The Rhymer ~ Part Four

Swishing of tree leaves. A forest breathing like an enormous lung. I wake up and am overjoyed to find a shingle shore crunching under my beached rowboat, and immediately stand up and fall over. Sea legs extraordinaire, I am debonair for all of the two seconds that my limbs can bear, then violently sick, pebble-dashing the pebble-dash. I have reached land at last, after many days adrift between the maddeningly myriad islands of that watery suburb behind me to find myself here, here. But it is queer to see trees and cliffs and mountains again, the glorious glens and valorous valleys. Have they missed me as I them? Again, I try to stand, and faring better, take my first steps on dry land. Then turning to take my leave of the ocean’s mirror, I recall with a shiver that I have lost my face and have no idea yet as to with what it has been replaced. I retrace my paces then kneeling find a pool of still water in a quiet space and wait, wait… for the breath of the breeze to cease and reveal to me who I am. There kneels a man, a lot like me, unshaven and dishevelled, with a backdrop of trees. He seems vaguely familiar, but a mirror is an inversion, a perversion, a carnival trick. Only the girl with whose face I collided has seen where my soul resided. Oh that we might have had long enough so that in me she confided.

Pine trees everywhere, evergreen and deciduous, evoking residual religiosity, tall as the pillars of a cathedral nave or choir, but I stand at the crossing now I sense, enchanted with Nature’s incense, the smell of sap from porous bark. Hark, is that a singing bird I hear? Spring, if not already here, is near. No more to fear, I will banish winter darkness from my soul’s long year. For I have found my Aphrodite and seen the hope to banish all my tears. And if I found her once, I know I may again. But what of men? They occur everywhere, spontaneous as trees, half so useful and less inclined to please. An infestation of every nation, they try my patience. And as I pick my way over roots and rocks, I see a roadway not far off enough, and realise with tired eyes and sighs that I must interact with humankind again. Onward, then. Headfirst into the lion’s den, the dread domain of men.

Hard-packed stones then tarmacadam, over many miles, if truth be told, do much to reconcile my heels and toes to the comforts of the road, as opposed to the rolling mulch of roots and leaf mould. And picking up a pace, oh joy, I am no longer cold, but nurtured sweetly by spring springing in its buds and shoots all around me, the tweeting of birds alighting in branches, delighting and astounding. They fill my soul with music of sweet anticipation, and adrift on Nature’s tides I am as a refugee arriving at the borders of Her nation, my passport the memory of the face and voice of Aphrodite. I will be part of life, its orbiting satellite no longer. The sun shall feed my hunger.

An unfortunate metaphor perhaps, for all too soon I feel an ache in my knee-caps fit to lead me to collapse, and reaching the outskirts of a town, lest I fall down, find my way to the first available tavern and sit myself down. I say a town and yet the effect is more as if the occasional cottage in the surrounding woods have multiplied and aggregated in number by slow degree until there might be said to be more brick than timber, and tiles than leaves. Tall trees abound in Sylvia and its populaces show their faces as might squirrels and foxes or birds in boxes, peeping that is, upon one’s business, before returning to their profits and losses. Can I help you sir? –A portly barman intones from some height upon my exhausted limbs, and I eye him apprehensively before suggesting my age-old jest, a test to see if he’ll buy my bargain. Have you a musical instrument, I hazard, a violin say, or a flute, a cor anglais, oboe or violoncello? A pianoforte, harpsichord, or clavichord?

The fellow’s brows furrow as rainclouds gathering to ransack a mountain top. He opens his mouth in wrinkling perplexity, but I continue for him: Or a virginal, muselar or spinet perhaps? A terpodion, uranion or melodion? A penny whistle? Now his eyebrows lift and he tries so speak again but is thwarted by my further interjection: Or a celesta, an octobass, or lira da braccio? A kazoo would do, or even a jew’s-harp or harmonica? I’ve even been known to fetch a tune on a twelve-inch ruler or wineglass with a wetted finger. Fair enough, I can see I’m getting nowhere so I shall not linger…

Wait! –Cries out an eaves-dropper before I come a proper cropper, standing up with the barman’s hands grappling for my collar. Can you play an accordion?

A squeeze box, by crikey, why do I always overlook the most likely? Throw one my way and I shall entertain you mightily and cordially, accordingly. Phew… food and drink I think and a pile of straw to recline on nightly. I hoist the heavy instrument of enlightenment and set the grace notes spinning to cancel out my imminent indictment for vagrancy. Like ripples, I soon marvel at the waves of sound lapping at the surrounding ears and passing on out into vacancy. The human soul is constantly astir it seems, enflamed as an itching skin, and fond of being soothed by an external agency. Eternal exigency, this soporific balm to calm the savage breast or suck its nipple like a tipple famed for its astringency, smelling salts, the brandy glass, the draught liqueur for all contingencies. Awaken! And in its wake, we are each uplifted, reminded of the divine elixir for which we are all vessels. Wrestle no more, but let it in, let it pour.

Then in the door, after four hours or more, forty-six tunes, three pints and two legs of boar, there walks a face I can’t quite place, some unextinguished acquaintance relinquished from before. Distinguished? By Jove, yes! It’s the good Doctor Horace Stockbridge, bedecked with dishevelled spectacles upon his nose, and looking a little morose, indeed in need of refreshment and repose. The state of your clothes! I intone, nearly standing on his toes, What roughshod tangle you’ve been dangled in, do please now hasten to disclose…

Do I know you? –He responds, wide-eyed. And of course I’ve half forgot the morbid procedure by which I periodically change my facial features. What a strange creature I am. Inimical inimitable physiognomical anomaly.

You used to get on with me. And indeed took me into your home. My name then was Nithna or some such blether. But I am averse to being tethered to arbitrary nomenclature or sedentary leisure. Peripatetic being my pathetic epithet of preference. Do forgive me if I’ve invaded your privacy and shot to fuck your frame of reference. It is good to see you again, Doctor. I beg forgiveness for my hasty exit stage left last and thank you heartily for all your kindness of the past.

Nithna?

Nadir, they seem to call me here now. Queer, I know, all this ebb and flow of labelling. I’ll be tabling an amendment to the central committee, if I ever find one, on this and many other topics, before I go into that goodnight and all that shite. What brings you here tonight into this prefecture, and in such a state of sartorial dishevelment?

It is you! I’d know your incessantly obsessive rhyming any time and anywhere, your alliteration in any nation, your onomatopoeia in any…

Come, come, Doctor, you can leave the verbal athletics to me, we wouldn’t want our audience to think us a pair of epistemological epileptics, would we?

Quite so… And Stockbridge looks around over the bridge of his nose and spectacles held on with loose elastic, observing that he has become the spectacle at last now the music’s lapsed. The bar customers are all agape to hear at last a clue of my identity and his. Well, I’d sooner piss in their glasses. Follow me and we shall quaff our ale outside where we can escape the venal ears of these loutish lads and admire instead the asses of passing lassies.

Toss it back, the cold beer splashes. Stockbridge I surmise is in some mess stickier than a barrel of molasses. Hands shaking he asks: Lassie’s asses? You never spoke like that before, Nithna. Have your dormant drives been awakened or am I mistaken? Some incident of intimacy, oceanic or obscene, drawn your attention to the primal scene?

