The Sun is God — Teika Marija Smits

This story was recently published in the author’s debut collection: UMBILICAL (NewCon Press) HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous review of Teika Marija Smits is linked HERE.

***

“‘No, Eugenie, that can’t be right,’ her father said. ‘For God is the Almighty. And not the wayward star about which our planet turns.’ His face had suddenly brightened. ‘Ah, but you must mean Jesus, His son. Ess-oh-en. Although the two words sound the same, they are not the same.’”

Near the outset of reading this significant story of painting-as-pain in the nineteenth century, the above homophone makes me think that the inadvertent chance that delayed my reading it till now seems a significant destiny so as to resonate with my concurrent reading, as it happens, of an even newer published work regarding ‘the sun machine’ HERE where this same homophone is also important! With other chance connections of art and its muse. And the coming of the ghost of a famous dead artist to be the model for some future artistic truth as rapture. All mixed with themes arising from Eugenie’s son strangled at birth by his own cord and her downtrodden existence as mixing  her own bodily parts as a paint mixer for her brother Edward’s art; indeed she is far more than just the brother’s muse as empowered by the explicitly pervasive sun. “And into all of this she pours her very soul.” But her own inferred self-portrait a still life of a broken jug. And there is, for me, a clinching elbow moment as pivot or trigger: “…turns to the ‘self-portrait’ of Edward, who is seated at a table with Emperor at his elbow,…”, Emperor being her cat, I recall. This story works on several levels and I am most inspired that I have been allowed to read it by whatever power presiding from within it.

“One day, she imagines, there will be great machines of steam to grind pigment and mix paint and imprison it within a metal tube…”

Aimages A

Continued from here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/2023/11/19/dwindling-5/

CONCLUDED AIMAGES HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/2024/02/11/the-final-aimages/

The Waiting Room by Stephen Volk

I did not want to miss the opportunity of sampling, for potential readers, a story recently published in THIS new acclaimed book collection by Stephen Volk, sampling it as part of what I call my ongoing ‘Dessemination’ project here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/01/24/39772/

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Volk&submit=Search

***.

“An author is not bound by legal contract to believe what he writes. We would all be the poorer if he were. Therein lies the task, as I see it. To make the downright impossible feel, if for but a minute, for a page—for a book—more real than the world at the reader’s elbow.”

And alongside that significant elbow moment (and two other elbow moments in it),  the author makes the ‘downright impossible feel’ as real as the story’s summoning of Charles Dickens, as he once summoned for me Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock. Summoning, too, a gestalt from a tessellation  of coincidences, and stories within other frame stories and ghostly echoes of Dickens’ Signalman —  as we grapple with the narrative painter and Dickens himself in a conundrum of plagiarism between a painting of a woman and an already printed story,  and the poignant secrets thus revealed. A ghost story for ghost story lovers.

Four Last Songs

Richard Strauss wrote Four Last Songs for Soprano and Orchestra. Many think he is related to Johan Strauss of Vienna Waltz fame – but nothing could be further from the truth. But is anything further from the truth than anything else? Truth is relative, some seem to believe. A moveable feast. A convenience. Their whole life is geared – at least subconsciously – to the fact that Truth is a matter of opinion rather than an intrinsic, unswerveable incontrovertibility. Life would be a misery if strait-jacketed by a so-called certainty of truth. Life is best when one can shift it about on the table, its various facets changing with the light or the angle of viewing it – ballooning one minute, shrinking the next. Truth can fall off the table and creep about of its own volition, now a rodent-like truth, later a ghostly truth, sometimes merging with the carpet itself or becoming just another indistinguishable aspect of its pattern.

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

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

We ended up not wanting to have names. We ripped off our unseen labels one by one. There needed to be an example set, however. Nobody would unname themselves without a lead to follow. A First Mover. The pre-emptive Clockmaker. If this were a story, the author would start with the example-setting character’s name – followed by a narrative of his rite-of-passage from name to namelessness. From Strauss, via Stress, to Self. A tale of bravery and hardship, of a dimmer-switch controlling the light of identity, of those who failed to follow and remained named, of those who did follow and became unnamed. Yet to name the leading character as he was once named would be to jam the dimmer-switch by wedging in what it was trying to dim. The others who remained named would gain prominence by having real characters’ names in the story while the rest floundered about unidentified – not only confusing the pecking-orders within the plot but the plot itself. To call them by false names or even by letters like A, B, C would, no doubt, cloud the issue even further. Meanwhile, it’s good for any story’s author to relax and concentrate on the plot’s landscape, its spirit of place, before worrying about the entrance of characters…

The public park in Colchester, with Norman Castle, flower-neatened gardens, an empty bandstand now bereft of Strauss wind music, all eventually leading down grassy slopes towards a small boating-lake. Nobody has hired a boat today. It must be one of those times when everyone is asleep at home. The Longest Day of the year. Light at Night like the Land of the Midnight Sun. Even here in England’s Essex. The dimmer-switch of the Sun turned right up.

Without people, there can be no story to tell. But now, at first dimly seen, are tall dark shadows wandering around the Castle. They are the nameless Masters of Existence trying to form gradually into real people. They have been given no belief in the story-premise that all the real people are at home sleeping with apocalyptic songs on their ear-buds. Yet the Masters, so-called, remain only partly formed into what they had hoped to become since the story had given them no names other than as fictionalised Masters of Existence, no names on which to hang their identities. The story refused them any such luxury. So mere shadows (if slightly flesh-corrupted) they remained, ever-circling the Castle like forgotten druids. Masters of Existence who could not even master existence for themselves!

