Southend-on-Sea

If you find this typescript, please preserve it, for it's not that bad. I dropped it down the WC accidentally and where it will turn up beats me. But if it's still intact, please return it forthwith to the address at the end....

My name? What business is it of yours? Suffice it to say that, if you knew my name, you would be none the wiser at this stage. You would be side-tracked so severely that you would not even bother to read the rest of this tract, too busy with looking up a variety of encyclopaedias and getting all entangled with the many cross-references stemming from my name.

Well, follow me. Don't dilly-dally and when I say jump, you damn well jump!

This tunnel closely follows the route of a new canal that wends its way several leagues above us. At times, it is close, to such an extent that you can hear the self-conscious chugging of the narrow boats, and, at others, so far, that you're nearer the core of the earth than to the surface channellings.

Jump!

That was close. We just crossed a crevice which goes deeper than anything you've known before and ends up on the other side of the universe, some say.

That dim glow, which allows us to feel our way, filters down along special tubings fed from the daylight way above us. They've got it on top - just watch. I turn this valve, and the deep richness of a summer sunset fills your face with a healthy flush. Look closer, old pal, and see what I look like. It is about time you saw my face which, after all, should be of more interest to you than my name, surely. It's deeply marked with age, you may note, but I'm younger than you, I'll be bound. It's got character lines fanning out from brow to brow, hasn't it? You don't say much about me: what's got your tongue?

Well, keep mum, man, just follow a little way more, just round that bend.

Jump!

Godforsaken gentleman. Failed to jump in time, I guess. Gave him plenty of warning, didn't I?

Halloo! Are you down there?

No. Well, he wasn't much of a conversationalist anyway, and I don't suppose he'd have learnt much. Even if he was still alive, he'd find it hard to call for help. Because shy he was. Shyer than a blushing bride on her first night.

Us ley-line constructionists don't talk much at the best of times. We're too busy following the natural courses of our brains. It's the veinings which count.

My old apprentice disappeared down a gullet and is lost for ever, no doubt.

If you find him wandering around some mocked-up London Underground, following his nose, as it were, silently seeking the by-ways for my friendly chump, send him back to me. Straight to the secret Inlet, part of the way beyond the Bill, until you reach the Cape at the head of the Flight of Locks, here to the Naze, half-way up the encroaching Creeks and Backwaters which face up to that mighty Peninsula, poised in the flushing seas of sunset, down the Essex way.

That's the address for all your sendings.


***

As a belated afterthought, you still want to know my name? OK, I'll come clean and I'll put it at the head of this typescript, like a sign-post to the better things below it.

Finally, all I can say is that we must find better ways....I'm sick to the teeth with it all.


(Published 'The Third Half' 1987)

The Wilde Head

 

 PUBLISHED 'MYTHOS' 1988  

 

 

The Wilde Head was full of New Year revellers but all of them somehow missed the   passing of
midnight.

 

  There  would  be many questions circulating in the relatively calm aftermath at dawn, when most would be falling blearily-eyed into sleep where they stood, bemused by the lack of Auld Lang Syne and the usual shenanigans at the pinnacle of the party: could all their wrist watches have stopped, as well as the huge hands upon the pub clock-face glowering from above the shorts? Or had the New Year not come into being at all? Or, even more incredibly, were they now within some form of no man’s time neither Old nor New?

 

I had had some experience of time travel although I would have hesitated to admit this to the blustering locals in the Wilde Head’s Public Bar: that would have set their flat caps a-shaking and their heavy-duty tongues a-waggling. Even the smart-arsed yappers in the Lounge would have clucked behind my back, to hear such outlandery.

 

 

But, being me, I had my theories, The dawn had cracked a few hours before it should have done, according to the ready-reckoner ephemeris in my head. Easy, then, for me to reconcile the movement of various realities at the other end of the Lounge where several drunkenners were sleeping off…

  

I knew realities were supposed to interlock and enmesh into a perfect jigsaw, so as to give the appearance of the single reality that most people think they see (if they think about it at all!)