Ahh doctor, your perspicacity is greatly penetrating to the point of gratingly enervating. Next you’ll be asking how often I’m masturbating. Truth be told I did encounter a certain girl who set my poor love-parched soul a whirl on another island of your archipelago, but no sooner were we matched than she was snatched by a batch of my dread brother’s brutes to return her to his nefarious seraglio. My fate was sealed by that intaglio. And so I found myself here, pursuing the boat that stole my Aphrodite. I pine for her nightly, unsure now how to find her, except perhaps to track my sibling, dribbling avaricious demon that he is, dripping semen from his three foot penis. But enough of my deranged estrangement and failed amorous arrangements, what of you, good doctor? –You seem more out of sorts than me, to whom such resorts to desperation are merely standard medication.

Good gracious, Nithna, your life is never simple. Your psychic state sounds positively stifling, beside which my own predicament is trifling. I was merely mugged by thugs who I caught rifling through my case. They stole all my money, I’m told it’s commonplace in this disreputable district. I’ve informed the authorities and given a description to the police who helpfully tell me it was all my fault for not using a padlock and leaving it unattended for enough milliseconds for them to have the thing upended. I was insured, so bar a few minor injuries I am inured to the whole sorry escapade, and grateful they did not stick a stiletto in my aorta to sabotage my badinage. But anyway, the uncanny thing in all of this is the reason I came here on this ill-fated journey at all. It was because I came across a notice in a newspaper announcing a forthcoming exhibition here in Sylvia by a mysterious new artist masquerading under the name of Ithir The Rhymer. Curious moniker I thought, then I saw his cryptic biography and portrait, but by some wild trick of photography this artist looked like our Nithna, miraculous man from nowhere washed up on the shores of Oceania. So I packed my bags and set out to find you anticipating many enquiries and dead-ends then by some weird godsend, after a perfunctory mugging, the first tavern I stumble into has you, or you claiming to be you, your name and face all changed as by a wipe of the lens, quite deranged really this little set-to straight out of the blue. Just what am I to do? –Or to make of this, or this indeed? He brandishes a crumpled poster folded and rolled, whipped from his pocket and torn from a wall with which he’s recently collided.

Jumping J-J-Jehoshaphat… I stammer, discomfited and disjointed to the point of fainting, casting my jaded peepers over an image of three of my own paintings, now I too am agape at the manic machinations of fate. I scan the small print for explanation of this situation and there in a corner spy two names that flick everything into focus, clearing the smoke of hocus pocus: “Kenneth Astley Kettering and Mustafa Hakim request your company at an exhibition of their esteemed missing colleague, protégé and auteur manqué, Ithir The Rhymer, whose paintings have been hailed of late as ‘heralding a new movement’s vanguard” (–Scunthorpe Times Literary Standard).”

You see? Stockbridge exults, steadying me now as much as I him, leaning together like a monument to muddleheadedness bifurcated at the shins. Slim, the sinew of reality to which we cling, which brings us on its whim in due course from one moment to the next and thence to enlightenment. This is the very exhibition which I’m seeking out, no doubt, and you the maestro the world is hungry now to learn much more about…

The world and Scunthorpe, so I see. The hyperbole of marketing never ceases to astound me. Ground me, before my head sails off across the sky like a nylon Hindenburg in search of a pylon. This is all very well and good, but I would rather find the aforementioned dame, find love than fame, set my brother straight in all his debauched and raucous games than stick around and wallow like a pig in mud in the newfound notoriety of my name.

Stockbridge puts a steadying claw upon my sleeve. Back up, old man, the two are scarcely opposites but apposite in fact in extremis to the task at hand. Have you not seen the news? Your brother, if such he be, is held captive in this land, in a jail not far from here I hear, indicted for tax evasion, drug trafficking, conspiracy to battery, murder and myriad other peccadilloes. We can go and interview the scoundrel there…

Interview? How so?

Ahah! But now you see the real reason why I risked the roughing up by those ruffians’ hands in striving to retrieve a reprieve for my grievously onerous and laborious paperwork… Stockbridge produces an official and legalistic looking pink file from his tattered attaché case. My contact in Switzerland, whom you may recall I alluded to in psychoanalytic sessions, while domicile at my erstwhile island abode… Erno Schwitzer, esteemed and well-connected as an enormous octopus with testicles everywhere…

Tentacles.

Spectacles.

Wallet.

And watch, all deleteriously painful to squash. I have been mysteriously granted legal permission on Schwitzer’s behalf to view the police files lodged here in this very prefecture, on the case of one Thomas Leermouth, supposedly deceased, disgraced, and defaced by a bullet to the hypothalamus, on which note we once again find common interest and intent, do we not? To go find your brother and the location of certain members of his entourage, whilst researching the identity of a man who may or may not be you?

Synchronicity indeed. Sly synecdoche, my brother as a sinful syndicate of interest to the police. On mnemosyne on the other hand, I am less keen, I mean more than a little loath to be proven a live dead man and slammed in the can, when here I am deadly alive and free to roam wheresoever I please and can. You get my meaning, man?

Yes, yes… Stockbridge muses, I think I can. But be at peace, by and by. Twenty years dead exceeds Lord Lucan’s alibi, though somewhat shy of Adolf Hitler’s. Schwitzer merely has the scientific bloodhound’s nose, not a Simon Wiesenthal’s bold thirst for justice, and besides his patient-confidentiality and Hippocratic oath are quite the match for a Swiss banker’s double gold standards. You shan’t be putting your head in a noose so much as a highly useful lanyard.

Thank you Doctor, for that briefly inexplicable tour of twentieth century European history. A mystery, your circumloquaciousness could come to rival my own spacious speciousness. Have you been in training? And do you not find the effort draining?

Like straining over a chamber pot without warning on a cold morning. Potty training. But come let us shake our shaking hands on this then. I surmise I have you half won over, or indeed have run you over, and that after three more ales we’ll sleep like pigs in clover.

Back into the hostelry we go then, I to play the keys and draw the bow, pluck strings, make music and make merry as a ferryman to cross the river of night for my passengers’ delight, as well I might. And one acquaintance re-made and a deal struck, we feel no more need to make sense and indeed make less and less as the evening progresses towards its blessed oblivion. Next day I wake with my head next to the feet of a not unappealing dolly who has robbed me of my lolly, with a hazy memory of riding pillion in a supermarket trolley. Sitting up for a painful second, I spy sprawled across the carpet at the bottom of the bed fully dressed: Doctor Horace Stockbridge out for the count and as good as dead. And judging by the thunder in my head, my tongue and feet like lead, I shan’t be getting up to check his life signs soon and besides right now with sweating brow, would envy him and anyone else eternal rest.

Too soon then our pretty host disturbs our fragile repose, throws us our clothes while fixing her make-up in a cracked mirror. Making a guess I call her Carol, only to be told it is Karen, gruffly. Close enoughly. Building on this success, I move on to guess her profession as we make our procession down the stairs, opening with a careless stumble a broom cupboard answered by a mumble of two people engaged in fornication in flagrante, enraged, engorged and apt to up the ante. We close the door upon their antics, and take our fresh air with the romantics and innocents of this world, stepping out beneath the fresh blue sky with clouds unfurled.

