The Rhymer ~ Part One

Melancholy, soliloquy. Hunger and a hundred questions burning in the heart. Turbulence of storm clouds, these tree tops raging in the forest I carry inside me. What it means to be abroad in this world and always searching. And Nature my church. I pray by walking through Her. Endlessly it seems, always trying to lose this body like the pathetic ballast it is, flopping puppet buffeted by futile gestures, the human mime. I wear a new mask for each new town I come down into, after weeks and months of pilgrimage on high plains pacing under this sun, the moon and stars. I sleep in hedgerows, haystacks, I waken with the dawn or when the snout of some curious animal intrudes, investigating my warmth and smells. If only I could learn of their conclusions, know myself, the ancient puzzle as the Greeks first phrased it.

Sometimes it begins with a church spire, like the old days, glimpsed across swaying wheat fields, tolling of bells resounding in my feet. Or more often now with distant tower blocks, hell’s teeth, or some swishing by-pass, the constant cars, whizzing hot metal like buzzing flies engaged in a feeding frenzy upon the corpse of civilisation. Because this is how it always is at the end, the selfishness made manifest, the isolation devices, the rash of rush and bluster. What face shall I make for myself today, to meet such people? One forged in steel perhaps, to glimmer, to join the clamour, for valour, for glamour. Warlike music in my tongue and blood, make ready for the great reunion.

This mask thing is a metaphor of course, but then again it isn’t. I really am a new person every time, made instantly into what the first of my lost audience yearn for. In that sense, this polished metal face is a mirror, dragging everything in from around it, and by the very contours of its features: fluidly distorting. And then the mask fits, clicks seamlessly into place, as do I, and no one knows the difference. Except myself who, trapped underneath and subtly starved of air over coming days and weeks, suffocates oh so slowly, until sweating, panicking, in the end breaks free and bursts out from some quaint domestic door in the early hours and embarks once more upon the world, eyes lifted, drinking the sky, as it were: the elixir of the soul. And the sun, my gold, fills my pockets, makes me rich and well again.

Today I find a dead deer by the roadside, struck by their hurtling carriages, its carcass bleeding, not long dead, still warm. But wait. I haven’t told you about the contraption yet, homemade, strapped with tape to my chest, and the wires trailing down both my sleeves. I reach a hand between two buttons of my shirt to turn a dial then plug my wires into the beast’s neck and replay its last hours and minutes briefly in fast forward, flash frame, flicker picture. And then after the jolt, satisfied as by a potent shot of coffee or firewater, I lift the deer onto my back and wear it like a crown, forelegs draped around my neck crisscrossed in front scarf-like, primitive costume, totem, token, atavistic, head dress of a former age, of what they’ve lost, the pallid insipid ones, the pride and primitivism, antique rage. Let me remind them.

I march down into their pretty country town through all the quiet carefully tended streets, past their immaculate gardens between prim hedgerows. How Nature weeps to be free, imprisoned there, enslaved in flowerbeds, chained in trellises, crucified by the cloche. And all the time sweet red blood oozes down my neck and chest from my hoisted prize. At first a few cars slow, turning, jaded eyes within, goggling. Then some gardeners gasp, retreat down dusty pathways. I stand at traffic lights in magnificent disgrace, parties of school children being paraded by in buses, white faces turned, spattered across their disbelieving screens as meadow flowers or gunfire, loosestrife. Then at last I walk into the little town centre and solemnly approach the foot of their war monument: a bronze lady on a marble pedestal, some grotesquely misunderstood and misdrawn goddess, rising from her knees to lift a burning flame of holy carnage heavenwards in thanks for wars and the blood of young men. She wants more it seems, always more, rapacious for futility. And I take down the bleeding deer and lay it at her feet.

A policeman approaches. Stout, stupid pillar of the law, his notebook bristling. I try to tell him the number plate and the face of the man who slew the deer in his speeding pedal car, a builder apt to dump his debris in rural hedgerows after a day overcharging the idle rich for unnecessary house extensions for children who never come home, but he seems to think me mad. Imagine, in a world this lunatic. I bid him lean in a little closer then I prise off my mask to give him a little glimpse of what lurks beneath and that does the trick, sends him scuttling off like a crab longing for a rock to hide under. I make my way across the cobbled precinct to the old pub, drawn by some ancient music leaking from an open door. Inside somebody passes me a fiddle and I join in, unleash a trail of notes borrowed from circling birds glimpsed on the high moors, semi-quavers gurgled from the mouth of fishes in tinkling burns. And when I’m done a pint of golden amber is placed on the table in front of me, instantly everybody’s friend, no need for money. I reach up to scratch my chin and find the joint-lines are gone, the mask is fused, too late for an escape now.

