant haranguing of Dukas, and her secret trysts with Mannion and the other - her spinsterly friend, facelesss and calm - were meaningless in the light of her new discovery. Even the Dark Minder took a step back in amazement, though he had let her voiceless baby cds out into the shadows of memory long ago.
Maude Millet, one-time heroine of the town, regular walker of the streets and supplier of information to the alleged room beneath the old WH Smiths, was an Else. But not even a Somebody Else. Not even that. When Mannion said goodbye, he said it to Nobody Else. And Maude Millet's time in the town was over.
***
What else could she do?
Dukas' lady-who-once-did spent the next few years writing retrospective bestsellers. They were books that had sold extremely well decades ago, but which people had now forgotten. Putting her name to their re-written wonders gave her a sense of peace, and when one of them suggested itself as Dukas' work, she gladly inscribed its spine with the name of Debussy.
She even found an old signature of his, traced it and stitched it into the leather cover.
***
Someone else eventually met Claude's daughter (who still liked Beatles records, John Lennon being, in some strange way, her martyred Christ figure) and, well, they quickly had the glad eye for each other: in 1989, they ran away together to another part of the country and married. They returned for Claude's second funeral (after a necessary exhumation to replace the corpse's lost feet), an affair which Mannion had financed at his own expense as a sort of belated wedding present.
Dukas was now himself chief accountant, he told Mannion, in a very successful small business up north making disposable bed sheets ... and he told Mannion how computers had taken over a lot of the hard grind: he had been lucky enough to get the job by being in the right place at the right time.
Mannion has not heard from any of them for several years now (and is unaware Dukas is the man upon whom Maude Millet once had conspiratorial thoughts). It is strange how people move about, leaving memories but not their bodies. In many ways, Mannion wished he had died along with Claude. He would probably never have heard of Margaret Thatcher, though thankfully her memory was now fast fading.
Being a Colonel and a Socialist was not a happy lot in life. He wondered if Dukas's bed sheet business was still going, in the deep recession of the early to mid-90's. Maybe Mannion should have emigrated to the other side of the moon, when he was young enough to start again.
Mannion wondered if Dukas ever met Claude, or vice versa, all that time ago, other than as mere passing strangers in the town centre during the single year of their urban contemporaneity. He hoped so. On the other hand, perhaps they were both dolls in a dark cupboard no child ever opened. Sadness comes with age. But Mannion can still amuse people when he uses his Australian accent.
***
Perhaps Maude Millet had known all the time that Dukas could not be the Sorcerer, because she was. Indeed, she shared dreams with many Elses so that the dreams would be better for her on bounce-back: this together with the renting out of other dreams from her headlease dream was the only way for nice dreams to recur. She eventually dreamed that Colonel Mannion was not a Colonel at all but a Antipodean Communist spy and that they were kissing each other! He blew cigarette smoke into her lungs and then she blew it back into his. She was awoken by a roar as a gingerbread man scored a winning goal.
***
Whether the Elses were after my green overcoat or my supply of groceries was anybody's guess. Spooky knocking noises from under my bed were just about bearable. The configurations of cigarette-smoke that I was somehow compelled to exhale - instead of being my usual proud trick of linking ring to ring - made three strange clouded faces. Even the tracing of coasts in death's country became another face - then another. The Harlequin and Pierrot. Three's a crowd. Only two peccadilloes for each side of a sexual coin. And only the past could prevail, with yet one more present having lost its antipodean benchmark. I really had my moments.
One day, the lady-who-did actually sought me out from where I was hiding in Jaywick Sands, came splashing my salt-spored shanty-window ... well, that was just about the last entry in Maude Millet's diary about sagging eyes, melted mutter and me - a diary (not for straight gays but for a new brand of trendy asexuals) bought in WH Smith. A tide-mark for shoeless wraiths. A false-door contrivance in the ghost house of a bank's financial futures. Lottery's scorched finger. Or Else!
(Previously unpublished.)
collaboration with Tim Lebbon
WRITTEN IN MID-NINETIES
His speech tended to tail off into a melted mutter, a streamlined stutter - yet almost preferable to the banter with which he'd earlier treated Maude Millet when each word was a splatter-bullet or a hop-skip-and-jump up the bridge of her nose in mistaken identity of eyes for ears. His name was Dukas - not the famous Dukas, but someone else who was not so well known.
His very personality was a series of ricochets off other people. In truth, Maude Millet believed Dukas might not have existed at all without the opportunity of employing her as a sounding-board, echo-chamber or vocal trampoline. His soul yearned for bounce-back, his eyes other eyes into which to sink, his ears to hear other ears listening.
Although he was not only someone else, i.e. someone who was not so famous as the famous Dukas, he was also someone else full stop, someone whom she actually called an Else: someone, she thought, to be tooled up into becoming an Else to each and every self, thus to bend more space into reality. And Dukas, she felt, was a typical Else: the slippery thin lips; the dreamy eyes so drooping with the need to sleep they looked like breasts sagging out; the lack of any real ear-width; the pin-prick nostrils each with one coily black hair on show; the yellow fingers; the even yellower teeth that glinted more than a film star's pearly white ones; the slouching slant of his gait; the plopping paces even on dry days; the eyebrows that met beyond the hairline ... yes, what else but an Else?