Pausing, dusting down his crumpled suit, Stockbridge hurries in my pursuit. I turn and hoot: Oh that your beloved Emily could see you besmirched thus head to foot at the portal of a house of ill repute.

Good god, the good doctor splutters, what profane act must you have fallen asleep engaged in with her foot, and what did she mean about having played your flute?

Ah, the monotony of anatomy. These points are moot, I venture, and incidental to our main adventure. Let us ease our addled brains of strains and stresses, over a cup of something black and hot, (you still have some money, have you not?) –while we peruse those addresses of constabulary establishments likely to harbour news of my brother and his misused muse, and if it amuses you: that other business too, of who you think I am but err, for I am not, and even if I were, remember not a jot.

And so the great towering trees of Sylvia rise up about us in the spring breeze, as we pace her imposing avenues. So much trunk and foliage, it is as if the place were but a forest with a certain residue of bricks and mortar, pricks and slaughter, sex and death and bad breath, caught up in her retinue. Beech and maple, oak, birch and pine all intertwine with architecture which eschews the straight line in favour of a more curvaceous flavour, organic of a manic savour, all swirls and twirls and caryatids, nymphs and girls, volutes, parabolas, scrolls, ellipses, ovals and twists soft to the eye but hard to resist, even by trolls and proles and not scoffed at by toffs not entirely cold. All carved most cunningly in timber, stone and glass. More joy to the eye than pain in the ass. Art Nouveau for the nouveau riche, more quiche than filet mignon, more rococo gone loco than lean modernist beef.

What a relief when the caffeine washes down, to sit by a window and let the afternoon skies drown us in their painterly clouds which wet themselves and us occasionally and discreetly, moistening the leaves and pavements with a glowing highlight of gold. Nostalgia like neuralgia, it is as if I did indeed know this place of old, such is the bold progress my eyes and footsteps make through its woods and moods. It is all for the good perhaps, this eerie return I shall not spurn in favour of further self-ignorance and denial. Some great trial approaches its closing reaches, and I shan’t recoil from its teaching and preaching, beseeching me to look into a darkened glass whose many glimpses I have not hearkened to as along its gallery I’ve passed. So in all lives, we do not pause or look enough as hastily we go, as if the destination ruled out all hesitation. And yet Thanatos guards the end of our every street and every row, a harvest moon or a child’s balloon cut loose, and all wise and ancient it knows: there is no hurry that negates our obligation to look right and left and carefully, wherever we go. ‘What have you learned?’ will be the one question we find our endeavours have earned at Saint Peter’s gate, and inattention seal our fate.

But what is this incessant imprint that crowds my eyes each time I blink? –The memory of the face and smiles and laughter of a girl. My rationale can transcend the strictures of this picture burned into my heart, and yet each time I drop my guard her image returns and burns and burns. Are we no more than arrows and darts loosed as sport from some mischievous bow from One on high who plays with us as toys, our terrors and joys mere spectacle for his cruel sport? Does each broken heart, as a gunshot register a loud report in that ethereal chamber overhead, or are we only playthings, inert as tin and long since dead? Can all this cascade of fevered meaning howling in every lover’s breast, a trillion souls since the birth of all creation, really amount to naught, and merit no reply but its own negation? No answer comes from this high sky, unless rain be tears from some gargantuan being of whom we are the very thoughts that throng his head. Oh let it be so, that every tangent and trajectory, as vapour trails across the blue, is a thought, a life, the magnificent demise of me and you, as autumn dying in its hundred hues. We make such smoke as lasts a hundred years a piece, our lives the very music to make the angels weep.

A police station. By what perversion and degradation of common sense do I find myself crossing this threshold voluntarily? Verily I am by instinct no friend to the constabulary. But friend to Horace Stockbridge certainly, who saved me from the waves and let me catch my breath, nursed me back from the edge of death until my legs could bear my weight again. And as he healed my body, so have others catered for my soul, the dear Mustafa whose acquaintance I shall remake too before this moon is old. I am stronger in every way each day, while my fabled brother withers. Now take me to the pot in which they keep the snake so we can watch him slither.

The street our feet take us down is somewhat tumble-down. If the gentrified districts we crossed were smiles then this is more a frown. Façades all bashed in as old boxers’ faces, bruised and ripped and stitched in places. Stucco weathered, peeled and patched. Thatched with moss and knotweed here and there, growing from the fissures spreading slowly everywhere. Render failing rather as human or reptilian skin: sorely used and growing rather thin. And due to shed perhaps some moment soon, a secret midnight or a sun-drenched noon when silence cloaks the expectant air like a she-spider waiting in her lair for the first clear word to bring her out to lunge and tear. Soon all will be revealed, is the message that I reach for, cloaked in metaphor, or is it fear? For so I sense and know, as something eerie tells me: here, I have been before.

We reach a door and pushing in find ourselves confronted with the habitual array of uniformed dunces at reception, too strapped for laughs to share a grin. Here one senses, time, patience and fresh air grown thin. Good evening, officer… Doctor Stockbridge clears his throat as to begin. I have a letter here from a certain esteemed Swiss Doctor Schwitzer, I emailed it to you last week. Here’s a copy, look, you’ll have a record of it in your book…

Dave! –the crew-cut jobsworth shouts as though addressing his desk, –there’s some bloke out here enquiring about a Vienna Schnitzel for his Bar Mitzvah, would you care to come and take a look?

What, what? The eponymous Dave emerges from his back-room fug clutching a mug of slopping Horlicks to his bollocks in an expression of lopsided solipsism. Mouth twisted, he opines: Des, Did you book those druggies and finish off those traffic fines? Des shakes his head, whether in deft refusal or rueful despair we’re left to make up our own minds. Dave turns to us. Doctor Whatnot I believe?

Stockbridge. And my understudy Nadir Renoir. I feel as if under study, as Dave considers me briefly like a slater exposed beneath a lifted rock, and turns his weary eyes skywards to the clock upon the time-stained wall.

I can spare five minutes with you right now, or not at all. He turns around abruptly as a sergeant major, our following him presumed to his luxurious and well-appointed room.

Excellent, officer. We can well appreciate your workload is heavy as your ability is small…

I nudge Horace. His newfound command of loquacious English is tenuous and dangerous. Such pride before a fall.

What’s that? Dave half turns his head as he walks, a difficult operation for which he trained for years.

Availability. Stockbridge comes out of the tight corner, correcting himself adroitly if desperately. Dave listens uninterestedly. Your availability. Your available time is small…

Not at all. He smiles and sits behind his desk, indicating by the smallest inflexion that we should make ourselves at home. I’m all ears…

Well, as my email stated, on behalf of the esteemed Doctor Schwitzer, Interpol have granted me the authority by proxy to obtain certain files on one Thomas Leermouth, deceased. An unproven murder case which took place on this date here, see… Stockbridge tables the papers and punts them gamely across the table with all the filmic aplomb he can muster. I am particularly interested in the addresses of the offences and those of the witnesses, the victims as alleged of Mister Leermouth’s rather queer experiments. Dave’s eyebrows lift, the papers shift, one senses that he longs for a cigarette, or a suffragette to arrest, finding us quite the pest.

Here, says Dave at last, marking a few pages and firing aged rubber bands across the desk, this is old shit now. I’ll have Des photocopy these pages then you can be on your way. Was there any other business I can be doing for you today?