Suddenly, there appeared, on the margins of the boating-lake, the legendary Clockmaker whose clocks had hands but no numbers but, more often, numbers but no hands, because, with the former, one could at least guess the time they told. A real flesh-and-blood person. Taught by Masters, but lacking their ambition of existence, the Clockmaker actually succeeded in becoming what they had desired but failed to be. The Clockmaker knew that any ambition destroys the goal of that same ambition.

And now is time for waking. We are here, stretching, fully-formed, truly nameless, stirred by pre-alarmed timepieces within our minds but pure of heart and unconstrained by the deadlines of finding identities to wrap ourselves in. Owning identities simply because we didn’t want identities, the only pre-condition for identity being not to have one. Thus spake Zarathustra. And the story can begin at last…

The song was left unsung. He scrutinised the faces before him in the audience, frozen as he was by their stares. Remarkably, the stage on the park’s bandstand where he performed was relatively unlit while the audience itself blazed with criss-crossing searchlights, a theatrical effect that sometimes worked, sometimes flopped. Tonight, it was the latter…

…except he happened to depend on this performance of performances to launch his career, indeed move it from wooden boards to electronic screens. An important talent scout was known to be sitting among all those faces on the grass and benches, but which icy stare, which particular slow hand-clapper…?

Singing was never his forte. Especially when singing, as Tenor, the Soprano part in Strauss. He was fundamentally a stand-up comic, simply throwing in a ballad or lightsome novelty number to recall the old-fashioned days when comics did just that — wrap their jokes amid a number of other all-round talents. But he was no Bruce Forsyth, especially as Bruce is now dead. Come to think of it, even the singer’s jokes were never anything to write home about. Dancing was the hardest thing of all.

He started clip-clopping on his metalled heels in an attempt to win back the audience and one member of that audience in particular. His steps grew heavy, the taps unrhythmical, the moves too easily followed, all his tricks gone wrong, as the bandstand’s searchlights grew angry and intense like tunnel-beacons through the otherwise dark skies of a new blitz and war.

Eventually, he knelt on the round sheltered stage, just as the lighting turned back upon him away from the now darkening audience amid a last firework-fizzing display.

“I beg thee, listen,” he intoned Shakespeareanly, amid the increasingly stony silence. He looked up, blinded by the lights, eyes wet and continued: “I was made from passion and taught by masters. Those who physically conceived me created the passion that created me and the angel-muses became the masters who taught me of their own existence beyond the scope of mere physicality. Whether mind or matter, spirit or flesh, or simply a mixture of both, a smile on pork-lips is still a smile. My jokes still jokes, even if there is no laughter to accompany them. My four last songs still songs, even given no applause. My steps still steps, given no real dance for them to become. A choreography of mis-timing is still a choreography to follow. My stories still stories, given no print to carry them…”

The lights dimmed one by one. Gradually, the applause in the dark audience grew from nothing until it eventually became unstoppable by deafening the rest of the soliloquy and its potential series of escapist punch-lines.

As a solitary weak beam lit magically upon his kneeling confessional, someone in the audience abruptly sat on their hands and hummed the Blue Danube Waltz into the silence. Counter-tenor, not castrato.

The Last Hero, Ghost or Machine

IN THREE MOVEMENTS

PROLOGUE

He tried to be simple but it never worked. He tried it without a name. But it involved several guesses that simply made it more complicated. He then tried it with his real name. This led to an unholy mess of recrimination. He then tried a pseudonym. That worked better. Also two titles worked better than one, but arguably less well than none. Certainly better than more. That could not be explained. So, he had a certain amount of perplexity about possible titles but learned to live with it. Two titles became the optimum. Neither crowded or uncrowded. But I sensed there was a shadowy third.

He had earlier, questioned, though, whether it should have a beginning. And if no beginning, why not no end as well? But everything needed to have a beginning and an end even if he did not intend them to be a beginning and an end. Perhaps they were simply beginning and end by default. A story with no middle like a mansion without a roof.

There was never any question about authorship, however. Everything was what it was, with no unnecessary nomenclature together with the minimum use of long words and heavy syntax. And he was whoever he was, even if disguised by a pseudonym. 

Now we come to the unravelling simplicity of a work with two titles (and a shadowy third), but with no author, and a main protagonist conveniently known by an otherwise unwanted name — and ostensibly a work with no beginning or end, because he had caused its ending to be truncated or cropped after it had been finished.

***************

He was a lover of old English churches. He loved especially those single-towered or single-spired churches with basic styles, such as undecorated wooden box-pews, an unwordy pulpit, a crudely manufactured (even makeshift) altar, silent bell-ringers and a pervading atmosphere of natural faith uncluttered by any sense of evil or even by a simple doubt.

He (our man) had left you at the hotel, telling you that he may be quite a long time today as he wished to explore St Nemo’s Church in Desborough with particular care, because a famous knight was supposed to have found his final resting-place there. A knight  who had featured quite heavily in an unnamed book which he was investigating so as to simplify a view of history that had wrongly been complicated by unworthy historians just in it for the money.  Our man hoped that there may be some textual or textural inscription on the tomb that would explain why the knight had been given his title of ‘Sir’. Particularly with which monarch he had found favour, there being several possible monarchs whose respective periods of reign had crossed the time-line of the knight’s own life.

“The plural of opus is opera,” said our man, with characteristic absent-minded absurdity. He then told a hotel worker he would need a lunch-box for his day at Desborough, in hope that this tone of homeliness would make the other forget the absurdity he had just voiced.