When Dukas first discovered a book by an author with his own name, he established that it was essentially a work of fiction, with elements of historical fact thrown in for good measure: but it was done in quite a revolutionary manner: a series of randomly snatched sentences: the whole coming together like a slowly evolving jigsaw puzzle, the middle outwards. To Dukas, the book was oblique and awkwardly cobbled together: but he was convinced that a second reading might have clarified the plot...
But he could not really be bothered.
Dukas was not a seasoned reader, in any event: he had only picked up the book during an uncustomary foray into WH Smiths bookshop for a map of Brittany, since he had decided to escape a rut and take a holiday abroad. The author's name seemed to stand out from the stacks of remainders near the front entrance of the store: Dukas was surely not a common name. The purchase had therefore become as inevitable as an Antipodes for the sun to go to at night.
Reading it for the first time, Dukas had experienced the closest he had ever come to a supernatural experience. Every page he read seemed to have been read by him before, the words leaving dried paper trails on the back of his eyeballs, so that he always knew what was coming and which was the way back. Cliffhangers hung redundant and red herrings paled into insignificance under the scrutiny of Dukas's future memory. The story may have fitted like an inside out jigsaw, but Dukas had the corners and edges slotted together even before he opened the book. For all this, understanding never really came. He read the words, and he knew what was coming next, but as a whole the story was as clouded as his own peculiar judgement. A truth hidden in fog, without direction, lacking even the means to call out for help. Dukas pretended not to mind. With Brittany on his mind, loose ends whipped around in his brain like questing snakes.
"More to life than tales of woe," he told himself. He always spoke out loud when he wanted to get a point across from mouth to mind. In truth, he could not really discern whether the woe was inherent in the staggered words, or if he had read it in. Either way, he felt the book should remain closed until after his holiday.
***
Maude Millet was an obsessive when it came to leisure time; her home was a shrine to entertainment, at which she prayed and worshipped at every snatched opportunity. Books lined the walls like the thickest, most colourful wallpaper there ever was; vinyl warped in cupboards while Maude listened to the wonders of cd music; video tapes became lost among themselves when she failed to upkeep their many-times-scribbled-over covers. In bathroom cupboards, unread tomes mouldered into obscurity, like their long dead authors (for Maude's preference was for antiquated fiction), and on shelves in her spare room, magazines slumped their shoulders at the bowing floor.
All through the house, books and videos and records and cds were piled into mountains of creation. Sometimes Maude sat and contemplated, in awed silence, how many hours had gone into generating her complete collection of entertainment. Millions, she thought, billions. Probably more hours than there had ever been, more hours than there are atoms in the universe. The thought scared her - however contemplative she liked to appear, Maude was a bit of an intellectual hermit - but it also comforted her in dark moments of doubt. It made her think she had got one over on God, because she could count higher.
***
Maude Millet disliked the name Dukas. She disliked the tatty cap without which he was never seen. She disliked even more the green overcoat he wore by day and slept beneath by night. But she disliked most of all his suicidal chain-smoking. Indeed, even in his sleep, this habit must have subsisted hot pace for the simple reason that the bedside ashtray - which he tipped out into the chamber-pot before retiring - frequently contained a pyramid of crushed dog-ends, come morning. She had him down as someone not worth even the most cursory attention. She kept a diary, hidden behind her cd collection, a diary filled with his daily doings, as some sort of proof positive of his worthlessness.
***
Colonel Merchant Mannion, on the other hand, did not keep a diary nor did he stoop as low as to be seen spying on Dukas. He was an Establishment snoop, no doubt. But he kept his distance, making mental notes on Dukas's peccadilloes, a military walkie-talkie and camcorder wielded merely in reserve. Even now nobody knows why an Else like Dukas deserved such in-your-face attention from the Authorities.
The book began to haunt Dukas during the day and, at night, he dreamed of a naked woman who pedalled her feet to the background of a jazzed up Beatles song: her left foot being bare and blistered, the right wearing a jester's elfin jingletoed slipper (naked, yes, bar this one item of footwear). He fancied this woman, which was strange. In real life, he couldn't bear the sight of naked women. Not that he was anything other than asexual.
Latterly, however, waking became more an act of self-disgust than refreshment and rediscovery. He did not wash the sheets, but threw them in the dustbin and bought new ones by the dozen in the shop next to WH Smiths. Crisp linen, crackling as he smoothed it across his bed, the fold-lines proud. Indeed, the book (dustwrapper and all) followed the dirty sheets into the dustbin. He hoped that would end the haunting and, for several nights, the dream did not recur. In many ways, he wished he had taken the trouble to plumb the book's plot: there may have been an answer in it somewhere.
About the third of each month, Dukas received his bank statement. For a few hours of ritual, he simply sat and stared at it, carried away by its neatness, trying to plumb the audit trail that the computer had evidently had a hand in. "They ought to get a screwdriver to that damn ready-reckoner of a contraption!" he spluttered. He usually ended up by putting it away in a drawer together with the mounds of football coupons he never understood enough to complete.
The house in which he lived was kept clean by a series of womenfolk, who turned up in large coats and felt hats. They 'did' for him.
"I'll just top and tail the bathroom, Mr Dukas," said his latest lady-who-did, "and I'll give the parlour a light going over with the tickler."
A heavy-duty tickler, it had to be said.