 

 

However, the realities I was witnessing during that false dawn were straining to depart and enter each other by the wrong apertures. The whole side-wall was a swelter of crawling creatures that wove in and out of their own treacly strands like a crazy maypole. The booze bottles lined up against the Courage mirror waddled in pairs of  ­vein-crazed, sugar-glass vulture-moths, their contents visibly angling back and forth like a dosser’s first experience of bath water.

 

 

 

All this did not disturb me. What did disturb me more was that something began to wake up in my arms. I then realised it was the girl who’d been my snogger at the party: I’d been attracted not only by the promise of her clothes but by the clothes themselves. It would be pointless to describe her finery due to its change over night into something far more downbeat; and, now, I was concerned for her mental well-being in the face of such seeming nightmares that were going on around us. I smothered her eyes with kisses as they flickered open. “You’re the most beautiful creature in God’s Kingdom” I crooned.

 

 

 

Well, she had been beautiful, the night before.

 

 

 

When she was fully awake, I,tried to conceal everything from her with my head, ducking about like a right loon. But apparently my features were worse than what I was trying to hide! She imploded in my arms and became a shapeless lump of coal.

 

 

 

“Oi, Mistah, didya say you’d been a-timetravelling?” asked a nosey flat-cap from the other bar. “Fellah back there do say you’ve been all over time.”

 

 

 

Apparently, the party was still

going strong in the Public, unperturbed. I could also hear a pair of sucking noises in the Snug…

 

 

 

Funny, though, I couldn’t recall telling anyone that I’d experienced time travelling. Maybe they’ve read this, I unaccountably mused. Anyway, I did not react to the greasy upstart from the lower classes: I turned a flirting shilly-shallying shoulder, as I made my way from the Wilde Head on route to deliver the lump of coal on the Stroke of Midnight.

Abraham Bintiff (V)

      PUBLISHED 'FAT KNITE' 1988

 

       

The man who had no mind, could not make it up either.

He walked into the pub so as to get legless too.

“How are you, Abbey?” queried the  landlord, almost too politely and, not really waiting to hear the answer, he went off to sell one of his specially concocted cocktails to a sophisticated lady who sat on a bar-stool nearby.

“Nobbut middling,” replied Abraham Bintiff to himself, looking down at himself and suddenly realising he had actually spoken and in sequence too! Pity the landlord was now busy chatting up a mare attractive customer.

Abraham used to be a Captain in an army fighting in a war he did not understand. He may not even have realised which side he was on (and there had been three). He had been retired from the ranks early for surrendering to his own troops.

He glanced along the bar and surveyed the lady in the tight red skirt, that accentuated the prime cut of her thighs, and the buttonless blouse that, despite its loose fit, did little to hide the weight of her bosom and its deep valley.

Before her on the bar was the most strangely constructed cocktail that Abraham had ever seen. It looked as if fizzing liquids of various colours had been mixed but in such a carefully arranged column of specific gravities they all remained unblemished by each ocher. Thrust through these undulating stripes was a large colourful brolly that protected the drinker from the upward erupting

bubbles.

“I’ll have one of those,” Abraham suddenly decided, pointing at the drink in front of the striking lady.

The landlord, leaving a knowing look for the lady to ponder on, sidled back to the bar in front of Abraham and, staring him straight in the eyes, said: “Have thee the readies, eh, Abbey? It’ll cost you an arm and a leg.”

Many stories have been told of Abraham Bintiff. He was said to take young girls out to the marshes and rape them in the quicksand. He was once Pope? No, that one has since been discounted. He lived on a narrow boat on the canal, full of yapping pets, that nobody ever saw, but ware said to live in the boat’s weed hatch and septic tank. He once had a council house where, at night, creatur­es from outer space were said to alight on his roof to pick their teeth with the TV aerial - they knew that Abraham wouldn’t mind. And now he’s a mindless lounge lizard....

“Well, Abbey, have you a brass farthing?”

“Put it on tick”.

“Time’s long gone since I allowed you that, Abbey. Your credit-worrthiness is worse than the tales that you tell of your past!”

The landlord chortled and returned to the red-skirted lady who was now inserting a hinged straw into the curdles of the cocktail. And the undertones of their imprecise conversation continued between the slurping noises.