“Have you asked the kitchen staff for a lunch-box?” this hotel worker asked. Evidently, our man’s ploy had worked well.

“They told me to ask again in the morning,” he replied. He laughed upon thinking that the word ‘replied’ had ‘lied’ built-in. Then immediately he airbrushed away the thought that had caused the laughter.

The night was full of dreams that our man, in his search for simplicity, also tried to brush away come morning. Dreams were easier to forget than most things. He had effectively forgotten about his own untruth about planning to ask the kitchen staff in the morning because he actually did ask the hotel’s kitchen staff in the morning and they fortuitously provided a lunch-box for him to take, although it was full of what later became a congealed mess. 

He said goodbye to the hotel as if it were a person instead of a renovated mansion, and began his trudge through the Essex creeks towards the church at Desborough. The weather was inclement and he was thankful for his thermal vest.

“Thank you, thank you…” he muttered absently to himself, as he watched the spire gradually exceed the distance between itself and the hotel from which he came. The journey should have been more straightforward, but one had to account for the number of missed turnings. As ever, there was only a single complex way to describe everything; unfortunately that would not have helped his ambitions to capture a confident simplicity from between the jaws of difficult doubt. The journey was probably full of tangents and misadventures. He preferred a straight unbroken line between A and B and so it turned out to be for our reading purposes here. But he did allow report of the lost lunch-box. He would tell you about it later to excuse his excessive appetite.

Despite the never-ending glimpses of the spire seeming to move by its own volition rather than from his changing vantage-point, the destination was eventually reached before this part of the story’s end. The exterior of the church was lit by a sudden glance of the sun through the clouds, simultaneously lifting his heart in the process. He had been particularly crestfallen by the loss of the lunch-box as well as by the anti-climax of arrival. The sun, however, seemed to lift the church from its own slough of despond. The wet roofs of the surrounding village could be seen through the trees as simple as an impression. Not a painting so much as a forgotten dream. 

He approached the door of the church, having first ascertained there was no relevant stone-marker in the graveyard concerning the knight in question. Such an important titled personage would probably have his resting-place within the church walls … and so it turned out to be, his carved stone likeness crowning the tomb’s lid, giving the impression that he had two bodies: one hard and permanent that was on view, the other just the congealed mess within.

“Thank you, thank you…” our man again muttered absently to himself. “Hmmm, this must be him. A simple turn of events. What was expected is what has happened. Thank you, indeed.”

It was too dark inside the church to make out visually the box-pews with any degree of clarity. Rearing from one of them, a huge grim shadow held out his missing lunch-box. Was this simply what one would have expected given the circumstances of time and motion? Or the most frightening experience possible? The sunshine, evidently now permanently in existence outside the church, was illuminating the altar-window like glimpses of a true Heaven rather than stains of a false one. A diversion thankfully back towards simplicity.

“Don’t forget me,” he heard you say inside his head. You must have known he had been in danger; but, sitting in the hotel lounge reading a Henry James novel, you was, in fact, further away than any such impression could vouchsafe.  You would have preferred M.R. James. But there had been no need to worry even if you had given yourself good reason to worry. Your hero returned before nightfall. 

“There are two Heavens, one called Hell, the other History,” our man  noted in his note-book after lightly rubbing, for many hours, a soft pencil-lead over his own thermal vest which he had earlier stretched, like tracing-paper, upon the alphabetical interstices of the benighted stone box-lid of the knight’s tomb. God is the one true hero: he thought his last thought, later in your arms. There was no ending to crop off. But soon there would be!

****************

The soldiers marched through the forest, some even taller than the trees. These soldiers were actually over-engineered robots at the same time as being scaled down to appear like giant human beings; they marched under the orders of two special robots that were in turn scaled up to appear like stunted versions of the gods depicted in the Ancient Book.  But not the same ancient book that our man once cherished and taught you to read in humility. A book more likely to be name-checked in Lovecraft than in James.

It was as if nobody understood the chain of command but were jockeying for positions in the variously perceived pecking orders of robot, human and god.

“How many more?” roared one god to the other.

“Millions, millions of them, marching to their death,” was the reply, with redoubled roar to outbid the screeching air.

Wild bird-fighters soared and slanted, sky-skidding and sky-skimming above the belittled forest. A huge forest belittled into a wood by those who marched through it. One by one the soldiers died a terrible death, across eternities of hand-to-hand fighting, the single force of a single army battling within its own ranks amid a makeshift war.

“There are two many heroes,” roared a pipsqueak god, diminished by the cruelty he oversaw.

“Too many brave hearts,” roared an even pipsqueakier god.

The roars were only roars because all other sounds had become a foil of silence. The roars were – in pitiful effect – barely beyond the threshold of hearing. One solitary robot having survived the eternities looked towards the old spire that had once represented an earlier god who had held sway upon the infighting army. Our man wore a soldier’s metal armour and was in truth merely a soldier disguised as a robot, as would become clear in almost instantaneous hindsight. The spire became – amid the roiling mists at the end of time – an image upon the cover of the Ancient Book. Spineless and without title. The forest’s trees were bending down between them like courtly pages-in-waiting.

Smothered by silence, our man as a cyborg soldier tried to find another soldier like himself to fight, rather than have his eyes pecked out by a bony bird-fighter settling – even as he thought about it – upon his face from the sky. But it was simply a ghost configured from the soldier’s own metal-eyelid wings hovering like eye-floaters.

The last hero was one too many.