A fellow takes a place beside me, a little weasel of a man, all white tousled beards and dreadlocks, skin nearly as dark as mine. Nadith, he calls me, so there we have it, a name. And says I have a brother, Zenir, who just went through here a few weeks ago, a fine and successful man, a great artist with a promising future rearing up before him like a tidal wave. He talked about me often, Weasel says, this Zenir, about his special little brother, a master of music and words as he is of colour and shape, a traveller between towns. I am that man now, am I not? And who am I to argue? He must take me to Elissa he says, whoever that is, who will have a message from him. But first I must have another drink of golden amber and sit in on their club. What club? –I say. Rotary, notaries? Masonic, platonic, knitting, hair-splitting, reading, bleeding, badger baiting, masturbating?

No, just watch he says, and it must be the nectar: he reaches out and lifts the black-and-white chequers of the floor tiles up as if he is tweaking my eyelid and the whole floor distorts with everything on it. There is a light pouring in a steady white line from beneath the far wall, and Weasel pulls on the floor like a carpet. He’s drawing us closer to it as everyone else crumples and bends out of shape like sweety-papers. Soon the bright white light is in my face, at the base of the tall wall, about to slurp under and I let myself go, flowing, glowing, into the locked room beyond.

Weasel is in his element here, what a crew. The sky-gazers and weather-watchers club, who lounge around in angled chairs beneath a huge skylight, a Victorian gazebo, lantern, conservatory, orangerie, cupola, cornucopia of glass and steel all pleasantly musty and in need of a good paint, although to do so would mean stripping the old lead paint off first, inhalation of which would drive some unfortunate handyman a madman slowly until he began wetting his trousers and falling over six months later, then death. So better not bother. The fug of cigar smoke is prodigious here, we thought they’d banned it, along with freewill, predestination, self-immolation and other innocent pleasures. So what gives? –opines Nadith, adopting the hip vernacular to an old avuncular: Doctor Tolleson by name, who looks in charge-ish. Introductions are made and instantly forgotten as is the custom here and anywhere. A Cynthia Beiderbecker, retired occupational therapist, which sounds like a contradiction in terms or at least a non-sequitur but I desist from the jibe advisedly, watching Weasel’s eyes. Secateurs, the weapon of choice of our next: Joyce, John, a gardener. Then sequesters: Henry Packer, quite a card, a banker, a gambler then with others’ money, soon we’ll have the whole pack: two more. A Mary Winston, with Churchill’s jowls and jocularity. Bill Heaney, heinous in his choice of cardigans at least and doubtless much else still to be revealed pre-judging by the shifty face, first impressions of a difficult birth that failed to strangle him.

Our club, says Tolleson, puffing like a steam train, eyes magnified in fishbowl fright behind his glasses, considers the notion that we are all dead, us humans, and all this that we think life now is but an afterlife. How else to account for the ridiculous preponderance of coincidence, the déjà vu, the way what books we read constantly prefigure our everyday concerns, the way the pet cat leaps up a second before the phone goes, the way I think of my Aunty Jean and then she calls me.

Moreover, interjects Packer, so violently that I think he means move over and nearly jump from the chair myself like said prophetic feline, –we find that sitting here and staring up at these clouds, sometimes of a languid afternoon we gain glimpses through the shifting gossamer tissues of celestial modesty and spy the true people up there naked, huge giants glimpsed from below at difficult angles, going about their real and proper lives of which these below are only confused memories, shadows and echoes thrown on a forest floor in which we wander lost as children.

Well spoken, winces Mary Winston, born to be a librarian, winsome in her smiles that her closed eyes and furrowing brow constantly lose track of, as she drags huge thoughts into the light of day from her dusty cognitive attic. You would not believe the considerable detail we have divined from here through sheer unadulterated persistence, of the lives of the Titans as it were, the huge heroic people we were each before we were woken by death and birth into this becalmed shore of suburban banality, a domain one might say of air-freshener and furniture polish, of broken dreams and haemorrhoid creams, where even semen is semi-skimmed, pasteurised and ultra-heat treated. And what do you think, Mister Nadith? (Old Tolleson chokes on his tea at that last, as if to wish he’d had it black).