Abraham imagined the lady partaking in the adult education yoga course he had himself been attending for some weeks now. He pictured her doing some of the body positions in her tight red skirt – allowing anyone’s gaze to travel up to the smooth round arch of her silken crotch. He was as it were sucked into the darkness there; and his deep breathing exercises (ripping from chest to belly and back again) were now merely camouflage for a completely different activity that his am own thighs engendered upon himself.

                                                                                                                                       Ji

“OK, Abbey, if you’re not going to buy a drink, I’ll have to ask you to leave. This aint a free house, you know... yes, I know you’re an old war hero... yes, yes, you saved the world from alien invasion too but I’ve got a living to make. . .and, furthermore, this lady here has told me she don’t like your smell.”              

                            Abraham turned a squint upon the aforesaid dame and saw she was now closing the umbrella upon the quenched cocktail. 

                            He shrugged and made to leave, but then changed his mind and addressed the lady with these parting words: “I may have a smell you don’t like – it’s my mind, it’s gone off. But I’m a meantime more while-worth than the likes of you... Didn’t know this pub was a knocking shop anyway.”

He turned to the landlord and, as a parting gesture, took a deep, yogic breath that seemed to fill his whole body, even his veins, with air bubbles - and proudly handed over to the landlord one arm and one leg in a moment of acu-rupture and concentrated extasy.

He hopped on his one remaining leg and managed to escape into the next storyby the skin of his teeth. Good job he wasn’t completely legless.

 

The Devil's Stinkpot
THE DEVIL’S STINKPOT


First published ‘Roisin Dubh’ 1994

I have scraped the useless flashing from the end of my pencil, cleaned this book's fly-leaf from blots, smuts, blemishes and foxing --- and am now ready to write about the girl I loved.

But, first, where was my story laid? A land where I ate dew-bit amid primroses and cuddle-me-to-you's. Where the sun peered above the distant hills, cantilevering its beams from ten to four across my yawning face. And where I showered cool spring water over my bareness.

The ocean breakers dragon-roared from beyond the nearby forest-lands, the dawn breeze fetching tangs of salty fucus: a trove of sea-mystery and smuggler's blessings in each heady whiff.

The pencil has become blunt and I'm finding it hard to continue and this fly-leaf is now over-crammed with my blown-up scrawl...

I've come to the title page now, showing author and publisher's name.

THE DEVIL'S STINKPOT

Nothing for it but to lay my plot across this unsatisfactory surface and gnaw further splinters from my pencil head. Not much time left. I must get straight to the point. My handwriting growing circumscribed by imaginary narrow feint lines. Only reader will be myself if I don't hurry.

BY D.F. LEWIS

Well, my rival in love was darkly tall, wielding a devil's turnip twice as large as mine. He mocked my wholesome gods and he hated the tooth fairies who whispered in my ears at night from under the pillow. He laughed almost out loud at my images of nursery tales and fruit-stones. He mimicked a lord's prayer of one to ten and back again.

CLERKES OF CULLESDON (FINE BOOKS) LTD.

But his gods were elder and swarthier: groaning, towering visions of cock-eyed ogres gobbling dung-wet, half-cooked human beings. They swooped from the sky on huge black bedding wings chanting of Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth , later squeezing out my pillow friends like earwigs.

And He the Dark One stood sentinel against the dying sunset to call them down.

And that's the title page filled out. I'm on to a page proper, one power-dressed in ugly print. Nobody will be able to read my thick pencil against it. My teeth ache as I pit them against the sharpening-end...

The seas are quiet tonight, not such as the night before. She I truly adore will drop me into the stinkpot sooner than love me back. He who calls to Cthulhu is a side-long shadow companion who may or may not still be here. Kids play dibstone down by the runnelled rocks, where winkles and cockles click in rhythm to the stars. The forky channels ebb and flow over the beach ... but I yearn for the forest-land, just my love and I, turnip in her merkin. She worries out my pillow-faces and taunts them with diddle daddle, tells them that at dew-bit they will have nought but the air among the corn-flakes.