**************

The fog came down like a safety-curtain. The voice you then heard wasn’t muffled but seemed as clearly struck as a well-tempered bell. It rent the air in much the same way as you imagined an opera singer would rend it in recitative to himself, probably unaware you were close by. You made as if to answer but this was too early in the morning to trust any voice. Cold and crisp as a Christmas older than simply old-fashioned.

Our man had often scolded you for failing to be wary of strangers early in the morning.

“You know it’s just as dangerous and as lonely at dawn as at night-time,” he said. You would nod. His warning strangely reminded you of the case of late-night drinkers religiously avoiding driving themselves home because of the law regarding inebriation, but then they would get up early in the morning after a similar skinful the previous night and drive without thinking. If they were breathalysed they would still be over the limit. Old Christmases were full of drivers weaving all over the road, at any time of the day or night, looking for innocent parties to maim, it seemed. If it wasn’t so funny, you would have laughed at this train of thought. The thought itself was confusing. You almost felt drunk yourself, but you never drank spirits. Or even beer.

Upon this morning in question, however, your mind was as clear as the aforementioned bell. Our man’s warning took root as you heard the lonely traveller’s relentless soliloquy become a sing-song rant that rent onward through the now mist-turning fog, while retaining a vague resemblance to spoken speech. You could see the face at this point for the first time amid the ‘smoke’ rising from the dawn frost that the fog was, even as you spoke, simply allowing to take its place. It was a muzzily kind face, clamped into the sweetest smile you had ever seen on a man.

The figure held out an upturned palm as if singing Christmas Carols for a charity. However, there were others behind with faces that looked far from Christmassy. They could have easily found a suitable dance routine in a film of thrills, you thought, as you gathered yourself to run. But your limbs were now rusted metal, it seems, not flesh. All of these faces must still be suffering last night’s skinfuls, as they shuffled closer into view. The stitching of their outer surfaces allowing their innards to poke though.

At heart, you knew you was too old to run. Our man had often said that age brings dignity, together with a counterproductivity beyond our control, representing forces that eventually destroy the very dignity that brought these forces into being. It was now you wished you had been drinking. Then, none of this would have seemed to matter. You absently heard cars on the near-by by-pass. This was the onset of commuter traffic just as, against the odds of reality, a once permanently static dawn turned to rush-hour.

“Run, run as if your life depends on it.” You heard his voice as if it were actually there. It overtook the operatic crooning from the shamblers of the morning’s school run. Kids once run over, now alive again to seek retribution from those who had swerved into their young bodies, because of drink. Led by the stylish figure of the smiling soloist for an unseasonal chorus of trick-or-treating.

“I am the knight,” you piped. “Knighted for good works and donations to help the wheels of civilisation go round. Mistaken identity. Begone!”

Your voice was never as strong as our man’s but you stood your ground. The world was going round as if you were truly drunk. Running was never even a starter. “A bad trick. A bad treat. I was never a drunk driver. Was I?”, words that you intended to intone inwardly. Strangely, you realised the sound of the words had come out all wrong. It was as if you were also singing … just like the unholy chorus … but in counterpoint … using a rich timbre uncharacteristic of your voice. Your normal squeaky undertones had vanished. Your feet may well have been packed in ice, but your voice was pure molten gold to match the maturing sunrise. And the golden limbs with which you walked.

“Not a drunk driver, Sir Knight, but a bad one.” It was unspoken. But you at least knew the truth. Drunk drivers were pilloried. Bad drivers simply endured. We can all have accidents. It was then you saw that the leading figure was our man himself, face still scarred by windscreen shards. Neck gored by gear-stick. Too long in the tooth for comfort. His voice had broken during the oldest Christmas of all, that dark season when those tricked from life before their time reached out for resurrection.

Upstaged, unsung, stripped of title, you took him in your arms as you would if he had been yourself and you poured out a poignant aria, till succumbing to the final curtain that lowered across the most dangerous time of day in the pretence of it being the safest. The shuffling shambling angels took his body away, no doubt, before the pre-emptive ending was truncated, even airbrushed away, to the extent that we shall never know that our man as the last hero had already come to your rescue before any of it had happened or merged as one. And he was knighted for it. Placed in gold armour and then embedded in stone, as belt and braces.

Is Emptiness Black or White?

The steaming coffee urns could only compete with the samovars infusing tea. The windows were misty with competing temperatures either side of them.

Late afternoon and Jack lounged back in the upright chair as he watched the waitress deliver coffee. In the old days, there were several of his old cronies at the same table but they had gradually expired (some in mid-chatter). Jack was alone with his thoughts … and dying dreams. The waitress smiled at him, a girl (far too young for him) with pleasant curves perceived under her long day’s dishevelled overall, but revealing a demeanour that suited the rather ‘posh’ ambiance that this particular café provided. The place was a bit too good for Jack, but he always relished spending more than he should on his refreshments to suit aspirations for a degree of classiness otherwise tantalisingly beyond his grasp. A top of the range café, for his means, was as unsuitable as Old Mother Hubbard coming to her cupboard and finding over-rich food for which she no longer had appetite. And nobody left to talk to him on equal terms. But habits died hard.

He overheard the start of a conversation even though he did not directly listen to it. “When’s your next mental session?” The speaker was a rough-looking man — in his mid-twenties, Jack guessed. Standards were surely slipping. High time for Jack to percolate at home, perhaps. Cheaper, too.