Now there’s the crunch, they’ve got me cornered. I take my time, lighting a huge cigar that I have no intention of smoking. At last, Olympian, the flame catches. Eternal recurrence you mean of course, I am familiar with it, the most unthinkable of Nietzsche’s theories, but even it is a metaphor for the ineffable, the inedible, don’t you think? So why shouldn’t Buddhist reincarnation and Christian damnation and all the other tosh be rated as equal tosh with all other tosh, fragments of a jigsaw of tosh that cannot be completed or viewed by those still living? Photographs of the same weird object viewed from different angles? Indeed, might we not consider human beings as metaphors themselves, and then for what, would be the next inevitable question. I say we are all asleep, and only art can wake us up for a few mad moments each day, but if we could but catch all those moments like falling rose petals on the dark polished wood of the lid of a grand piano on a summer’s day in the drawing room of a quiet house, and read them like tea leaves, then we might hold the truth quivering in our quivering hands like a captured bird, but even then to hold it long would kill it.

Extraordinary, extraordinary, John Joyce interjects, ejaculates, ejects adroitly (Tolleson covers his tea), -Your command of words, your insanely elliptical diction. Is there a guidebook one can purchase on you, as if you were a National Trust-entrusted castle, or a blog one can follow so devoutly nightly and daily as to lose one’s job gaily, gaining one’s employer’s contempt and derision not to say one’s P45 on a platter?

No, alas… I sigh in faux despair, I am just all me, and tomorrow I will be someone different.

Back to reincarnation then, Beiderbecker mumbles, bumbles, if indeed we ever left it.

And leaving is what we must do next, Weasel says, rising, I’ve promised to take Nadith to meet Elissa, hoping to save me from Heaney whose eyes and ears have taken all in and whose gorge is rising to a mighty declamation.

Nadith, before you go, he stands, his waistcoat buttons popping like distant shells on the fields of Flanders, -you must take our card and call again, we should like to have you in our club, you theorise like only the truly idle can muster, and sport the foul breath and body odour that in my experience only two categories of men ever possess: great writers and the homeless.

Perhaps they are the same thing, I say as my parting short, pausing at the door, and farting for good measure.

What a jolly old time, not. But the pedestrian precinct is quelled and quieted, the crowds mostly buggered off, laying off from their shopping at last, by the time we emerge from that den of obscurantists by what route I can’t remember. I am left with the impression that the room I have just exited existed not at the back of any pub, let alone that one, but at the back of any mind led so astray as to entertain it. I vow not to again. Sunset is not long off as Weasel hurries me past the brassy thighs of vainglorious Athena or Boudica, or whatever she is, the statue’s pedestal still visibly stained by my late offering, but not a bone of it left, and I wonder what dog nibbled there or what butcher plundered for his choicest cuts, had he the wisdom.

Walking westwards the blood red sun is pierced by the lance of a steeple, light dribbling from the wound, snagging hazily in yellow blurring haloes around gravestones, tombs, sepulchres, lairs, grottoes and the like. And I pause for a second, sniffing dog-like, straining on the invisible leash by which Weasel seeks to drag me, tensing, to kneel and examine a few graves. Putting down roots, I sit down with my back against the wall of the auld kirk for a moment and plug my sleeve wires into the mossy stones, turning the dial on my chest like a radio set, tuning into the waves, afore and aft, astral sailor at the bridge of present time. The willows weep, the yew yawns, the ancient oaks open up their secrets. I watch a legion of Roman soldiers emerge from one wall and march across to vanish through another. I can almost smell them, the sweat and olives, the spilt blood of savages still misting their tired eyes. They will be ambushed presently, by my obliging ancestors. I could stay and go back to plunder further time for Norsemen’s raids and echoing prayers of monks in rough sackcloth, glinting altar pieces, jewels and armour, but Weasel is tugging at me and we must away.