Fizgig shoves her oar up against the rock-face --- and the point is broken again. My tongue is splintered. My hand has points of flesh, inturned and gristled. And the Dark One has flown with those he summoned and she pulls the crappit-heads from the lower sand-levels to suck them dry. The dibstone kids have gone for shelter behind the drunkery, wherein their daddies skulk and sup. And she says I've no lead in my pencil.

I'm in flesh-quake. The sea-wrack's 'gainst my hide. My skin's hell for leather. My turnip's creased and winkled. Words mix and flether. The storm-clouds are really rather large webs and wings --- and the waves comb my head. One story within another story upon another story. It's not fitting. I'm in her stinkpot now (thick cellar-turds and forkheads eating my brain for high tea), far beyond the spit of land where once we cuddled and kept our future.

She's creamed out now, gone with the Dark One who once pointed a thick finger at the black spume in the sky, betokening the coming of the Great Old Ones...

And the words printed in the library book which I once used for scribbling my story seemed far more immediate than anything I produced. Far more relevant, if strait-laced. With far more present tension.

My own point had finally gone. Unless the reader had read far more between the lines.

Yellow Cargo

The fog closed in like fog did in the old days. I could hardly see to the end of my nose and, with heart in my mouth, I continued tentatively with my evening constitutional.

I knew this much -- I was wandering through a city with which I had fallen in love over some time, that had become the place where I had set up home with my then future wife, beside a river that bled at sunset like dark wine.

The domes and turrets of its convoluted lanes were tonight closed off by this sudden curtain of fog and the most I could do was conjure up the familiar skyline from its under-scoring in my mind.

Ftflank! My face hit a cornerstone which, no doubt, on a better evening, would not even have been there at all. I rubbed away at the grazes on my nose and forehead, calling up an image of my long dead mother retrieving her invisible pot of magic ointment from inside her work-box.

I was lost, of course, but not desperately so, for, although this was a big city with acres of untrodden by-ways, I felt confident that I was still on a course not too distant from the river wharves (of which, on better evenings, I could see the shimmering yellowness from my house; and even hear the aching drip of its drenched timbers and the intermittent curse of its otherwise silent cargo workers and ballast shifters).

But, tonight, not a sound broke the silence, and even the sluggish, shaggy shapes of dossers slid easily through the fog like the engine-room oilmen on leave from the creaking cargo ships; and I realised, too, that the cafes to which I thought I had been heading were, if there at all, uncustomarily low-keyed...

Ftlappat! I felt a tap on my shoulder and I turned to see a face of fog: my future wife had evidently been searching for me and was, thankfully, planning to lead me home. She smiled, wisps of fog, like cigar smoke, formed her gracious head of hair to which I was so familiar. Her tongue curled out her mouth & I found it hard to keep track of the words that darted from corner to corner of the face I had grown to love.

But what I heard, & what I heard clearly enough, as I now work the yellow cargo in an endless tangled night, I recall it more than clearly. Her mouth fixed itself finally somewhere in the rite of her body and emitted a snarly voice I did not recognize: “Eat yer heart out -- I’m you now, and I’ve got your beloved fiancee for my own.”

Schpplonk! A sharp swipe plunged on to the top of my head and forced my teeth and jaws together with a jolt: the river and all its foul detritus seeped from between my lips.

(published SKELETON CREW 1988)

Love On The Line

If I saw anything at all, I saw you. You stood out from the crowds, waving your sore thumb at me: you had evidently hurt it in the fight.

You may not have realised, but I had witnessed the fight from relatively close range; and I think you put up a good show, despite your obvious shortcomings; though some of your tactics were a bit near the bone, don’t you think?

Well, I think the sooner you clean your teeth the better. I’m definitely not going to kiss you, until you’ve gone through them with a fine tooth comb. I’ve just had my breakfast.

*

Out of the sky, there came the ‘copter which had evidently been surveying the skirmish from an air-pocket.

Its blades worked a grinding siren and a most searching headlight picked out those considered to be the prime stirrers - my girl friend included.

I tried to warn her, because I had seen all of this coming a mile off. But all she could do was grin a wild, fateful, almost loving smile, with tatters of raw scrotum still hanging from the teeth - and then she was picked off like a sitting duck.