The man’s companion was a woman in dungarees. Jack was surprised she had been allowed entry. The two of them were seemingly, if unseemily, sharing a single all-day breakfast. She noticeably had teeth missing when she smiled. Perhaps, she was missing them, when she cried, too, Jack thought, whimsically. The dungarees were slightly shop-soiled despite her claim that… “I’ve just bought these brand new. Do you like them?” She fingered the arm.

The man winced and replied: “Better than a boiler suit or track suit or, what do they call them, shell suit, or any suit that suits you…” The man laughed at what he thought was a joke. Jack’s own secret joke was to turn a blind eye to the couple and imagine them gone, which became quite an easy process as they soon left the café, the waitress with the neat behind then quickly wiping their table down and clearing the used dishes as if they harboured germs beyond the norm of smeared yolk. 

Jack had earlier watched the waitress talking to the other staff behind the counter when the strange rough-looking couple had still been present. Jack assumed the staff had been tutting together as co-workers tended to do in any office, shop or café. Too proud to admit they were just a glorified greasy-spoon. Or bucket shop. Or backstreet lock-up for sweated labour. This café surely owned up to all their VAT returns. A cut above most other establishments. Jack was confident that his judgement of many years’ customer-service was well-grounded.

Jack’s train of thought took a downward turn. Time he called it a day. His pension could hardly stretch to this waitress service. His eyes filled with tears. A self-service sadness that took him unawares. He was usually such a chirpy, cocky individual, it was a strange experience for him to feel depressed – and he suddenly recalled the shell-suit’s companion talking about her next ‘mental session’. What multitude of sins did that expression contain, Jack wondered. Care-in-the-community on the brink? Or merely another attempt at the Times crossword?

The tears in his eyes were a direct result of this mental-session expression having lingered in his sub-conscious rather than having been caused by the sudden dawning upon him that his life of ‘café society’ was now drawing to its inevitable conclusion, and that this had been happening for some years … a sudden awareness of a gradual process. The couple’s reference to a ‘mental session’ had been a catalyst for something quite separately pre-existent within his mind, although the two events would remain forever inextricably linked by hindsight. 

His was the mental session that mattered. He had no control over such sessions held by other people. He could not be responsible for any mind but his own. Meanwhile, the waitress was now hovering round Jack’s own table, thus making him initially fear any approaching hints that he had been nursing his black coffee long enough, ready, as she appeared to be, to start clearing his table next. But, no, she was intent on making at least small talk last, it seemed. “Hello, Mr Clark, how are you today? Weather getting you down?” He had hardly noticed the weather through the steamed-up windows. It was hardly worth giving it the time of day. Habits died hard, he thought. Put a hat on it. Or the hot tin roof. He smiled back at the waitress who was relatively new and unnamed. He just heard her called Pet, short for Petula possibly. A pet name, indeed, used by her co-tutters behind the counter. Petula was too Sixties, too downtown. She must have been born in the late eighties, even nineties.

“How did you know my name?” he asked. He bit his tongue. It came out all wrong, too sudden. He should have been conspiring with her, or at least accepting the small talk rather than countering it with a sharp-drawn breath of a question.

“It’s just I know you from before.” Her voice was lilting in Welshness. Or French.

He looked casually into one of the top corners of the steamy room. Vaguely perceived within was an irregular shape that he could not reconcile with anything that had gone before. A tangle of material or garment-smalls: end-of-line bargains from a market-stall floating improbably or caught upon a nail on the inside café wall. An irregular shape because it should not have been there at all. This was a classy joint. Cast-offs or hand-me-downs represented a commodity in which a café could not possibly deal. He sweated, unsure if this was what was meant by a ‘mental session’. If so, he had never experienced one before and, therefore, could not compare it with anything else in his life.

“You knew me from somewhere else?”

She nodded. “You helped my Mum once. You were very kind. Don’t you recognise me? I was the little girl who sat on the couch when you were there. I was a bit shy.”

“Errr… Was that when she had called out for help – a premature birth…?”

“Yes, that was my sister. Or would have been my sister, had things been different.”

“I know… sorry…”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mr Clark. You did all you could. And if it hadn’t been for you, I’d’ve lost my Mum, too.”

He wondered now if this was a true memory being conjured into the open by a trick or entrapment of conversation, whereby he had been drawn into the girl’s own ‘mental session’, a mutual conspiracy of small talk grown too big for truth. He had a sense that he had already lifted himself up from the chair several times, motioning as if to leave the café, while simultaneously offering a generous gratuity, but the waitress held him fast by conversational means, cheeping and chirping about trivialities which he was too polite to ignore. Some independent strangers were wiping the café windows from outside in the street, although Jack felt – somewhere at the back of his mind – that to clean steamed-up windows one would need to do this from inside the café, not from outside. Nothing made sense otherwise. He remembered a nursery rhyme: Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the candlestick. He was uncertain what it meant. Or rather, implied. The meaning was quite simple, the implication less so. As in all stories and rhymes and other similar mental sessions, the searching for some holy grail of purpose or message was counterproductive for most conscious people who lived through them. He fingered her arm.

Jack eventually left the café society, intent on never crossing such boundaries again. Like all people, he saved lives, or killed lives, by the merest trivial action, of doing or not-doing the same thing.

Jack saw the waitress trying to peer through the clouded café window, as he marched downtown, too old for any Juliet to mistake him as her Romeo. He vanished amid the other ragamuffins.