She no longer wasted words on him. Once speaking about her son, Dukas had grunted that nobody should bring children into the world. No good would come of it, he had asserted.
So she kept all her family secrets to herself, making them more secret in the process. And eventually she became too secretive to work for Dukas, so he got rid of her and hired someone else. He wanted to ask Maude Millet, but refrained, because he could tell she didn't like him. She called him an Else, which he took to heart and hated; for a while after, he tried to imagine her naked, pedalling her feet to a distorted guitar track. He could not contrive to hear the jingle of her slippered right foot, and the image thankfully faded.
Dukas went on holiday. And Maude Millet, the secret obsessive that she was, hauled out her diary and followed his abhorred cap and coat onto the ferry. And Colonel Merchant Mannion, moustache oiled into an Austrian ski-slope and trouser-creases parting the air in front of him for ease of transit, followed on.
Dukas did not know of the pursuit then, which just went to prove what a gentle existence he really led. As an Else, he was always thinking of things other than what he was doing at the time. Thus, his oft-noted actions were usually the product of mixed memories and twisted intentions. A step in one direction could be a combination of a rection to a previous night's meal and an idea to go to the toilet. Sitting down in a defined way could derive from considering the prickliness of cacti, and the location of his next pack of cigarettes.
And the book written by his namesake fluttered at the back of his mind.
So, as it seemed to Maude Millet that there was order in Dukas's chaotic life, there was in fact none. Her diary became full of jottings and notes of a frighteningly random nature, and the more she tried to read a pattern or shape into his actions, the more confused they, and she, became. It led the poor woman to obsession, so it did.
***
The Colonel, stiff-upper-lipped observer that he was, merely took everything as read. His mental observations were filed and fixed, but never shaken down to be put into any hidden order. He was a walking camera, programmed to record and document for future reference. Whether that future reference was ever made - whether this mine of information was even opened up for working - Dukas never found out. The Colonel disappeared as secretly as he had appeared, so that at no time did Dukas ever in fact know that he was even being followed.
***
Maude Millet made herself known, of course. Dukas could tell her a mile off, regardless of the increasingly bizarre disguises she lumbered herself with. She was the only one not looking at him and being obvious about it. The ferry crossing to Brittany was rough and ready, and every time Dukas slipped onto deck to expunge a newly- bought plateful from his guts, the woman was there before him, puking her own wasted meal, spying on him retrospectively.
Back home, Maude Millet's reference point about Dukas stemmed from being in league with the local shopkeepers, who kept her apprised of all his purchases. Around such knowledge she could create little stories for the children to whom she might one day give birth. She was certain that, even now, they heard her voice tinkling out about Dukas (like a fairy's lower-case voice):-
" mr dukas always buys baccy on wednesdays, after matinée pictures, his bacon on thursday mornings, and saturday, he obtains the rest of the week's groceries, including alcoholic bevvies, more baccy and oodles of thick creamy yoghourt. By tuesday, he's fresh out of matches and pot noodle, but he can't replenish his scullery, since this is the day for raking out under his bed and any other corners where muck may accumulate."
Maude Millet knew that muddle-headed sleep had now quickly overtaken her little listeners, thumbs in their mouths. Thus, after kissing the empty pillows in turn, she left the house to the dark baby-sitters on the landing and went off to visit her friend who lived a few winding streets away.
***
Suddenly, the phone rang. An abrupt call to attention. The ring itself, however, was slow and unrhythmic, handset seeming heavy: a long-distance call, unaccountably went through Dukas' mind: from Australia it seemed. "Who?" Dukas asked. The line was crackly, making it difficult for both parties to hear each other: could he have put it to what he jokingly called the earless side of his head? Something about wanting Dukas to come over ... to help another Dukas run a shoeshop in Australia: all the rage there: Aborigines entering the city from the bush in droves: all needed shodding: why not keep the business in the Dukas family? So serious, it surely must have been a joke.
Dukas put the phone down, when he thought the conversation had naturally come to a conclusion. He often found finishing a telephone call difficult. How many times was one meant to say goodbye and which of the two parties was meant to say it last?
Later, he could not remember whether he had actually agreed to dig up his feet by the roots here in England and join the venture in Australia. Better take a chance ... and do nothing. 50/50 he would be right. At least the incident had cleared up a few imponderables.
***
The town was more familiar as a football team than a place where people actually lived. But people did, and so did Dukas. Its small shops were famous for at least a radius of five miles. The butcher (the other side of WH Smith to the linen shop) had a sign swinging outside above the door, a manufactured haunch of beef dripping red when it rained. The awning emerged from the wall like the back of a striped deck-chair above the baker's window, wherein gingerbread men, fresh from the kiln, sat upon the heels of unsold loaves and stared out at the window-shoppers. Midget clothes dummies, with no clothes on.
The knickerwear shop (opposite WH Smith) only allowed womenfolk such as Maude Millet to enter, for nobody else, including Dukas, was able to appreciate the various frilly items: the brassières that sculpted as well as held, the corsetry that had real human-bone ribbing (expensive at that), and the high denier stockings which, as if bank-robbers had abandoned them upon their victims' faces, sported countless designer fish-eyes and convoluted ladders. The fact that the bank thus robbed was the branch at which Dukas kept his account was neither here nor there.