As a matter of fact, I wonder if you might tell me which police station the artist Zenith Learmot is presently being held at. I read in the paper this morning that he has been charged with a fair barrage of villainy, after all these years of accumulating pillory from the very media whose praise his slithery…

I kick Stockbridge under the desk, anxious to curtail his inexpert verbiage.

Zenith, ah yes. Causing quite a stir over at Briarbarn Road I’m told, shouting promises of bribery through his prison bars, making frequent references and promises regarding his gold bars in Swiss bank accounts. But I don’t think those will be worth much by the time he gets out. His goose is cooked, the way things look. Has this some connection with your Swiss professor?

Doctor.

Father confessor… I add irrelevantly, unable to restrain myself at last from the joy of a cheap rhyme, then stop in time from further indulgence.

Dave eyes me like a mouldy effulgence glimpsed on the dirty walls of his dreariest cells, marking me well. Well?

Only time will tell. Stockbridge brilliantly answers, resolving the situation with a clichéd collocation just in time. He goes up in my estimation. I’ve taught him well. And so we leave, the situation retrieved, reprieved, the gruff policeman deceived into thinking we are figures of credibility, unable to believe we’ve bluffed our stuff and taken personal information one ought not to disclose, in contradiction of all appropriate legislation, out from under his nose.

So, how to make use of our abuse of a policeman’s trust? Phrased like that, ’tis quite a rare and unusual jewel we have in our hands as we wander about, the good doctor and I, strangers together in these strange lands. Inevitably enough, I want to go find my sordid sibling first, but Horace restrains me with an eminently logical refrain, somewhat wasted on my irrational brain: To get to speak to Zenith behind bars may be no easy thing, requiring some extra special skulduggery and thuggery, bribery and imbibery, and if it goes wrong we’ll be ejected from this noble region. Reasons are legion why we should press on with our more legal business first, culminating in the opening of your first artistic show tomorrow night. You’ll want to meet with your friends beforehand, renew their acquaintance as they spray your canvases with fresh varnish and glue. I would if I were you. Thereafter, in the wake of much applause and laughter, you can slip out some tradesman’s entrance to wreak all the revenge you like on your tyke of a brother.

Revenge? I stop myself and him, slowing a little as we whittle our way through the woody streets, spring blossoms blowing at our feet, reaching a district a little more neat and complete. Is that what you think is driving me still? Did I not speak of the love of a woman, of that urgency, that primordial thrill? I find myself thinking of the words of Mustafa, sense my soul being weighed, as he conveyed, in some great scales above us tended by an unseen hand of infinite gentleness and wisdom.

I wonder though… Stockbridge ponders half to himself as we resume our stride, if you’d be able to restrain yourself, given the unlikely opportunity to throttle and kill him. Those bars may prove a blessing, both for you and for him. The gap between them too thin to let him out, or to let you in.

I laugh, grimly, answering his shrewdness with a grin, noticing that night is falling fast and that if this place has a public transport system then its mastery by tickets and timetables is a task too late for us to begin, today at least, I’m tired of being on my pins. Stockbridge treats me to a fine buffet dinner in a restaurant chosen on a whim, which fills as night goes on with loud Sylvians making a din. I get him drunk again and we spend the night in some bins. Chaste at least, in this place this time, with only rats to nibble on our extremities, no dubious saloon girls to quibble our moral proclivities. And a fine municipal fountain to shower in the next morning, what more could a fellow want? Stockbridge seems less than grateful, frightfully set in his ways and unable to adjust to the noble lifestyle I’ve perfected over so many years. I’m sure Mustafa understood and I resolve that I must discuss it with him again. Comfort and luxury are a terrible hindrance and corrosion of the mettle of men.

A new district then, and a strange trail to follow, astute and erect as bloodhounds, once at length I’ve found some coffee made of grounds of Herculean strength to throw down Stockbridge’s throat. He glows at first like a ten pound bomb ready to explode then we’re up and away and back on the road. Metronome men, we tick and tock, and talk at an accelerated rate as we confusedly follow a cheap tourist map, and I begin to get the queer notion that the café which sold me the coffee was not entirely kosher. Amphetamine sounds no more like coffee than sun tan lotion. Whatever the cause, the effect is much forward motion.

We arrive we think at our first address, and take some time to dust the excess of mess off each other’s clothes while hiding behind a rose bush. An ambush, is what this feels like, poring over our photocopied details of a certain Gerald Meek, a lab technician who subjected himself to the alleged experiments of Thomas Leermouth in return for a hundred and fifty-six pounds a week. Cheap at the price I’d say, for the voyage of your life, back and forward in time, where’s the crime? We hit the door chime and wait, wait a long time, for Meek’s aged mother to shuffle to the door. She immediately seems all too ready to ignore us until we implore her to let us tell her son’s story, in all its unsavoury glory, to an ignorant world, of all the untold harm that man Leermouth got to do before he was apprehended. But how could they let him escape? –she asks herself with a shake of her head while going to rouse Gerry himself from his bed. That bastard doctor fair messed with his head.

In time we hear the stairs creaking, and rambling sounds of speech leaking down from above, like the hoots of a wood dove nested in the world’s eaves, or the laughter of God as he leaves us for the last time, tossing us the keys. Gerry Meek descends, his aged mother helping as his limbs bend, a travesty of the normal run of things for this man is not yet forty by the tally of mere years, according to our notes. Motes of dust spin in the morning sunlight from the seldom-parted curtains, a swirl of dishevelment about this sore sight on which our eyes alight. Long unkempt hair prematurely white, he sees us and recoils in fright: The fumigator men, ’tis them again… back to flush the rats out of the basement and lick the mould from the walls like a whore’s tongue on my balls, why are you always out, mother, when Dorothy Parker calls? It’s not what I meant, what I meant at all, this clashing of rocks like unwashed socks at the charterhouse of dawn. You get me wrong? Then sing me a song to save me from the graceful faces of the men who mow the lawn. Their fingers are like knives impaling pale wives who run for their lives and sail off down the Ganges in washtubs made waterproof by mountaineering dubbing. Let’s all go clubbing. The land-lubbing god who tied us to this clod of sod can answer at least for the dark mood of this flood and its constant thud against our hearts and heads as the tide rises. No surprises, you’ll have it off with all that rubbing. Put a sock in it or a lampshade on it, stuff a flex up a poodle’s arse and switch it like Christmas tree for you and me, one each in the abstract beach of snow where we meet before nobody goes. What direction is time? Primordial slime is the recurring terminus, looking up or down the line.

What the devil is he talking about? –Stockbridge interjects in a sympathetic whisper into Mrs Meek’s ear.

Oh, she says, almost smiling sadly, he’s been like this for years. Pay no attention to the generalities, they’re invariably jumbled up, but the details sometimes mean things, well, half of them, and the other half are bollocks, pardon my French, gentlemen. Fumigator men for example, he’s seeing them right now, as if you are them, but they came here five years ago and upset him because he had to vacate his room for two days. To him, this incident is real, still happening right now, he has no sense of time. His memories are not packed away, but constantly replaying, in an art gallery, permanently on display.