#

“Upon examining the primary sources concerning the Coffee House society of the 17th century, there is a feeling among peers that Pepys was only the tip of an iceberg. Bigger, better diaries were kept telling of bigger, better fires and bigger, better plagues. It’s just that others of the time (rough diamonds in the main) had the good sense to seek to destroy these diaries before historians were able to take them as their own. Subsequent brainstorming and other similar mental sessions of posterity’s academics and intellectuals upon the existence or not of such rogue diarists out-doing Pepys were also thankfully destroyed by not writing them down in the first place. A good example of academia as cultural ‘suicide bomber’.” From ‘CAFÉ SOCIETY: SAMUEL PEPYS TO EDGAR DEGAS’ by James Clark, Emeritus Professor of History at the University Of Rhyme and Reason.

When I stumbled upon the now disused café that Clark had once frequented, I thought it was anything but. The building seemed full of life; the air sounded with jiving ghosts from the fifties when the place was a would-be Lloyds Corner House; the walls only needed a lick of paint to bring them back to life. My wife needed a similar lick of paint, too, but priorities were to earn a living from property development, hopefully with a TV show following our efforts at renovation work, useful as a spur to progress as well as a fateful backhander by means of a fee. My wife would only be able to afford her mud-packs, toning-up weekends and mental sessions with an expensive shrink as soon as a real income was rolling in from a new property development. She had to get stuck in, too, meanwhile. No point in manicured nails when she had to spend the day sandpapering.

It was a disused café, however. The deeds told a million stories … of its past, its period as a middle-class restaurant during the war years when they served three-course meals quite reasonably but only for people with manners. How they kept the riffraff out remained a mystery. However, it soon went to seed, before being revived as a milk bar with a juke box, then more latterly, a café with an eye on the passing lorry trade, then a café with posher pretensions but with no fail-safe method of deterring the everpresent onset of the riffraff again, then final dereliction as an empty Ligottian shopfront always being bill-posted, and that was when my wife and I stepped in. We were riffraff ourselves, of course. But we had pretensions to property-owning grandeur following a reasonable lottery win scooping us from the gutter. The building itself  had a massive mansion roof with chimneys stacks to match, I noted with delight. And I turned to the camera to show my delight.

I was now unsure about the TV show. There was only a single camera that followed us round. We had effectively given up hope of proper sponsorship by a major ‘peeping tom’ outfit wanting to sneak glimpses into our business trials and tribulations for eventual broadcast to the world, revealing our innermost marital quarrels over the building project and how it affected the rest of our lives; but there was, however, this little guy with a shoulder-shoot who did turn up on the first day of our building work; we assumed he was starting out himself in business as a TV programme creator, surely hoping to see the finished reels ending up in the hands of a big Channel 4 producer. So we turned a blind eye to him. We just allowed him in on most things regarding the café renovation and on our daily habits short of personal ablutions. We got used to his presence shadowing us with his whirring lenses, a sort of visionary overview becoming such a regular feature of our lives that he almost melted into the background. Forgotten, if pervasive. A cameraman we called Sam.

My wife did at first try to hold a conversation with Sam. But he was rather taciturn and we were really too busy to pay him much attention. We could have asked him what he did for a living if that was not already obvious. The circumstances of his sole purpose obviously being to film our actions on a day-to-day basis indeed cancelled out any opportunity for small talk other than the rather stylised interviews-to-camera that he arranged. I called them ‘interviews’, but it was rather Sam simply pointing the lens at us and letting us talk, spilling all our dreams, fears, setbacks, rages (with the café project itself and with each other), even eliciting from us (by his silence) several gratuitous comments on current affairs and our taste in contemporary entertainment. Perhaps we were eventually to be shown on other light TV programmes unconnected with building projects.

We started to suspect that Sam wasn’t all that he seemed to be when, one day, he started pointing his camera obsessively towards the top corner of what had become our main showroom for future commercial use as a lounge bar. He was particularly interested in the uncharacteristically pre-renovated white ceiling that seemed to spook him out with its ready ‘newness’.

“What are you actually renovating this place for?” he suddenly asked, as if thinking he had now spotted our first attempts at stocking the place with goods to sell instead of table covers at which to serve unruly pork dinners disguised as nouveau cuisine.

I stopped the hammer in mid-air; my wife halted sandpapering in mid-scrape. We had automatically assumed he must have known. Even a half-hearted pre-research or a cursory glance at our video diaries would have told him at least what our business plan happened to be. And how could we have ignored such ignorance when we knew full well that we were indeed renovating the disused café to … well, wasn’t it obvious…? James Clark haunted it and so it would have its gimmick of an attraction in bearing such a ghost.

I scratched my head in my own form of mid-scrape. My wife went into one of her famous televisual rages….

A clothes shop for riffraff. That was it. Boiler suits. Shell suits. Dungarees. Cheap tracksuits. Hand-me-downs. Nearly New garments. Seconds. Run-ups. Ready-mades. They were all the rage. Rail upon rail of hangers simply waiting for their own dressed ghosts swinging to the earth’s daily spin. Doing the empty hand-jive. What a business we would have, a million miles from being a posh café.

Sam’s own spectacle lenses continued to spin as we returned to the job in hand. Soon be time for a coffee break from the steaming percolator. Meanwhile, just the gentle scrape-scrape of wall against wall. A café society of ghosts re-living the high days of Lyons Corner Houses or posh restaurants accompanied by palm court violins in mute bowing.

I don’t know when I first realised it. None of us riffraff were there, of course. It was almost as if I were a figment of the medium in which I was being filmed. A TV portrait of a TV portrait. A fabrikation of a fabrikation. My wife and I were merely temporary stuffing in a concoction of the future that the past had prematurely programmed for any rogue historians or history-makers (watching out for the onset of a peak viewing time) to wrap around costly commercials. 