Further down the road was the ironmonger where they rivetted sheet iron as well as supplying ambidextrous screws.
***
And, indeed, there was someone else deemed Else. Someone late to the game. A man called Claude had spent twenty years from the end of the second world war, raising his family in the leafy suburbs south of the town centre. Then, in 1965 (when the film 'Rosemary's Baby' was being made), he died from a mysterious complaint, whilst debating with his daughter the relative pros and cons of the Beatles. The doctor who examined the body said it was premature old age ("But he was only 42!" remarked the distraught widow): so a second opinion was sought and, being a doctor manqué, Colonel Merchant Mannion (or his visible double) was consulted, only to diagnose a reasonless death. Claude (Mannion maintained) had died for nothing. By all logic, Claude should still be alive. That seemed to make Claude's widow happier, who could then get on with the rest of her unhappy life. But Mannion's motives had always been questionable, especially to himself; sometimes military pragmatism drew a veil over personal autonomy, and Mannion was nothing if not duty-bound. His aspiration to doctor-hood was merely subconscious betterment. Though he'd never admit it to himself.
And his motives in this particular pronouncement stemmed from a knowledge far deeper and grubbier than any possessed by the curious Maude Millet. Claude - on the surface little more than an Else who ran an ordered house and family - was more than simply himself. He was the Else, something extra, a deviant Else. Claude's very existence was a towering Essence-of-Else, the Platonic Form of Elsehood, a condition which Mannion had recognised in Claude soon after the end of the war, when as a young whipper-snapper Mannion had been recruited by the Establishment as a recorder of other peoples' lives. A recorder, but an observer too, one who would know everything, but actually understand very little of the full import of what he knew.
Claude had used to work in a basement room, beneath the place which was now WH Smith. Mannion knew what Claude did, which was all the more reason to gloss over the unreasonablness of his death. The room, measuring thirty feet by thirty, was peopled by all manner of grey, grim individuals with faces pasty-white from their constant immersion in the nether regions of the town. Their fingers tapped out a rhythm of lies, twisting words into whole new convolutions with an audacity which would have shocked the most outrageous wordsmith. The product of their labours piled high on desks, analysed and agonised over by their superior, another establishment nob by the name of Hamlet (he lacked a rank, being way above even that of Prince). Mannion, it was true, didn't know exactly what they did down there, these men and women, seemingly prisoners of their typewriters. He assumed that, under the principle of infinite monkeys, they were endeavouring to produce some random masterpiece. He knew enough of his superiors, however, to realise that this would be no casually amusing or entertainingly tragic piece.
So, Claude's reasonless death was not as meaningless as Colonel Merchant Mannion was inclined to make out. But for the poor man's wife, the theory seemed to hold. The hint of something within her - Claude's final gift, perhaps, in a year when devil-children were all the rage - seemed to make it all the more bearable.
***
Maude Millet had been to see her friend, a spinsterly creature who seemed to understand Maude's faltering love for children who could never return it. Indeed, this friend was about as substantial as the children, being nothing more than a shadow living among invisible cardboard boxes, tucked away years ago under an abandoned allotment shed by an elderly gentleman long since departed. The boxes had once held onions, but the taint of their presence had faded to a sensory memory. Now, there was only the continuing stench of mould and mouseshit to answer Maude's strange litany:
"Dukas, a strange name, foreign sounding, like a sorcerer ... or maybe his apprentice, who'd know? But this Dukas, ah, now this one, must be undertaking an apprenticeship in being boring, uninteresting, bland and ordered. He is truly a nothing, you understand. Tatty cap and a dreadful old coat. Everyone in town wants to tell me about him, so that I can make note of how tiresome he really is, so that...so that...maybe one day, I can warn the world about him."
Maude drifted off, watching a pair of robin redbreasts fighting to the bloody death over ownership of an overgrown allotment. Her friend under the shed sighed wetly, and Maude glanced down.
"That's what I'll do now," she said. "Show someone my book. That'll surprise the blighter. Oh my, is that the time? I"ll have to get back, the children will need feeding."
She returned home and turned on the lights. Her children were suddenly sitting up in bed, awaiting the next part of her tale. She did not disappoint.
***
Dukas took another call that night. A deep voice, like an old well, scratching past a fuzzy beard.
"Hello, I was wondering if you could give me a reference," the voice growled.
"Who? Me?" Dukas stood in a state of shock and lit another fag. His ashtray overfloweth.
"Well, you see, I'd like to be an apprentice fish gutter, but there's so much standing against me. I feel that your recommendation couldn't help but sway my prospective boss in the direction of my employment."
"Well," Dukas said, frowning. He suddenly remembered what had happened in Brittany with startling clarity; ironically, the clear memory made him light-headed, like a ponderous hangover.
"I'm another Dukas, by the way," the voice said, "and I've got a book belonging to you." The growl slid into a laugh, and back again. Dreaming to most of the town's inhabitants was just as important as the relatively few hours devoted to real life. Dukas dreamed more than most since he had been brought up on sleep. "Get as much as you can, lad," skidded the voice, "for it'll do you a power of good, a dress rehearsal for death - 'cos endless nothingnesses without any dreams ... well, you can imagine how soul-destroying death could be if you let it be dreamless. And about this here book..."