Quick, Sir Nigel! Meek leaps to his feet and raises his hand as if hailing some passing dignitary. Down by Whitman’s Farm, the enemy are nigh! But what a roguish trouncing we might yet bring them too were we to be the better harriers this day…

Ahh now this is his medieval phase. He sees knights riding through here apparently, something to do with the Wars Of The Roses, right across the living room. He often complains that I don’t shovel the horse dung up from in front of the telly or that his feet are sliding on the cobbles, but our living room is fitted carpet as you can both see. Oh deary me. I’ve grown quite used to all this I’m afraid, strange and harrowing to you as it undoubtedly might be. Can I get you both a cup of tea?

When Mrs Meek goes to leave the room, Stockbridge gets up and sits beside Meek on the settee, passing a hand in front of his eyes as the man goes on muttering. Mr Meek, Gerald… Gerry… can you hear my voice, are you aware of the two of us, two visitors sitting in the living room with you? Do you know where you are? Sitting in your living room at home? Can you see us?

I hear you… the voice replies at last, tired and cracked, as if from far away through layer upon layer of quilts, a man deeply asleep or imprisoned beneath the weight of his own eyelids. What seekest thou in this land? I have more motives for men than hats and gloves, but none for you to hand.

Did you know a Doctor Thomas Leermouth twenty years ago? Did he harm you in some way…?

Phhhhhh… Meek lets out a violent expulsion of air, purses his lips then paces about the room with disturbing velocity then bangs his head into the fireplace wall. His mother returns holding the tea pot high in her hands and as she pauses in the door for a moment, Meek lets out a deep guttural animal wail then grabs the poker from beside the fireplace and runs with it flailing around his head and swings it majestically as Excalibur into the teapot’s side with an almighty boom, sending it skidding and spilling right across the room.

Stockbridge and I seem a good deal more shocked than Mrs Meek who takes it all somewhat philosophically and decidedly in her stride, returning to her kitchen to fetch a bucket and cloth, while the doctor and I restrain her son on the sofa as his mouth pours with froth.

What? What heresy didst thou quoth? Leermouth stuck me in the goalmouth then aimed a thousand bladders at my nuts. Penalty time. Sick to the death and walloped in the guts. Guinea pig served raw I was with mighty sore baws. A fiery little homunculi fetched out of the foundry with red-hot glowing hammer and tongs. Ah the voices voiceless that throng my hiddenness. It was he that opened up the hatch in my head, set a batch of twelve-inch singles playing on my turntable then left me there for dead. Ahh, ah’m fair fucked lads, it’s time we packed me off to bed.

As Meek quietens down, Stockbridge goes to help his mother with the mop and broom and I feel some idiotic obligation to break the silence in the room. How did he do it, this experiment? Drugs, hallucinations and suggestions?

Meek breathes a long rasping noise, harrowing and horrible and I suddenly become terrified that I have been left alone in the room with him. It’s you! He screams aloud, scrabbling backwards on the sofa, crab-like, his eyes staring unseeing, roaming wildly across the room. That voice! Keep your paws off my hair, it’s all growed back so you can’t touch me anymore. How did you find me, you fiend!? I’d sooner have had leukaemia than this temporal anaemia. You wicked emissary of perverted academia. Call this toxic intoxication life then I’d sooner choose abstemia! And with that he takes one last run and launches himself headfirst straight through the living room window.

That went well… I reflect to Stockbridge, as we hasten away from Meek’s tearful mother, the ambulance doors closing behind her son. A good morning’s work done.

He’ll be fine… the good doctor muses, –just a few bruises and flesh wounds. His mother seemed to think it was time they took him in for review anyhow. And we swept all the glass up nicely didn’t we? It should be making eye-catching ballast in her shrubbery by now. What did you say to him though? I caught only a snatch of it while I was fetching a new batch of Hoover bags. You seemed to send him right over the edge, and indeed the hedge and the petunias.

Loony logic as only a loony has. And come to think of it, the moon is full today and will hold full sway across a regal night too soon if we go on squandering our wanderings to expedite your theories in this way.

Nithna… Stockbridge turns to look at me as we pace down leafy noonday streets again, If I didn’t know you better I’d swear you were trying to change the subject or indeed the sport to some game that you were better placed to play. Could that fellow have recognised you with his wrecked eyes, even though you’ve been through a face or two?

I doubt it seriously, don’t you? The present seemed to make less impact on him than the price of oil in Timbuktu.

Indeed, or 1462. I suppose you’ll be contemplating consulting a library to see what historical realities he was viewing with his psychic telescope.

No need. I could see the man was quite deranged, estranged from reality, in actuality. Let us give our attention to the neglected sport of punctuality.

So in time we come to a yet sadder clime, a melancholy bungalow amid an avenue of limes. And more and more now in Sylvia I find my feet and mind atremble as fragments of vistas resemble memories all jumbled up and pushed away out of sight in my cognitive attic. Does Horace Stockbridge know I’m at it? –Pretending to him that I am in all respects a mental white sheet, when in fact I am gaining unwelcome self-knowledge with every sorry street? Who can we trust on this earth? A dearth of friends is what the truly honest man would all too quickly find, were such a fool creature to exist upon this world. Oh yes, remind me, there was one once, and they crucified him for his trouble. Or a wise man, yes, of genuine and total perspicacity and sagacity, I wonder if he would have much taste or capacity for friends and time among his fellow men, when every second he could see their writhing thoughts recoiling and contriving to bend each other to their ends. I put my hands up to my dishevelled hair and am amazed to realise how much time has idled by since I last used the rusting wires concealed there. With a kind of panic I part the buttons of my tunic to make sure the dial upon my chest is still extant and has not been stolen by some harlot or footpad who caught me unawares. I sigh with relief. It’s there, it’s there. But why do I care? I seem not to have made much use of it of late. Do my otherworldly powers at last abate?

We ring the doorbell, and in a while a middle-aged man stands there puzzling at us in the bright light of afternoon, and cordially invites us in to talk and soon we find we three are freely discussing the lost life of his late wife Rachel Blackwell. He makes us tea and leads us to his study, ushering us to sit opposite him on a large leather settee. The house is modest but drab, with an air of something indefinably sad and male, the absence of a woman’s touch, somehow cold and pale. He has not re-married, and photographs of her lovely face are scattered about the place amid, atop, tasteful hardwood shelves and armoires draped with Turkish cloths. A grandfather clock ticktocks somewhere in an echoing hall, and dust feels just a little too undisturbed in this solitary future whose occupant given the choice, one senses, would not have chosen this at all.

Blackwell begins: Rachel and he, Professor Leermouth, they became friends you see, quite close for a while, sometimes I even wondered if there might have been something between them, the way she talked about him, but she always denied that. Him a neuro-scientist, her still an impressionable student. He exploited her you see, her trust, the rat. At first she was just a volunteer, imagine that. That’s how enthralled she was to his appalling theories.

What were his experiments? Stockbridge prompts compassionately, stirring his tea.