But these thoughts of my own non-existence as riffraff (or as a diary-reporter of riffraff masquerading as riffraff) were only premonitions of what once might have been our destiny, given the ability to film us for wider audiences at home with streaming internet services rather than for the dirty Mackintosh brigade of men like Clark  in a backstreet cinema during London’s wartime of impending blitz. Or given the ability of putting us in expendable film rushes for later excavation and examination by modern shrinks who got rich from filming ‘mental sessions’ in readiness for home viewing on TV before TV was invented, still just a pure white screen with no signal,  nor even snowy static to fill it. But, rhetorically, is true emptiness an expanse of black or of white?  And why was James Clark’s shortening not Jim rather than Jack? Meanwhile, Samuel peeps on…

A Milestone of Mansions and Mentions

I don’t know how long this will last, but I thought I should try to reach a gestalt as I do with real-time reviewing from the guestroom in the mansion-without-roofs, turning to  the full meaning and  assimilation of a smile, the vertical eye, the third bed, the real mucky and the whitening ceiling. We all have to shape up to such a challenge. I know today it has come to a monologue I speak spontaneously as I approach the final, or perhaps not final, mansion-without-roofs that has come to symbolise something far greater than a ‘thing’ with something else missing. At the front of the building, a woman waves at me and tells me to remember the authors whom I have so assiduously reviewed over the years. I will not name them here, but she did mention all of you, every single one of you, and she smiled and invited me in as a woman I knew very well, someone to live with, it seemed, well, what should I say, for 50 years, and still counting, but that was another life in an alternate world, and I thought of the voice in the parcel, the wave and the kiss, the state of being drowsy with divinity, a maelstrom of miniatures, this milestone of miniatures, this eventual mountain of mansion, the thing that is the thing that is a ghost, but it is not a ghost as such however large it grows, because I seek the ghost. The ghost that is the gestalt that is the gruesome guestroom at the top of a bungalow mansion not a bungalow house, a mansion that has only two floors and the guest room is on the fourth floor! So, what happened to the third floor, I asked myself, and I stepped back from the building, knowing that the woman who would welcome me had already gone somewhere else. I see a  huge tree leaning against the mansion, but is it the tree yielding, or the building yielding? The building that had once been a bungalow, and it was actually growing up alongside the tree, so as to fulfil the vision of the further floors above the original two floors that I already knew and the roof was healing itself with some slow and arduous precision. A huge finger from the sky tapping tiles into place, touching chimneys into an upright position, and I knew I had to get to the fourth floor to find the gruesome guestroom, before it became the fifth floor, then the sixth, and so on. And then I knew I would see all you authors I had reviewed in that gruesome guestroom, as I did so much yearn to do so, standing  around me as you would as if you knew that you should. And I continued walking up the stairs, one by one,  slowly in a paradoxical gait that Zeno would’ve been proud of. The floorboards were bare as already adumbrated in the story I wrote yesterday, bearing the dance of dents from soldiers’ boots, and if you look at my list of miniatures, you will find this story in the last few that I linked yesterday,  and there were these dents clear to the eye today. I also thought of the other stories, or miniatures as I call them, and the steps seem to represent each miniature because I would try new steps now because I was just as tiny as them, perhaps like the tiniest Lilliputian and I passed the floors I already knew, and beyond that were a network of attics and lofts choked with a tangle of loft ladders, not real floors or bedrooms or guestrooms, but just interlocking attics with cobwebs and discarded toys and further bric-a-brac, but I managed to get to the fourth floor beyond those attics of which  the third floor was completely constituted,  but the fourth floor was more resplendent beyond the last loft ladder. It was actually what you would expect in a mansion. Now that the roof had been healed and towards the back of this large room I saw an old gent sitting gently intoning to himself as I am also intoning as I spontaneously dictate this about nothing gruesome in a guestroom.  I thought nothing strange, just a sort of homecoming whether it was my doppelgänger or my ghost that I would soon merge with, to join my intoning of words with his, but I never seem to be able to end, but just go on and on walking towards him. Null Immortalis.

Dedicated to the silent author mentions.

Mansions as Miniatures

Beyond Triffids

Elbows as Leitmotif

One leitmotif many have told me is missing from the previous leaky list, not the concept of leaky lists themselves, but Elizabeth Bowen’s elbows, not to speak of it also being the most beautiful word in the English language as cited by the Singing Detective. Deirdre indeed often had problems with her elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate her. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything she wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt somewhat, however, their mental machinations simulating bones grinding…

She was tested to the limits, unable to mention this to anyone for fear of them thinking her mad. She speculated on obtaining advice, but from where? A GP or a shrink? A random person chosen in the street? Or even a religious person of some sort? And the questionable list goes on.

Her husband was certainly out of the question, and if you knew her husband, you would not be surprised how he would be the last person to consult.

She tried googling the word ‘elbow’ along with some of her symptoms, as people had increasingly become prone to self-diagnosis following the onset of the internet. And people did indeed become subject to the strangest maladies, some quite surreal as a result of their searches. Mostly in their heads. And that is where Deirdre firmly placed the symptoms of her own malady — in the head!

But such googling did also elicit much obscure information about elbows, such as their use in literature, poems and stories and novels. For example, as I have already hinted, the 20th century fiction writer Elizabeth Bowen who has recently been found to use them quite effectively, and that, some thought, was because of her name… The EL of her forename and the BOW of her surname. Or was that a coincidence?