***
Maude Millet's supposed female friend opened the door after hearing the agreed secret sequence of knocks by Maude Millet upon it. And, just before entering, Maude Millet scanned the street to see if Dukas were hanging about. With the all clear, they could talk freely, at least for a while, until their mentor, Colonel Merchant Mannion, arrived to compare espionage notes. And Maude Millet spoke of the days she had pored over the map of Great Britain, to plot the seaside towns which ringed its coasts. One day she intended to visit them all starting out at Jaywick Sands and returning to there from the opposite direction. The inferred friend reminded Maude Millet that people who actually lived at the seaside were different from normal folk. Listening to the sea had a decidedly soporific effect and tended to make people moon about on cliff-tops dreaming up myths and constructing legends that are nothing really more than the call of the gull or the breathing of the tide.
If Maude Millet spoke about piers, crazy golf, strolling along the promenade, big laughing twirling clowns with mouths where coloured balls could be popped in, clifftop romances, shady lodging-houses, big ferris wheels with the cradle-chair you inhabited always at the top, pink candy floss, the ghost house where the joyful shrieks soon turned nastier than the real frights, bent teeth in dodgem shunts, characters who had never known love loitering by the bandstand in the park, abandoned beach huts, cheap cd markets ... if she spoke about such matters, Dukas did not listen because he was busy following Colonel Mannion. Such was Dukas' guile, the Colonel thought he followed him.
***
Dukas moved to this same town (where Claude lived) from a dubious part of the country in 1964 and set up home on his own in the more industrial streets, north to northeast of the town centre. He had a terraced twouptwodown, with straight steep stairs, although the alleyway down the side supposedly made it a semi-detached.
Doctor Mannion, the one who had examined Claude's body, had a much older sister who happened to live next door to Dukas and, despite this being the start of the permissive age, she and Dukas established a relationship "over the garden fence" - but no further. When Mannion visited his sister - just before Claude's death - he was introduced to Claude who was then working as a ledger clerk at the local shoewear factory, the railings of which could be just about seen at the end of the street. The railings of which could be just about seen. The railings of which...
***
Dukas believed that there was someone else accompanying him along the track of a dream parallel with his own. This person was there to watch over him as he slept, teasing out dreams for Dukas by whispering sweet nothings in his ear, leading him hopefully into endless summers long gone. And, as the dreams progressed, this sleeping invigilator took up a rutted file and smoothed the dreams so that he could enter them, without the necessity of the town's reality changing at all ... hopefully.
If it all went wrong, however, re-entry was hell to pay. There was someone else with whom he took it in turns to share dreams, and this happened to be a dream version of his latest lady-who-did (Maude Millet's imaginary friend, that friend with whom she discussed the seaside visits) and this lady stopped Dukas exploring those shops of the town through which he wanted to browse and maybe purchase a frilly item or a coal scuttle or a ripe cut of brisket beef...
This particular lady-who-did was a stickler for keeping to the rules. Dukas had to follow her into a grocery shop, where a friendly enough fellow had nothing but tins of processed peas past the sell-by date on his shelves, which they ended up having as midnight feasts.
He wanted to go into the cobblers, where the model with a hammer poised above the shoe-last would smile and welcome him into another dream.
He wanted to go into hat shops, where they served fairies as well as people like Dukas, and where there were cash canisters zooming along the ceiling on taut piano wires.
He wanted to go into coffee shops, where his dear departed grandmother would buy up a whole tier of colourful jam and cream cakes, just so that he could choose the one he wanted (usually the coconut pyramid).
He wanted to go into the knickerwear shop, above all, so that he could change his pants for prettier shop-soiled versions.
He often woke with a start, reluctantly returned from the exile of dreams ... only to find himself trapped for a time in yet another one.
***
Dukas' whole conversation and character were akin to double book entries, neatly circumscribed, meticulously balanced and woefully irrelevant to any "buzz" that the Sixties began to sound off. He stayed in the town another 25 years, despite some call to go to Australia. Mannion's sister died in 1972, because, as Mannion had predicted, she became someone beyond her own means. Claude must have been a bit like that, too, which, in hindsight, could account for Claude's death: his mind had to find more space. People of that generation in England (even refugees) had constructed expectations beyond the ability of their own nous. Death was the only way to broaden the mind for such folk. Death or dreaming, and that was something which Dukas had years to perfect.
Dukas objected to being followed. He had always objected, but viewed it as something of a twist of fate, like the way his teeth grew in his head or the angle of his dangle. It was merely a part of his life, attached to his existence as firmly as a billion barnacles glued forever to pier stanchions around the country's coastal towns. So long as the incessant observation did not interrupt his day to day enjoyment of life, he was content. He could still smoke, though there were those who objected, so he was happy. He revelled in his lovely creamy yoghurt, and positively exploded with desire when he discovered its use in Indian cooking; so, he was happy. Fresh newspaper in his hand, sticky bun in his pocket, the park surrounding him and lending him a semblance of privacy, Dukas felt like he was on top of the world. If he put his mind to it, he could even imagine the watchers as security men (and women, of course) keeping a covert eye on a Very Important Person. After all, in this town where WH Smith was the main megastore, there was no one else to think about.
The time he did object, however, was when his shared dreaming became fair game. And his latest lady-who-did, duster in hand and tickler aggravating her excessive nostril hair, fled his place to impart false wisdoms to Maude Millet's eccentric imagination.