Well, she signed a secrecy agreement, I wasn’t supposed to be told anything, but Rachel, bless her, extended that circle of confidence to secretly include me. But was that any blessing, I wonder? Well at least I knew, know, why she died and who was responsible. It was all about hypnotic retrogression. Most scientists dismiss it, excommunicate any heretics who dare to even sniff at the supernatural. But he was shrewd and careful. Had been quietly going to performances and interviewing practitioners for years, befriended a few, got them to teach him the basic techniques. It’s not like swinging a pocket watch and ‘are you feeling sleepy?” you know, that’s all just popular myth stage show stuff, it can be done with more subtlety and control than that, so Rachel reported. Leermouth started practising it himself, on a few subjects, Rachel and some others, sworn to secrecy. Said he’d taken them back to their childhoods, that sort of thing. But he’d invented this gizmo, “the hairnet” Rachel used to call it. A grid of wires and sensors he fitted over the head of the hypnotised subject, used it to measure exactly the electric field patterns of the brain. But it wasn’t just a measuring device, it was an inducer. He didn’t need to hypnotise anyone anymore you see, after the first session to map their brain. He just turned the dial up, induced the same currents again in their brain and they went to sleep and started voyaging through their own memories.

At this point, Doctor Stockbridge is unable to resist casting a glance over at me, with eyebrow raised, his face animated with fascination. Blackwell continues: But according to Rachel things got stranger after that. Leermouth discovered that if he kept going with subjects, right back to their birth, they could go beyond, they would find themselves inside the body of another person, someone who had lived before in a previous generation.

Reincarnation?

Yes, ridiculous isn’t it? He had film recordings he showed Rachel apparently, of what she had said under hypnosis, speaking in strange accents and archaic languages, that sort of thing.

How far did he claim to be able to take her back? –I ask now, unable to maintain my restrained composure in the face of such mysterious disclosure. James Blackwell looks towards me curiously, his eyes unfocussed, his mind far away.

Oh… way back. The middle ages, then even before the Romans. Crazy stuff. Rachel said they verified some of it, or tried to. Historical maps confirmed the location of some cotton mill she had “relived”, that was the term they invented, not “remember”. She had relived being a woman working in a cotton mill, and they found the site and supposedly neither Rachel nor Leermouth could have known its existence beforehand. But they would have said that, wouldn’t they? Perhaps it was all baloney. Oh yes, and other things, an ancient fort, a stockade built in the water somewhere in some remote loch. They drove away there together one weekend, which I wasn’t happy about… maybe the whole thing was just a cover for him hitting on her. But of course they claimed they found the landmarks she had seen in her “reliving”… lost standing stones buried in the peat up to their tips, not marked on any map, ancient stepping stones under the water in a pattern you could run across at speed if you memorised them, but which outsiders and attackers would never master. It was utter madness. I felt I was beginning to lose her by then, as if she was coming under that man’s spell, like a warlock.

Did you ever meet him? –I ask, with no inconsiderable trepidation.

Again, that turn of the head, and the slightly startled look from Blackwell. No… strangely enough, although I tried to. Tried to ask questions at the university he was attached to, to launch a complaint against him if necessary, although I didn’t want to make trouble for Rachel, just to try and extricate her from his spell. I think I saw him once at a distance getting into his little yellow sports car, but he drove off at speed. He had longish dark hair turning white, an ageing hippie, you know the type. Do you know he got Rachel to shave all the hair off her head? All her lovely long blonde locks. She cut it all off for him and she wore wigs instead, like she was a flaming cancer patient. Just so his ‘hairnet” would work better on her. Can you imagine how I felt about that? She said it was worth it for the money he was paying her for the experiment sessions, but I couldn’t see that anything was worth that. I don’t think it was about money after a while anyway. She believed it all, and believed in him and wanted to find out how it would all end. We disagreed and argued about it a lot, began to fight.

What did happen in the end?

Leermouth said he wanted to go public with his results, that there might even be big money in it one day, a company selling voyages into past lives, “Heredyssey” he planned to call it, hereditary odyssey, he probably even registered a domain name. But before that he said he needed to test his “Forward Hypotheses”.

What did that mean?

He discovered he could reverse some of the currents in the brain patterns and induce the subject to go forward.

Forward?

Yes, so if Rachel was in the 18^th century and he wanted to bring her forward to the 19^th, he turned a dial. But of course, the question occurred to him after a while: what would happen if he kept her going forward to the present day then beyond? Into the future in other words.

Did that work?

Blackwell shrugs his shoulders. It was probably all hogwash. But she believed it apparently.

What did she, or he, see?

She would never tell me. But a look of pain and terror entered her eyes that day, that never left her until she died. She came home shaking and crying, a nervous wreck. She said she’d seen the future, ours and mine, and that it was better not to know, that nobody in fact, nobody should ever want to know the future, that it was the worst kind of curse imaginable to have that knowledge. She said she wanted to lose her memory, to be lobotomised even. She started drinking heavily, taking pills to get to sleep. Leermouth destroyed her, whatever it was he did, whatever it was he convinced her that she’d seen. And that’s how she died you know… a cocktail of prescription drugs, as they said. A cocktail… doesn’t that sound chirpy? –Like a wild party. But she was so alone towards the end, inside her head, no matter how I or anyone else tried, you couldn’t reach her. She didn’t even leave a suicide note. I don’t suppose she needed to. Her life had become a suicide note, our every conversation, for the final few weeks.

I’m sorry for your loss, Mister Blackwell. Stockbridge says at last after an appropriate silence.

Oh? So was he apparently, Leermouth. Tended to confirm my theory that something had been going on, or that he’d had a crush on Rachel at least, unrequited, an older man and a beautiful young woman. Or maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it was remorse for what he’d done. But he phoned here repeatedly, in distress, wanted to come to the funeral, but I told him I’d break his legs if he came anywhere near. He began sobbing like a child down the phone. I told him I had told the police what I knew about his experiments and that he should expect a knock on the door soon. That seemed to shut him up. I heard he went on the run after that… and well, you probably know the story, he shot himself. But tell you what… I remember something else he said on the phone, maybe the last thing he ever said to me. He said he was going to “go back and change things”. Maybe he just meant trash his lab and destroy the evidence, or maybe something else, something weirder to do with all his creepy ideas about time and memories. I suppose he changed the future at least, for the better, by removing himself from it. Maybe we should all be grateful for that, one fragment of redemption. I don’t think I’ve ever wished anyone’s death. But the news of his, after everything, God forgive me, was a relief.

Thank you, Mister Blackwell, for sharing all that with us. I realise the memories must be painful, even after all these years… As Stockbridge talks, I find I have stood up, bewitched as in a trance and danced across the room to face into the photo-portrait of Rachel above the mantelpiece, her eyes like dark tunnels into which my consciousness funnels, slips and trips and drips in runnels.

The police closed the case a long time ago, how come someone’s interested in this again? –I dimly hear Blackwell asking, as if he is a hundred miles away across a sea of spray.

My colleague, the esteemed Swiss Doctor Erno Schwitzer believes he has a patient with memory loss who may have been involved with Leermouth, is showing similar symptoms to those you have so kindly and helpfully recounted to us as Rachel’s. The man is very ill apparently, mentally, and any kind of light on his history could be most revealing.

Then I am glad to have been of some assistance. There was some sensationalist news coverage at the time of course, but after that people lost interest. It hurts me sometimes to think that Rachel has been forgotten.