The elbow paths on which the internet took Deirdre often ended up with details about coincidences; how people instinctively used coincidences as cushions when tested to the limits of their own fallible humanity and the otherwise randomness of life. Not that they consciously thought about it. These were factors and machinations not within their heads but within their bodies. And for elbows, please read knees, in some folk. But rarely wrists or waists. Never ankles or knuckles. Mostly elbows, it has to be said. But what about the finger-joints, I suddenly find myself asking?

Well, the story of Deirdre is a complicated one, so I shall simplify it. By ending it here. Other than to inform you that the mindless finger-joints seem to have become part of some conspiracy to test my limits of intellect and will-power. And so this story using elbows as a new leitmotif indeed was forced to end there. Because I have no Voice App on my computer, and, what is more, the fingers have just elbowed me out of consciousness altogether by strangling my neck and they seem to be typing something else.

And so Deirdre fully recovered without any memory of what was told about her and she now happily plays tennis most of the time.

Consoling The Elbows

 It was dark and I could not work out which room I was in. I saw a misshapen thing lying on wooden floorboards. I heard a piercing sound coming from upstairs. As I reached what I thought were the stairs, two fiery eyes peeped down. Suddenly a woman came into view with the misshapen thing dangling upon her. Her hair was dusty and her fingernails made spiralling motions in front of her. Her breath sounded as if she were using stuffed cauliflower instead of lungs. She followed me to the kitchen and asked me to go with her outside into the smoky air.

“No” I simpered, “not into the smoky air, since I’m a non¬smoker.”

“If you were a non-smoker,” she said, with a voice that sounded as if it were using something in her lower stomach as a vent, “how can you see me, let alone the misshapen thing? You must be disgracefully steeped to the gills in druggy smoke.”

“Please,” I whined, “please don’t speak so loud. If my preceptors should hear…”

‘They should have beaten out your junkie ways yonks ago, since tonight you are actually speaking to one of your own hallucinations!”

“It’s better than talking to someone else’s hallucination,” I said. Reaching into my handbag, I removed the oblong box. Poe had an oblong box, hadn’t he? His was a coffin, mine contained coffin nails.

I removed a cigarette from the packet. As well as being a non-smoker, next I’d claim to be a virgin. If only the preceptors knew…

There was a sound. Someone rising from a bed upstairs, perhaps. If I was caught out here, lit cigarette between my lips (albeit a mere tobacco one), well, the consequences were better not considered in advance. The upper dormitory window suddenly blazed with light. As one of the preceptors was fast waking up, I scuttled into the shadows of a dark tree where a moon’s shadow was the strongest — and lit a second cigarette. The glowing end would match the other one already alight and, hopefully, cause the face at the attic window to think they were the smouldering eyes of a fox or something like a fox but taller.

Then the door of the mansion gashed yellow and, in the luminescence thus created, I looked down and saw that the misshapen thing was attached to one of my legs. It reached out a willowy appendage, grabbed one of my cigarettes and began to puff smoke.

The angry preceptor had by now discovered my hiding place and forthwith dragged me towards the mansion — where I just knew I was to be punished by being shackled in its lowest cellar. My greatest punishment, though, was when I felt myself in the pitch darkness, realizing that the misshapen thing was an integral part of my body — and always had been.

I love the intricate, semi-understandable fiction of those women writers as my preceptors who were either Elizabeth Bowen or Elizabeth Bowen’s contemporaries who wrote in her vein. Dialogue was Ivy Compton-Burnett  to the nth degreee, often murkily fustian but, on clearer days, clear as clouded crystal. Intervening prose of description and scene-stetting and mind-setting and passion-posing was dense at times but, at others, crepuscular with emerging meaningfulness. Words which stretched you. Thoughts that imbued you with thoughts you dared not earlier think you could even have the capacity to think. It made me want to write further fictions that their pens had not had time to write. Days of the heart where plots bleat for escape. Heat of the death in a night’s hotel. A house in a city called Eva Trout. Eva she was the one I’d love. A country where maps were made like her face. Fictions stuck to her elbow. Ley lines gave form and favour to a sweetheart’s beauty. This was the fiction I needed. A fiction that fabricated a real-life lover I would not otherwise meet. Even a misshapen form.

“And now you have made me, what next?” she asked, splitting from the page like a woodknot made proud.

“Let’s explore the place you live.”

I looked around at a city I knew was like Paris but was not Paris. It had canals like Venice, museums like Vienna, statues like Florence, lakes like Maggiore.

“What here?”

“It made itself as a sort of non-sequitur in admiration of your own gratuitous serendipity.”

“Your big words are too clumsy for real thoughts.” She looked even prettier as she mewed this plaint.

“Real thoughts don’t touch the sides … least of all the sides of paper. They flow along wordless channels like these mock gondolas.” As I spoke, and as if she had not seen them, I indicated, with a pretty finger, the ghostly craft that threaded the ever-developing veins of my city.

“Even if your words are plain and simple, being used in complicated structures of thought and meaning does not absolve you.” Eva, now thinking herself autonomous enough to stalk off into parts of the city I had not yet created, toppled into a canal I had only just deemed possible. She sleeked off into the splintery rainbows of false tides, before I could catch her in my all-weather, all-fable net. A Trout become Tench.

Perhaps it was the ghost of Elizabeth Bowen herself. One who was frequently photographed when smoking a cigarette. But do ghosts have scales and eyes in the sides of their heads? Human ghosts, surely, don’t.

The city faded around me to the north. To the nth degree. 

The only victims are those who never read this. The missing misshapes of the universal soul.