Weasel leads me through the resplendent gardens of suburbia, maze-like, parterre walls of hedge and bush, losing both of us quickly in the failing light as the orange sodium blossoms droop from overhead, strange fruit on iron trees. I am suddenly haunted by fragmented memories of childhood, coming home from school on winter evenings. So I was a child once, with a mother somewhere. But the dark window closes as quickly as it opens before I can catch sight of… What? There it is again, Weasel, walking always slightly ahead as if dragging me like a sleigh across snowfields, is jabbering again about my having a brother. The streets get quieter and posher, passover kosher, hushed in bushes, hunched in bunches of branches, carefully tended and mended, until we arrive at the door: fine iron gates in voluptuous curves and Weasel squeaking into an intercom like an over-awed overwrought urchin.

We are in, up a winding path then through large carved doors into an interior like an ornate lighthouse burning in the confused night, a temple of unreason. Then strangely, Weasel is gone, out like a rat through a tradesman’s entrance, leaving me to Elissa. I feel naked, like a morsel poised upon a trap. She comes down her long hallway, a swishing of white satin, flowing and pouring, a soft storm pinned by two red lips and above them a nose which sniffs at the blood on my stained shirt. You bear such a resemblance to him! –she shrieks, -to Zenir! Let me look at you, your profile. She turns my cheek with hands of a practised film director or perhaps a manqué hairdresser. The nose, the aquiline profile, that Arabic brow, or are you of Armenian, Persian descent… I forget?

I forget also… I say, sotto voce, eyes down, aiming for modesty. Then she plunges me into her studio, her salon, to show me Zenir’s pictures.

Look, Nadith, isn’t it? He told me so much about you. When did you two last meet? He’s always on the move. Look at these pictures. I bought far too many of course, but I simply couldn’t restrain myself. He is in his prime, this is the mother lode of inspiration he’s ploughing these days, have you ever seen such strangeness, such illumination?

Now at last, used as I am to trees and skies and the green and natural things that spring from the fields and seas of terrestrial creation, I must admit that these paintings make me halt, break step, break wind, skip breath, skip breakfast, jump ship, jump backwards. Each canvas is huge and hugely strange. Here one is a crab, transforming into the face of a man, then into the scene of a sea cliff, a landscape in wondrously sad light. And here is one of a flock of horses galloping through the air and turning into clouds then into the white dress of a young woman falling backwards her golden hair lifting up in strands and turning into a halo around a summer sun. And yet another of a tree of red apples but each apple is a bullet hole and the tree is also a hand, the branches and leaves the lines on the palm, and there is something inside of each bullet hole, other tiny scenes that draw me in and I’m starting to feel sick as I bend down to look closer into one, when Elissa’s hand on my shoulder brings me back to my senses with a jolt.

What was it like to grow up with him? –Such a great artist, did you watch him doing his first sketches, did you play together? Did you urinate together, taking care to generate convergent streams from alternate sides of the water closet? Where does he get his ideas?

Enough! I raise my fingers to my lips, then my temple, wishing it was one. It was a difficult childhood. We were often separated by our obstreperous governess.

Obstreperous?

Yes, she was an obstetrician. I mean… an optician… a magician.

A musician?

That as well, certainly. A polymath.

A mathematician?

A polymathematician then, shall we settle on that?

Appallingly. Assuredly. It accounts for your extensive education.

Elissa is an exceptionally tall woman. Her head always seems to be out of focus somewhere above me, dimmed in a swirl of blonde hair haloed by her halogen lights in smoked glass lampshades. And between the paintings, I can see Art Nouveau stained-glass windows with cryptic glimpses of meadows beyond. We are on the outskirts of town now, where she has bagged herself the best views. But the interiors are old, Arts and Crafts, Jugendstil, Fin de siècle, sinuous curves and languid androgynes. Education? I’m not sure I get your drift… -I reply, and we do seem to be drifting, from the studio to the parlour from the parlour to the boudoir. We must get back to the Renoir. Ce Soir.

Zenir told me, how your nanny gave you your first sexual experiences.

Did he indeed? How indiscreet of him. Had he had a tipple when he let that slip a little?

But I’m almost muffled now. She has me pressed up against a wall, my head between her breasts like one or all of the three of us is going to give way to make fruit juice. A tipple… a nipple, even. Evening. Leaving.