Oh, but she is not forgotten. I find myself saying, as the two of us stand to leave, not quite able to believe the unbidden words slipping from my mouth, as we shake hands with Blackwell. Stockbridge looks at me askance, aghast, then retrieves the save like an expert goalie, quelling an advance. You keep her memory eloquently alive, Mister Blackwell… and now you’ve shared it with us also, for which we are most grateful. Slowly, and wholly chastened we depart that holy shrine to lost love and time, wherein a flame endures to whose poignancy none but the hardest heart could be inured.

Now the afternoon hurries on, the light grows weary… we must go see your friends and seize your new destiny as a talked-about painter whose fortunes are on the rise. –I hear Stockbridge say this by my side as we stroll, but I am still miles away as the roll of thunder on a distant horizon. I am in strange turmoil, and if pressed could not attest as to what constituent parts my conflicting thoughts comprise.

You know, the good Doctor takes my arm, I am alarmed as to how quiet you’ve become today, and odder still I’d say you’ve even started rhyming less, that might be significant, but quite of what I cannot guess.

Bless you, Doctor, for your concern, but I believe my ailment is no more mysterious, and indeed no less, than what is customarily called Déjà vu. Perhaps my alleged new status as an artistic parvenu will do the trick to lift the gloom and restore some conversational hilarity between me and you.

Could you be Leermouth? Stockbridge punts the awful question, the looming chasm, intimidating phantasm, then throws me a lifeline to quell my spasms, –or one of his other victims perhaps, of whom we know there were a few, not all of which the police ever found to speak to?

I know not, I sigh, I have forgotten, as was perhaps that poor girl’s desire, all regret and epithet of years past apt to make me sad or tire. And only to the present now or future, can my heart aspire. I am drawn forwards as by angels singing to whatever revelation awaits me next, in punishment or recompense, my task to shed one final mask.

So I only had to ask. Or disappear, dispense with fear. Now here I am at last outside an art gallery solely dedicated to my work, I can’t believe my luck. Look, there is my name (or one of them at least) proclaimed across the launch-night banners. I stammer as I cross the threshold, full of disbelief. T’would almost be relief to find it all an error, the mouse in me recoils in terror. But there they are, straight up ahead: canvases and pastels I recognise as mine, strange and yet familiar, glimpsed dimly from some other time. And Mustafa and Kettering, muttering in a back room, catch sight of me and come running out, overjoyed: Ithir! What miracle is this? We all feared you drowned or dead!

Indeed! We lock in a tri-partite embrace, nearly bang our heads. It is as if I have been dead and now return to mourn at my own burial.

Much better than that by far, you silly old goat! Here, let me take you by the hand and throat, and squeeze the life half out you to check all’s real about you. –Kettering exclaims, until we descend to calling each other disrespectful names, as was our habitual game of old. Dirty gypsy bastard, old dead-beat rock-and-roller, we laugh and holler.

You have changed I see, old friend… Mustafa marvels, and writ upon your face are all your travels. In fact, hold on, the very shape of your nose and brow, the colour of your eyes. How can this be? –Your soul re-housed in a vessel of a different shape and size?

I cannot understand it either, and have learned it’s better not to even try. Besides, after a drink or ten, who truly recollects the face of men? ’Tis our spirit and our voices about tonight we should be rejoicing. I did not know I had done so many oils, how noble of you to build such a monument of the spoils of my abscondment. And what uncanny luck that I should chance upon you in this arrondissement. Here, in fact, how could I forget? –I owe this very meeting to this friend here patiently waiting throughout this greeting, Doctor Horace Stockbridge.

More hands are shaken as the doctor joins the group, bottles cracked open, everybody cock-a-hoop. The wine and stories flow and bit by bit my spirits take to the air, as standing by the stair I dimly register the first guests entering then more thereafter, much hilarity and laughter. My private view, my vernissage, parvenu and ingénue, my soirée a la carte and sur le plage. Premier étage. But oh, behind this visage, how my soaring spirits turn like an eagle and venture out too far and high into my own sky and by and by I find myself more distant than I would have planned or desired. All the voices and faces turn to one, one vast auditory hallucinatory hum, a cacophonic choir. I find myself drawn, glass in hand, to stand before my own pictures puzzling over their deeper meanings. It is as if I hear a bird cry, plaintively keening, something lost, a knife-sharp fragment of returning meaning. Every face on each canvas bears some resemblance to Rachel Blackwell, or is it to some other woman looming in memory or obsession? –Cynthia, Gladys, or my brother’s Aphrodite, on whose trail I’d rather be tonight if I were half so drunk and twice as sprightly? And figures lying on chairs without their hair, and nets across their faces fixed in sleeping grimaces, and everywhere symbols scattered as if plundered out of shopping trips through history. Crosses, swastikas, runes and Sanskrit interweaved in symbolist mysteries older than time and maybe older, someone is talking at my shoulder. Kettering, whittering, he’s reading my thoughts like psychic join-the-dots, or has been creating them, weaving them with his own verbosity, like hypno retro gresso-whatzity:

Who was that girl who was all over you at the end of that show in Oceania on that last occasion? I last saw the two of you vanish into that goodnight together, arm in arm for all the world as if you’d been like that forever and all set to sail off down the river. Then bang! There was noise, confusion, gunshots even, you were banished, leaving. Famished for news we’ve been since. What did it mean can you evince? That bold stramash so close to the Feast of Stephen.

They took her… I mumble… the sharp-toothed rats… my brother’s orthodontic rodents, I should have seen the portents… but no fear I’m on the trail and won’t fail to find her, or if you find her first please do remind her… I say from behind my haze, gazing into a glazed bottle and emptying its contents.

And next, minutes or hours gone by, its hard to say, I find Mustafa at my side, painting pictures in my ear with his melodic brush of words. It is good to see you my friend, but consider if you would, our mutual acquaintance Kettering as he is stood there at the other side of the room, entertaining what company he can about him gather...

What about the good fellow? I ask, blurry.

Consider how little jealousy he feels towards you, although this is your show and not his, and your paintings are selling like proverbial hot bagels. You’re getting praise and acclaim tonight of a level which he has craved for years. And yet, I see only joy in his heart on your behalf. A man cannot fake such light-heartedness, such a smile and such a laugh.

Yes, that is good. I admire the man, but I’m not sure I grasp your point entirely…

As ever, Ithir, this is about you and your brother. Would you feel so little jealousy towards Kettering were the roles reversed? –And did you, when he was flourishing and you were but his assistant, his under-study, factotum, back in Oceania? You see, you are well-rehearsed in negative emotions. But didn’t I tell you once how your soul is being weighed? Or was my point too subtle, or the metaphor flawed by which it was conveyed? You are fond of asking what the point is of all this game, and yet perhaps you have been told the truth already but simply did not recognise its name.

Mustafa… I have changed already under your teaching, altered as clay by a potter’s hand. And you must know I seek a woman now, love itself, whom I have glimpsed, a fragment fallen from heaven. Is that not proof enough that I have honed my arrow towards the holy straight and narrow?