***
Brittany, as always, preyed on his mind. What he had seen there pecked away at grainy bits of grey matter, coalescing sometimes into great, complex systems of conspiracy theory and secretive underground compliance. At other times, he could not see the clear picture, as though the scene was hazed over by his endless cigarettes. But memory told him the truth, usually. When dreaming didn't steal it and distort it, casting it aside like just another nightmare to be forgotten and forgiven in the light of the next day.
He had found someone Else with his own name. Interest tickled, the memory of the old book still fresh in his mind, Dukas had tracked this person down to a small shop on the outskirts of one of the many small, welcoming French villages. He'd had every intention of confronting them with the coincidence, but his chance had been scuppered when he approached the shop. Sitting on a fountain across the road, gaze averted in such a way as to attract full attention, sat a woman. She was the image of Maude Millet, even down to the notebook and the stub of pencil tucked behind her ear. Dukas paused, confused, but could still hear the hurried clatter of Maude's footsteps way behind him. This woman, then, was not her, but a simulacrum of her, cast in sunlight and exposed as a watcher by her attitude and dress.
She was watching the Dukas in the shop, of that Dukas was sure. Noting him, Nothing him, allowing him no space to breathe or dream or expand into anything other than an Else ... or, even, to die.
The sight had disturbed Dukas all the way back on the ferry. Ever since then he had been unamused at the constant, indirect haranguing. Until, finally, he decided to take charge. With an old exercise book with lines the wrong way, and a pencil he had not used since his school-days, he sharpened the dulled lead on his crooked teeth and wrote down a make-believe observation. He added an impossible time, a risqué comment, then dropped the paper into the pavement grating in front of WH Smith. Let them make of that what they will, he thought.
Behind him, Maude Millet gasped.
***
One afternoon, all the shops in the town closed early. Signs were flipped over from open, shadows invited in as blinds were drawn and dusty lights extinguished. Maude Millet wandered down the street with a vague expression on her face, unable to confer with her snitches, notebook empty of times and dates. Her children had stayed in bed that day, flat and insubstantial, and her stomach ached with something akin to memory. The only sound in the street was the steady rumble from beneath WH Smiths, where Dukas had once bought a book about Brittany. More lies, it seemed, were needed now. Lies like Colonel Merchant Mannion arriving at Maude Millet's house at exactly the moment he should have arrived.
These typical backstreets of a largely forgotten inland town were fraught with a past that could only really be remembered from within a contrived future. Tardy children who had been to the park to play on the swings but had fled because of a dribbling man lurking behind the bandstand, ran down the street and, a split second later, ran down the street again in the same direction. There used to be shops further down this street on the left, including WH Smith, within sight of Maude Millet's house, where Dukas used to get his shopping, but now everything was lengthened out ... and the lines, along which the terraced houses ranged, grew to a point much further along.
Later, Dukas passed Maude Millet's house, ignoring the three faces (two women and a man) peering down at him through the net curtains of the bedroom window - and he continued along the street, with the point of perspective drawing no nearer. Later, he found himself passing Maude Millet's house from the opposite direction, but now all the curtains were tightly drawn upon the assembly which the Colonel must be conducting within: a circle of three, hand in hand, around the pack of saucy cards from Clacton-on-Sea.
That eccentric trio must have summoned Dukas from the ether to their rapping-table. He was to be their Raging Captain, their Red Indian, their little Creature of the Shadows, their Dark Minder on the landing, all wrapped into one. They told him he would make their fortunes, when they pitched and struck tents from seaside resort to seaside resort. He was their version of Gypsy Rose Lee. They told him to swing a pendant above the optional futures. And there was nothing he could do about it. He was, however, determined not to be a seaside novelty act. He poked the pendant down his throat and expelled one great wave-covered sea of unconsciousness.
***
Eventually, Mannion introduced Dukas to Claude's widow in 1973. This was against Mannion's better judgement: but Dukas and Claude's widow had so many disappointments between them, Mannion thought such disappointments would give them something in common.
All three of them (Mannion, Dukas and Claude's widow) were watching news items concerning the Watergate affair on the TV in Mannion's town flat. Nixon had evidently been grassed by a foot odour powder salesman to a mysterious inhabitant of the White House tape library. Unaccountably, however, Mannion's mind was elsewhere, speculating that the death of Claude and that of Kennedy had not been poles apart: except that Kennedy had been shot.
"I never liked that Nixon fellah," drawled Dukas.
"I think all Presidents need to be ruthless and devious, otherwise, he will not be able to do his job properly in dealing with foreign powers. Nixon's crime is being found out," said someone else, indeed, a near pukka Else, previously unnoticed.
Claude's widow was silent. She knew this meeting had been arranged on neutral ground, for some diplomatic form of match-making. The age difference, Mannion felt, was possibly a problem, Dukas now being 42 and Claude's widow in her early sixties. But that would not matter: she kept her figure well.
The repercussions of that meeting fan outwards, even today. Still, Mannion should not blame himself, for even the smallest action could set different cog-wheels turning in the vast machine of random fate.
***
Dukas turned his head away, as his lady-who-did struggled into her deep-boned corsets. She was off to get a heavy-duty screwdriver, she said, from the ironmonger.