You did not die straightaway. I’m sure you felt me kneel beside your body. I kissed your brow.

The paddles of the ‘copter churned towards the distance but were sent peculiar in mid-flight by a sudden vacuum - the ‘copter flopped to the ground, where its blades froze but its body still wheeled like a dying bluebottle.

You opened your eyes, or so I thought. You sucked your sore thumb, like a babe just born.

The breathless air - your dying whisper - the dispersing crowds - all is like a photographic tableau.

When I got back to civilization, I checked that my hotel room had not been rifled in my absence. The heat was over-bearing and the room was full of the fattest fucking flies I’ve ever seen; and some were evidently feeding off each other.

I crawled on all fours under the bed, to hide my sorrow and my shame: for I had last seen my loved one picking her way towards the sharp remains of a twisted ‘copter: to suck the blood it had toted far in the belly of its engine.

(published ‘Something For Nothing’ 1988)

Adrian's Spacewalk

Beyond land and sea, there was a space for matter to take which was neither.

Adrian, one day, awake in his father’s castle at the edge of the known world where clifftops beetled and skies funnelled downwards. The weather seemed amenable, as well as his mood. Indeed, the rest of the castle was up and about, taking advantage of their own moods. So, was this the optimum day for seeking that space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea? He asked himself the question, with nobody to answer but himself. Yes, it was simply ideal, being the answer in question.

And Adrian rose from his bed to check his alter ego’s instinct. For the first time in his living memory, the mists had dispersed, allowing a clear view of the way forward - except, of course, where the mists regained their landbound status because his eyesight, at that distant point, became too blurred to disperse them. You see, bodies had moods, as well as minds.

He’d’ve missed breakfast altogether, given a free choice. However, many servants of the castle had spent the whole night preparing it and he didn’t have the heart for hurt. So, he sniffed and snaffled through many of the various dishes, containing steaming rashers of back bacon, divine kidneys, cream eggs, cherry tomatoes, blood dumplings, all fried to the perfect hum. Such comestibles served to put indigestible fat on his muscles and a weight of force-fed pigs on his feet, which slowed his departure from the castle, as he set upon his quest to discover the space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea.

Naturally, in those days, nobody knew that there was a real space above the air where one could travel between worlds. For Adrian, it was already incredible to believe in a space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea, if it were, indeed, possible, in a sane universe, to believe in the incredible. He had forgotten the main reason he had not previously been so foolhardy as to venture from the castle on such a quest, the purpose of which quest bore so much repeating. The disincentive was presented by the legendary monster which guarded that space for matter to take which was neither land nor sea. Adrian customarily depended on his saner self to keep the dangers at the forefront of his mind, but, on that optimum day, his alter ego was entirely in charge: with not even a sniff of an id.

Adrian’s father was not in residence at the time (the cause of his absence being the subject of a different tale than this) and that absence my have been the presence that did not deter his son. He usually breakfasted with Adrian, when the servants needed no excuse for increasing the helpings available upon a ratio in excess of the increase in the number of stomachs. And, during such periods of chewing the fatted cud, father and son cancelled out each other’s moods, as well as split personalities. But, not today.

Thus, upon that optimum moment in a long-running saga of stranger things than this, Adrian, unshriven and unstarved, strode towards the cone’s end of perspective which had previously been at the far-sighted blind spot of his visionary powers. He soon discovered that the guardian monster was the space itself: an area of near nothingness which could neither shape a world we knew nor, even, concoct a tenable territory to house a world we didn’t know.

When Adrian looked back for the last time, the castle had vanished into a white hole. If it weren’t for the baggage of his own body and the bilious stench of its contents, he’d’ve been hard put to make belief from his own heady communion of thoughts - which, in the end, had no room for matter that mattered, because the monster swallowed its own tale as well as the space within which was neither self nor someone else.

(Published 'Ocular' 1993)

After The Requiem

Every seat in the concert hall was occupied. I was sitting towards the back, accompanying someone from work who had offered me a free ticket. I did not know him very well, but he must have known enough about me to guess I would be interested in classical music.