Ithir. This whole word is but a construct, a stage play in which even I am merely scenery devised to test your soul. So it is for every man and woman as they strain their eyes, crossing fog-clogged bogs to seek their prize. Never mistake life for being real. Only the soul must be your goal. To cleanse it and find truth, to face everything, each charge, each crime, each indictment, and tally up the balance-sheet of your own folly. To unlock the magic box in which we’re trapped and be released into enlightenment; the trick is not to win out over others at all, but to lose beautifully. Your greatest painting, your ultimate work of art, is your self, and suffering your only brush, the only thing to make your colours lush. You must renounce hatred and jealousy before you can complete your odyssey…

And so these words, out of so many echoing others, become the ones that assail my waking state the next day, well after noon, in some luxurious boarding-house my kind friends must have booked me into, using all my fresh windfall funds from spectacular sales. A knocking on the door is waking me, and rising unsteadily I let Doctor Horace in. Are you fresh and rested Nithna?

I nod my head. Something close, a few stops up from dead. Have we a mission today? –I feel something of that ilk slopping round my head.

Indeed. We go directly to jail without passing go, I believe, although there are a couple of other locales within my notes into which we could have poked our noses if our reposes had but ended sooner.

Like?

Thomas Leermouth’s former home, a ruin now I believe, as grandiose and mysterious as Rome.

And all roads have been leading there, is that it?

Not quite the carrot for you as your brother and his ingénue, unless your priorities are changing. Its time you put an end to your estrangement, him and you, lest all this friction end in your derangement.

I thought I started out mad and ill in your estimation, or have I misunderstood the arrangement?

Whatever. You’ve reminded me of something your friend Mustafa said last night. Deep fellow that. Something about time only being comprehensible when we remove its vector. He’s expecting to see us again tonight, I hope you’re not planning on doing anything unsightly today at the police station to get us expelled or extradited?

I only want to get my business expedited. A name, a location, for my new flame. I must trace her before I forget her face.

Very well. Let’s go. I’ll show, you tell, if you promise to quell your anger well.

Another constabulary. Describing it would involve invective and diminutives fit to exhaust even my vocabulary. Drab and drear and dreich, and full to the brim with the uniformed uninformed, who fill out forms ad infinitum. Dear Doctor Horace does his bit, chatty patter to butter up the batty copper in charge, congratulating him for not leaving the dreaded Zenith Learmot at large. And could we interview him as part of our study, cue the ridiculous Swiss aside, believing he has had some contact with our unnamed amnesic patient.

Truth be told I feel exultant, triumphant and ancient, being led into the room in which my brother faces me at last through iron bars. I can unlock these gates, the superintendent offers, if I lock the outer doors instead.

Please… Horace snorts, do not put ideas into our head. Better to keep him at a distance in this instance.

Whatever, Plod shrugs, I’ll leave the keys beside the chair, now I’ll go get out your hair.

Silence descends as Zenith wakens stiffly from his thin foam mattress on the floor, and glances over us and behind us sees the gently closing door. Brother, I’ve been expecting you. Does it please you now to see our fortunes so reversed at last? His smile makes me flinch. The power of his personality, his apparent magnanimity shakes me somehow like a psychic strip search. Who is this clown you’ve brought with you?

Doctor Horace Stockbridge, sir, at your service. The good doctor steps forward and thrust his hand through the bars.

Zenith laughs aloud. Your personal shrink! How very quaint. Without warning he takes and twists Stockbridge’s hand round rapidly, thrusts another hand through the bars around his throat and strangles him expertly until he faints, then lets him slump to the floor. I stumble back in horror, frozen in inactivity, falling backwards onto a seat. The keys… my mind races, are still over by the door. Zenith’s eyes follow mine minutely, reading me. That’s right, he smiles, sweating, exulting. Your every thought is known to me, brother. You can’t hide your weakness and cowardice from me, even here in a city of so many trees to duck behind. Your triumph doesn’t taste so sweet does it? Revenge tastes empty in your mouth, because really you wish you were me, wish you had my audacity and strength. You don’t want to kill me or crush me at all, or whatever snivelling fantasy you’ve been harbouring half your life. You want to become me, but you can’t because you lack the balls. We’re like man and wife, you and I. Different but contrapuntal, yin and yang. Come on, come over here and strangle me. Prove to yourself and me that you know how to kill, that you’re up to the challenge. Then maybe, just maybe, you’ll be worthy, you can call yourself cruel and brutal enough to harbour my appetites, to exact and realise your will. That’s what success is, brother, a triumph of the will. Because most people out there, ninety-nine percent, are little sheep, waiting for a shepherd, good or bad they can’t tell the difference, someone with all the decisiveness and willpower which they sense they lack. You see, the good lord in his wisdom doesn’t seem to have handed out much initiative and leadership. They’re in mighty short supply. And mighty indeed are those who realise that and cultivate it. And wanna know the most self-empowering and decisive act of all? To kill! To kill, brother! To defy life itself…

Zenith kneels and begins to twist Horace’s neck and I panic, run towards the door to raise the alarm, but Zenith rasps: Stop! Bring me the keys over or I’ll break his neck. Can’t you hear it clicking already? Just another few notches round and you’ll hear the lovely sound, a fatal weakness in the human design, this narrow vulnerable canal to the brain through which everything must flow. Death is almost instant I’m told, from a relatively simple blow.

I pick up the keys and find I am walking back slowly, like a zombie, a damned puppet working to his command. I feel the edges of the keys with my sweating slippery hands, their edges and serrations, their points and tips. Approaching suddenly I lunge and thrust the sharpest with all the force of my body behind it, straight into his throat. Aiming for the jugular, whoever taught him anatomy it seems, taught us both.

Hiss and froth of blood in blinding spray across my eyes. Letting go of Stockbridge, Zenith’s grabbing me instead and smashing me against the bars with terrifying force, trying to crack my skull or crack the gate. Making hideous hissing sounds now, he’s reaching for his face to remove the keys. Both of us slick with blood I try to beat him to it and our hands interlock, fingers interweave about the keys. Tell me, I say, who the girl was, her name and where she is, where to find her…

What girl? –He rasps grotesquely, spraying blood like a fatal lisp.

The one I got talking to in Oceania, before your thugs took her away, long brown hair, blue eyes, said she was from Sylvia originally… tell me.

Zenith has the upper hand on the keys now, although his strength is fading. Thea… he says… her name is Thea, you’ll find her in Suburbia… if you hurry.

Hurry? Suddenly he punches me hard in the face and I recoil violently across the room, the back of my head striking the wall. I nearly black out for a second, and when I open my eyes, incredibly, the cell behind the bars is empty. I stand up and stagger forward, thinking perhaps Zenith is on the floor, hidden by the slumped form of Doctor Stockbridge, but there’s nobody there. I look down at my hands, covered in blood and see that, stained very red and almost unrecognisable in the midst of my palm: I still hold the keys. I go over to the gate and check the lock but it’s not been opened. Confused, reeling, heart still racing but sensing some kind of peculiar release and freedom, I kneel and take Horace’s pulse. He’s still breathing.

Stepping away backwards slowly, dumfounded, disbelieving, I reach the door and turn the handle. And leave, leave. Walk then run and run until I can scarcely breathe. Blocks away I collapse into some green copse, streaked with sweat. But to kill one’s self is not so easy, I’m breathing yet. But am I dreaming or has there been some change? Deranged beneath the beating sun, it seems my dual has been murdered by our duel. The jewel I clutch in my hand: blood-red, is better than any diamond or ruby, the key which I have won. I am no longer twin it seems, but one.