(published 'Zine Zone' 1998 )
All land was south of us.
The sun was low in the sky. We had more than enough wind to fill the raft’s makeshift sail. And we would soon chop more wood for extending our raft to cope with the increasing crew.
So, basically, things were looking up.
My wife was expecting our seventeenth baby. Our first one, Dorothy, was expecting a baby of her own very shortly. My brother and his girlfriend were not Swiss nor a real family nor even called Robinson, but they had ideas above their station. But, despite this, we rubbed along reasonably well, especially in view of the decided lack of privacy.
And, yes, of course, there was a man calling himself Cruciform, Dorothy’s eventual husband, who had not joined us at the beginning of the shipwreck. He arrived out of nowhere, as it were, waking up to find us around him.
He told us we would make land sooner or later, not north as we originally expected, but south of us. There was no need to change direction as, apparently, we had done so already. He built rudder-tiller contraptions at the four corners of the raft which gave the children much joy, vying with each other to steer.
If it had not been for the storm, I believe we would have made land eventually. Instead, we made wood for what seemed (at least to me) like the rest of eternity. Cruciform left us as suddenly as he had arrived, eyes blinking as he woke to nothing but endless sky overhead, instead of our beaming faces.
Meanwhile, Will decided to give Lizbie a bell and see if she were also at a loose end. After all was said and done, Will and Lizbie both possessed a memory of each other’s erstwhile love - and if the past were worth anything at all, the present had certainly missed out on the bargain.
Listening to the evenly mechanical cat’s purr, Will pressed his finger into the correct numbered holes in the dial, but did not actually move the circular metal overlay in the variously measured arcs towards the fixed indented finger-home. Having been raised back home on push buttons, his mind was adrift because he couldn’t hear the minimalist music of the ringing tone. He blamed the fog for dampening down the lines.
He had recently peered from between the curtains and witnessed what a sopping wet blanket the night had become, reminding him of the endless nights on the raft, when he was called Cruciform.
If he succeeded in contacting Lizbie, he would have to use the shooting-wagon and, with its headlamps carving bisected beams into the billowing darkness, negotiate the unfamiliar back-doubles of a town which, at the best of times, was a bewildermaze of T-junctions. Worse than being lost at sea in overlapping fog banks.
Gently recradling the handset, he simply stared at it. Perhaps it, would ring of its own accord.
Meanwhile, Lizbie (a reincarnation of the raft’s Dorothy) sat in her finery by the bedroom window. Despite the uncertain curdling of the fog, she could discern the floating young shaver of a moonrib’s yellow bonelight. The red trill phone was beside her, connected to a wall-slot by a coil of sprung flex: a small device, compared to the walkie-talkie her naval officer father used to tote round when on board ship.
She had long since surrendered any hope of Will ringing her. Despite his inscrutable charm having been barely one notch away from a miscegenate breeding-trap, a tangible love had nevertheless shone through. And because he hailed from the open oceans themselves, he was more of a real man than most. Of course, being a woman, she couldn’t take the initiative - other than the simple osmosis she employed in actually willing him to ring.
Eventually, however, the pair of ex-lovers felt a leap together. Simultaneously, too, they made an easily forgotten encounter in the selfsame seadrift dream -just as the fog began to lift and twin moons shafted through the irrespective portholes.
On waking in the morning, both laughed for no obvious reason, yet instinctively knowing that ringing, from their respective rafts of erstwhile love, had always been beyond any reach of reincarnation - with or without coastal fog banks. Or telephone poles. Mobile phones were only in the future...
Meanwhile, there are handicap races where the participants are intended to arrive more or less together at the finishing tape. Yet, because of unpredictable human factors, such as illness, supreme effort, pacing, targetting, under-confidence, over-confidence, accidents, luck, inspiration, sheer sweat, laziness and so forth, the results of life’s steeplechase can never be certain.
Hattie’s husband Reginald simply adored horse-racing. It stemmed, no doubt, from Reginald and his boyhood chums organising competitive games for creepy-crawlies. He now spent five bob a week with the bookmaker, but never won anything. He followed his fortunes on the telly, whooping and whistling for the unfavoured nag he’d happened to back to forge through against the odds and make his day. Hattie humoured him. Reginald never laughed. And he died not laughing. A cross he had to bear was Hattie.
And today Hattie sits alone in her parlour. The carriage clock ticks ponderously from the mantlepiece. The telly has been dead since Reginald’s day. She never wants to switch on its screen. In any event, Reginald was the only one who could work the controls.
Old age is an ocean-ringed raft, just waiting for capsizing - or is it merely a bare-boned sofa on which even feebler bones are crucified? Physical handicaps, too, include any that affect the chemical substance of the brain inside the head. Senility’s only half of it, however. And even a tumour is, if nothing else, company.
Hattie’s indeed pleased she doesn’t have the nous to turn on the telly. She’s afraid Reginald will turn up on the screen, peering out at her, then whooping and whistling, in his typical fashion, to speed up her slow-motion squirm towards the finish...
Whilst, beyond her body’s hearing, the user-friendly video plugs on. And the tinnitus, from which she has suffered for many years, resumes its ringing in her ears with a renewed vigour -hissing and roaring from an empty conch shell once gathered on a diminishing shore. She doesn’t answer. She cannot even remember her real name. One of seventeen brothers and sisters. Too many names, too few whiles to live.
All land was north of us, give or take an odd pole.
