Painting With Water


First published 'Noir Stories' 1993


The pendulum of darkness swung from side to side.

My eyes could hardly take in the extremes of the cinemascopic night, as blinding rain drove itself into my face. The streaks of street lighting oscillated with the pulsing of the deep gloom. I might have found the effects mind-blowing, if it were not for the knowledge that everything stemmed from my swaying walk, the hood of my overcoat extended forwards to ease the stinging torrents. Thus blinkered, I could only follow my eyes in their near drunken rite of passage.

I felt I might be in an old Hollywood film, where some editor had splodged various shades of streaky yellow into the shuttling celluloid monochrome, making the rain appear more like blood than if he had used proper red instead.

There were indeed stock figures in those old films, mysterious threatening hoods roaming empty backstreets, but I did not feel mysterious nor threatening. I realised, however, that those peering out of ill-curtained windows would think otherwise about me. Perhaps all villains were innocent, merely wending their way between run-of-the-mill assignations (like taking their mother to hospital), never dreaming that their own dark shapes, hunched up against the encroaching storm, were viewed as evil and horrific.

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

No doubt this would be the real villain of the piece: a young lady, perhaps, unsuitably dressed for the weather, with chiselled smile and cleavage. She, with her winsome walk, would tempt me to accompany her...

I turned to face out the demon sex eye to eye. It was a policeman with as friendly a smile as ever was seen in Dock Green.

“Are you all right, sir?”

He squinted closer to see my face properly. But I could clearly discern his egg-shaped face below the back helmet. Residues of my swinging gait made him seem like the policeman dummy guffawing imbecilically at the end of Southend Pier, just for the price of an old penny in the slot. His loving family no doubt waited eagerly by the banked-up fire for his shift to end. The beacons of humanity which shone out from his face were a comfort indeed, until...

“Want me to give you a good time, Mister?” he said with a wink.

No Norman Bates I.

It was not me, surely, who slid so easily the tirelessly honed firepoker between the narrowing ribs above his cringing belly, just missing the silver buttons and other more natural obstacles to his heart...by means of a prestidigitation perfected over centuries of dark memory.

It was not me. It was not me.

I waddled down back-doubles of the city, each gloomy landmark individually daubed with its own personal colour, unblending, unblurring. I had even forgotten I was taking my mother to hospital.

I was no longer me, I was convinced: rather something else masquerading as me, with frighteningly clearer, freshly angled shots of everything.