“It’s a pity your wife couldn’t come,” I proffered as an attempt at conversation. This was in fact the only reason I was there, as a late replacement. I said this as the conductor, amid applause, strode, baton aloft, to the rostrum.

The lights dimmed and the audience quietened, except for an isolated cough or two. But, then, my companion announced, in an embarrassingly loud voice, that his wife had died earlier in the day.

With that, Verdi’s Requiem took off, thus releasing me from any response. But I hardly heard the music, as my mind ticked over...

***

The resounding roar of a multitude of human palms smacking against each other, as the orchestra and chorus took their bows. A few people were standing in ovation, including my companion who was even shouting his head off.

We walked out eventually into the night where the roads were still glistening from a late shower and the sky was sufficiently clear to see the stars. I plucked up courage to continue our conversation:

“I’m so very sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been very sudden.”

I could not believe that he had cane to the concert at all, in view of the circumstances.

“She’s up there somewhere.”

He pointed to the night sky.

“I expect she was with us tonight in spirit,” he continued, “because even if Heaven is beyond that half of the sunlit moon, souls of the dead are always everywhere . . . In fact, I heard her screech in the violins, her wind in the brass...”

I was speechless. I could not credit what I was hearing.

We were walking towards the underground at High Street Kensington, along with several others who were chatting of the performance. It was almost as if we were being dragged along, as the rain began to soak down again. I pulled up my collar and looked to see if my colleague was keeping up.

He had evidently disappeared into another part of the crowd. Everybody seemed happy, but something in the behaviour of my colleague had turned something in my brain and my stomach was heaving as if I was about to cry.

I was hustled into the tube entrance, even if I had not wanted to go down there. The platform was milling with ex-concertgoers, and I was relieved to hear the churning noise of the train arriving fran the dark tunnel. I felt I did not want to see my colleague again tonight – Monday at work would be soon enough.

The train careered into the lighted station, its doors sliding open even as it drew to a halt.

The whine of the wheels, the hiss of the doors, the clatter of feet and the insistent tannoy calling “Mind the gap, mind the gap” were almost musical, but composed by Satan rather than by God.

I was thinking along tracks I’d never thought along before.

I was a bit behindhand getting on board, what with the crowds, and the doors came together smoothly through my body, slicing bone from flesh like a chef with his expert cleaver. It would have no doubt hurt me if I had stayed in that position long enough, but I escaped from that body space by the skin of my teeth, to miss the exquisite agony of my own gristle being pulled from its flutings.

I was relieved to find that my sanity and identity had returned and, as I brushed off my spectral skirt, I sat down, through the lap of a complete stranger, beside my beaming husband.

 

Published 'Dark Dreams' 1992

Mustard Kat

Collaboration with Paul Pinn

  

            Your memory wavers like a fading photograph of a distant unimportant relative. However, your surname sticks in mind, gives you away.

            Charnock - charlock: a weedy annual of the mustard group; bright yellow flowers reflecting the day in cornfields down by the chicken coop where, back in some lean year, during a crisp brown fall, a rodent's nibbled teeth gnawed at an empty moment under a sick grey sky that frowned in vague torment at yet another lie as I left you to die, a bewiskered woman, a filamentary mole, burrowed 'neath the nap of past events, your spoor ugly hills 'midst other peoples' dreams.

            Hah! And to think you posed as something exotic hidden in a brightly coloured shell, like a pacific mollusc, expecting me to coax you out. If I had I would have missed the catch, and let's face it, there were plenty more fish in the sea without me having to spend time on thee, slug in a pretty shell, crossing your legs for me.

            But it's no good trying to escape from you. Every night I dream of flawless prisms of faceted gold glittering becalmed in a sea of mud, strange creatures milling around in attentive excitement, burbling and guzzling, probing and uttering sounds of pleasure, inebriation, desire. And when muddy hands reach out to touch the prisms and capture infinite spectrums, to twist and torture their colours, caress and love their brilliance, your form appears and turns my guts, and the prisms laugh, weave a slick temptation, flash smiles of silver beauty, a perfect manipulation with which to confuse me.