He heard the distant crowds chanting obscenities at the football match - no doubt the visiting team had brought their own followers by the coachload, for there would only be nobody to watch. And maybe no home team to play against, either.
Dukas tried to get out of bed, but the dream had him out of his head instead.
When his lady-who-did, in real life, or as real as it can be believed to be, arrived, she started straightaway mucking out. She no longer needed approval from the man whom she knew as Dukas, for it was the house that was now all important ever since he had become bed-ridden. She had a nightmare last night, but like most dreams, she had forgotten not only its content but the fact she had dreamed it at all.
As soon as she had upturned generous doses of disinfectant into the most vulnerable parts of the house, she sat down at the kitchen table. She had infused herself a nice cup of piping hot tea. She liked it strong.
"Well, it's been a day today, so far, hasn't it?" she mumbled to herself.
She heard creaking upstairs. That nice Mr Dukas turning over. He was always happy.
"Wonder when he'll pay me," she muttered to the reflection in the spinning surface of brown. "Three months it's been and no sign of a brass farthing. But it's such a pleasure to look after a fine house..."
She beamed round at the sparkling walls but then glared at the weeds that she could see out of the kitchen window encroaching upon the crazy paving. A wind picked up and the tree towards the end of the squat garden cast a moving skeleton of light across her pinched features. She flicked it away as if it were a cobweb.
The creaking upstairs grew louder. He was no doubt dropping cigarette ash on the sheets, she mused in growing concern.
The milk had gone off in the tea. She blew a raspberry and, in getting up in a hurry, accidentally knocked the high stool to the floor. Having flushed the tea-leaves down the sink, she shook a fist through the window at the weeds ... and at the rubbish that was threatening to clamber from the dustbin.
She trod upstairs to see if Mr Dukas had escaped from his bed for any reason. She would also take the opportunity of emptying his chamberpot, a job which she hated since it was unwieldy to carry and the strong yellow fluid usually had soggy cork-tipped dog-ends floating about in it. She discovered that he was indeed still safely swaddled in winding-sheets.
He woke with a start ... and stared, as if he were seeing his lady-who-did for the first time. It seemed he could not breathe properly, for he pointed down his throat. He then fell back and lay peacefully sleeping.
"Mr Dukas, what's the matter? Lungs a bit dicky, this morning, eh? You shouldn't smoke so much in bed, makes brown stains on the ceiling." She pointed up at the tell-tale archipelago of marks.
Such a shame, for he was once such a gentleman. A bit like her son would be when he was older. She knelt beside his bed, to pull out the chamberpot whence it was customarily kept under the springs.
"My, Mr Dukas, you've not done anything in it!"
She stared into bone white and saw no visions of the future there. She was used to reading the yellow lees in his chamberpot - could read them better than tea-leaves. So, today, she was at a loss...
She then discovered with gut-wrenching horror that her dear Mr Dukas was threaded from throat to belly-bottom by a huge plumber's screwdriver - and it must have been his death in real life that had made him wake with such a start. After all, Dukas was merely the Sorcerer's Apprentice who hadn't yet mastered his tools nor turnstiled his parts 'gainst the need for night-letting. The trouble, aslso, was that Paul Dukas, the French composer, lived and died in Paris, not Brittany. But that must have been someone else. Dukas' lady-who-did suddenly did not, for how does one when there is no one for whom to do?
She fell to her knees in a snowdrift of paper, realising as she writhed that she was already destroying the only evidence connecting the mortified Dukas with his vanished attacker. On the papers, footprints sat bloody and incriminating. But she had twitched once too often, and in a whirlwind of grief the marks vanished forever into randomness. Perhaps, she thought, with an unfamiliar depth, spectrographic analysis of each and every atom in the room could reveal, by the application of chaos mathematics and a planet's supply of luck, their previous locations. But then she realised that this was her world, that there were more atoms in this one small place than the whole universe, and God took a step back in awe.
She cried and mourned the death of another boss, not once wondering at the presence of such a huge tool. The point in her brain where dreams were made, whether naturally or by demand, shivered and twitched in agitation. This point was angry that there were no more dreams to have, but also sad that its previous partner had now slipped somewhere wholly different. Dreams and memories were mutually exclusive components of a rounded life.
The spitted Dukas was left with no option but to dream. He dreamt of a hundred faceless people below a grey street, tap-tapping away on an infinite number of typewriters; stormy seas and green smiles; telephone calls from far away, claiming ownership of a book never read and, perhaps, not yet written. And all the time, the plumber's tool parting him up the middle did minute adjustments. Eventually, he thought, he may be tightened up and fit for anything.
***
His lady-who-did stumbled her way downstairs. There were scraps of paper clotted to her aboriginal feet, decorated with words she did not wish to read. They flapped there, like a chicken's useless wings. The bannister had begun to grow again, sprouting shoots implanted in its genes but paused at the whim of a carpenter. Now, the hall resounded to the amplified creaks of stretching wood, and smelled of a pine forest after a light summer shower.
She made it into the kitchen before she saw what was becoming of the house. The nooks and crannies had taken over, forcing themselves into all the places where space held sway. The old, wide hallway had become a muck-infested nook, the living room a cranny. The disinfectant she had spread around earlier - though how much earlier she was beginning to question - had killed dirt in sad black patches. Feeling sorry for herself, and even more sorry for the dirt, she went down on her hands and knees and dreamed of a time when all this was merely a part of her job.