            Alas, the prisms fade as the gold facets dissolve into a glaucous backdrop, and your form remains bearing a warmth that sickens like the stench from unwashed armpits, and in that hour before wakefulness, you touch my body with a coldness straight from the sneering face of Time. And so the inebriated grow sober and lose their desire, and I awake, hungover but relieved, calm enough to face another day, close-shaven and without the Slough of Despond.

            I can think of your sister then, young Kat, who slinked like a horny wraith down to your father's cellar, pushed open the freshly painted door, and drank one of two vats clean dry. With her hippy hat she looked quite pretty, as she sat and watched a cat chase a rat round and round the other vat. But the cat was slow and fat and lost sight of the rat, which ended up sleeping on the brim of Kat's hat, the cat drunk on the contents of the second vat, Kat floating face down in what was left.

            Vats without bottom, young Kat. Vats without a top. They're cylinders which I dream through from beginning to end. Prisms I crawl through - breaking each golden shaft of dreamlight and letting it mend behind me. I seek your golden eye - the light at the end of the tunnel - a little girl's eye, whose innocence can only cast such heavenly guidance. You see, Kat, it was your sister who should've had it up to the neck. Not you. Not you at all.

            A circular tunnel is the worst tunnel of all - which is my own particular cellar - and it's where my bottles of red are stored, like glass sleepers. Until I touch them and find them softer than shellfish without shells. Wobbly containers, each with its own coiled-up soul of slumber. One drips a white cat-lick substance that the cork itself seeps.

            I wake yet again to summer. The meadow wafts with motes from shedding plants. Motes not moles, Kat. It's my whiskers that itch when you kiss my lips. Not yours. Picnics are nothing without the wine-cooler close by. Have another glassful before we retake the rhythm of our love. You're nicer than those characters I used to read about when I was a child - those peers of mine that Enid Blyton sent on adventures........into cellars.

 

(published 'Psychotrope' 1996)

Carving The Fish

 The fish had been poached perfectly and Rachel turned from her atlas to scrutinise its potential eatability.  Bill had prepared it for her - and had sprinkled several herbs and whole peppercorns over it.  Bill was currently her Ex.  But they were still fast friends

 

.            Bill was a geography teacher and Rachel’s worst subject at school -- but she enjoyed the shape of maps more for their aesthetic quality than their representation of reality.

              The atlas she had been browsing through was one of Fantasy Worlds, where all literary maps had been collected together.  Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.  Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.  Samuel Butler’s Erewhon.  James Hilton’s Shangri-La.  Cervantes’ La Manche.  And so on.  Rachel adored poring over them with studious grins – lovingly tracing their margins, imagining herself in the various purlieus of mindscape.

 

            “You want to read a real atlas one day, Rachel,” announced Bill as he carved the fish: thick-slivering fillet after fillet upon each of their plates.

 

            The reason for them falling out as soulmates had been caused by their lack of sympathy regarding these very maps.  Bill was fascinated by the salt-of-the-earth disciplines of physical geography.  Political, too.  Brown contours that swirled around outlandishly tall peaks.  The bright primary colours dividing chance nations.  The pastel ones depicting exports, customs, geological features or striations, irrigation projects, hydroelectric dams, forestry conservation preoccupations…  

 

          Rachel loved nothing better than the more nebulous worlds that occupied her precincts of thought.

 

            She grabbed the fish knife and, in a desultory fashion, prodded her share of the mutual meal. 

 

           Bill, by now, had taken a whip from his wide-mouthed briefcase.  It was a snaky, quirky terrier of a whip.  It snapped and coruscated.  It almost had a life of its own.

 

            Bill positioned it on the table in the shape of the country whence the fish had come.  In this case, a country not a million miles dissimilar from France.  This had been a tradition at their dinner parties.  And Rachel smiled as she recalled that their differences over mere atlases were not the only reason for their love affair foundering.

 

            There were also Bill’s habits to contend with.

 

            He seemed to smile back at her as he watched a rather different habit that inhabited Rachel’s own reflexes: the one of beating the fish at its own game.

 

            She was evidently not steaming to France.  But quite another place.