Mr Dukas would still be upstairs, then. Waiting for her to finish the chores, so that much could be done if need be. Now she was only doing it for herself, and raised as a good honest lass, this was something she was painfully unused to.
She wondered what he had been dreaming when the tool had cut him short. If she knew, she reckoned - if she had stayed with him - she would know a lot more of the twists and turns of life than the long, straight road she had travelled. No side streets, not even a white line, because there was never anyone coming the other way. Never even a service station, or roadkill, or piles of lipstick painted dog-ends in the gutters. Long, straight.
***
Later, after Mannion had left for good, Maude Millet found out a painful truth. ddd cds were silent. Too perfect with the soundlessness of approaching death.
Dukas, too, had been seen passing down the street several times, always from the same direction. Mannion had told them of the time Dukas had gone out with Claude's widow. Her son - her final gift from Claude, deposited the night before his pointless death - had stayed with Dukas for the night, and Dukas had even refrained from smoking his regular twenty fags. Pity there was no way in for either of them.
Time had been a failure, Mannion had said, because Dukas could not drag himself from the niche he had made in life. A cleft rarely referred to, let alone filled. That of fall-guy. Mannion had left then, and said goodbye to Maude with a finality that begged no questioning.
And she had known, then, that she was even less than she had always assumed. Her constant haranguing of Dukas, and her secret trysts with Mannion and the other - her spinsterly friend, facelesss and calm - were meaningless in the light of her new discovery. Even the Dark Minder took a step back in amazement, though he had let her voiceless baby cds out into the shadows of memory long ago.
Maude Millet, one-time heroine of the town, regular walker of the streets and supplier of information to the alleged room beneath the old WH Smiths, was an Else. But not even a Somebody Else. Not even that. When Mannion said goodbye, he said it to Nobody Else. And Maude Millet's time in the town was over.
***
What else could she do?
Dukas' lady-who-once-did spent the next few years writing retrospective bestsellers. They were books that had sold extremely well decades ago, but which people had now forgotten. Putting her name to their re-written wonders gave her a sense of peace, and when one of them suggested itself as Dukas' work, she gladly inscribed its spine with the name of Debussy.
She even found an old signature of his, traced it and stitched it into the leather cover.
***
Someone else eventually met Claude's daughter (who still liked Beatles records, John Lennon being, in some strange way, her martyred Christ figure) and, well, they quickly had the glad eye for each other: in 1989, they ran away together to another part of the country and married. They returned for Claude's second funeral (after a necessary exhumation to replace the corpse's lost feet), an affair which Mannion had financed at his own expense as a sort of belated wedding present.
Dukas was now himself chief accountant, he told Mannion, in a very successful small business up north making disposable bed sheets ... and he told Mannion how computers had taken over a lot of the hard grind: he had been lucky enough to get the job by being in the right place at the right time.
Mannion has not heard from any of them for several years now (and is unaware Dukas is the man upon whom Maude Millet once had conspiratorial thoughts). It is strange how people move about, leaving memories but not their bodies. In many ways, Mannion wished he had died along with Claude. He would probably never have heard of Margaret Thatcher, though thankfully her memory was now fast fading.
Being a Colonel and a Socialist was not a happy lot in life. He wondered if Dukas's bed sheet business was still going, in the deep recession of the early to mid-90's. Maybe Mannion should have emigrated to the other side of the moon, when he was young enough to start again.
Mannion wondered if Dukas ever met Claude, or vice versa, all that time ago, other than as mere passing strangers in the town centre during the single year of their urban contemporaneity. He hoped so. On the other hand, perhaps they were both dolls in a dark cupboard no child ever opened. Sadness comes with age. But Mannion can still amuse people when he uses his Australian accent.
***
Perhaps Maude Millet had known all the time that Dukas could not be the Sorcerer, because she was. Indeed, she shared dreams with many Elses so that the dreams would be better for her on bounce-back: this together with the renting out of other dreams from her headlease dream was the only way for nice dreams to recur. She eventually dreamed that Colonel Mannion was not a Colonel at all but a Antipodean Communist spy and that they were kissing each other! He blew cigarette smoke into her lungs and then she blew it back into his. She was awoken by a roar as a gingerbread man scored a winning goal.
***
Whether the Elses were after my green overcoat or my supply of groceries was anybody's guess. Spooky knocking noises from under my bed were just about bearable. The configurations of cigarette-smoke that I was somehow compelled to exhale - instead of being my usual proud trick of linking ring to ring - made three strange clouded faces. Even the tracing of coasts in death's country became another face - then another. The Harlequin and Pierrot. Three's a crowd. Only two peccadilloes for each side of a sexual coin. And only the past could prevail, with yet one more present having lost its antipodean benchmark. I really had my moments.
One day, the lady-who-did actually sought me out from where I was hiding in Jaywick Sands, came splashing my salt-spored shanty-window ... well, that was just about the last entry in Maude Millet's diary about sagging eyes, melted mutter and me - a diary (not for straight gays but for a new brand of trendy asexuals) bought in WH Smith. A tide-mark for shoeless wraiths. A false-door contrivance in the ghost house of a bank's financial futures. Lottery's scorched finger. Or Else!
(Previously unpublished.)