Special dispensation. I plead inability, disability, gullibility. I’ve been too long in the hills, the smell and taste of a real woman is too heady a wine for my rarefied senses to refine. She puts me in the library like a book, in an inglenook, scaled by one of those little mobile ladders you only see in dreams. And I sleep between several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica keeping company for once with the truly great until my head hurts without a pillow, or is it the dreams of everything from A to Z and from Eden to Armageddon all strictly in order that do me in? At any rate, long before dawn, I’m gone. Down the treacherous dream-ladder and out through an Art Nouveau portal, slipping the bolt without a jolt, scared to wake her.

I sleep instead where I love, a more familiar bed, in the swaying fields of wheat not a hundred yards from Elissa’s palatial abode, under a tree with the stars and the moon overhead, the only bed-mates I crave on a good day or a bad night.

In the morning Weasel wakes me, with Cynthia Beiderbecker at his side, just the ticket for a thicket, you can never find a retired occupational therapist when you need one, an occupational hazard-to-shipping in a sea of cereal, beached by the lighthouse. All those books and big ideas and bollocks. I let her ease my back with skilful hands while Elissa peers from on high from her parted voile curtains wondering what’s ruptured, what we’re up to, the three of us, what little’s on show, with so much below, beneath the waves like golden hair on a summer’s day, the sun like a wan face rising. Then it dawns on me as I glimpse her through her lacework windows moving about her corridors, pacing to and fro, that she has no head, only a glowing light, which all her flowing white dress flourishes and burnishes towards like the handle standard of a bed lamp. My false brother’s lady is a false sun, a perambulating artificial illumination whose power fades by day, shamed by the sun she shuns so.

So. Just so. So so. -Is how I feel after my rough night, and too polite to complain or disclose my not-so-sweet repose amid the bibliophile delights of the best stocked library this side of Alexandria. I dare say. Cynthia and Weasel seem to have plans, designs on me even, hurrying me to the nearest hostelry to ply me with strong coffee and aromatic breads. I only manage a wave between two waves of ears of wheat, no tears to wit, to a distant window holding Elissa who sees me or not, in contempt or besotted, I know not as I depart her extensive policies. Get knotted, I propose to Weasel’s infeasible insinuations that I should disclose the upshot and downdraught of the evening’s ruminations. He thinks me coy and fey, offers to pay, but in fact I mostly can’t remember.

This strategy returns dividends I see at the bank of mystique and mystery, as Weasel and Cynthia pull up their chairs to face me like inquisitors, suitors, executors. Exquisite silence then, eloquent as the sea, greets them, broken only by the happy lapping of me at my scrambled egg and toast soldiers. A shoulder to cry on, or two, between me and you, I can do without. Beyond doubt. And my eyes rise to catch a glimpse through the dusty coffee-room glass of the sudden sunlit patch of green on a hillside oddly wistful and distant in time and space. Already I long to return to the hills, escaping the race and the pills, the procrastination that fills the place for most people of what real life ought to be. We’ve been thinking, says Cynthia, that you should play in our festival, your fiddle and whistle and all your fine wit, and maybe, just maybe, talk publicly and unpre-emptively, unprohibitively, unreservedly, just the littlest bit about that other, with whom you shared a mother, your brother: Zenir.

Ahh, so that’s what you’re at! I laugh, then drinking, thinking how I could soon so easily grow to hate this man that I have never met, just by virtue of his supposed virtues which these numbskulls, pedants, peasants, pleasant dullards, unpleasant sycophants, psychopaths, sophomores, hyperbores and embryonic stalkers and poodle-walkers so constantly lick over like dying puppies with a fatal rash. It would be nice to unveil their hero as a pseud, a fraud, a bawd, a fallen god, if I could only find him and catch him off-guard, prise off his mask which he so surely wears as I wear mine. That… might be divine. And there may be time, but not now, for it seems my fate served up on a plate, irresistible as rashers, is to impersonate the dutiful brother, a quisling, sizzling, a ham, centre of attention, hot as I am.

It’s a deal, we shake on it. The plates nearly break on it as Cynthia rises, tears of joy in her eyes, jolting the table. Fortunately I’m able to catch mushrooms in my maw like mice in a cat’s paw or fish in a fat seal’s muzzle, a veritable tussle, after which the café’s morning crowd are laughing out loud. I’m doing them proud already and taking a bow, strafed by applause, which turns to nausea. This acting crap is easy but apt to make a tramp queasy who’s eaten too fast and bent over moreover too quickly and jiggly, and now makes a dash to the bog. Fog of insight and delayed apprehension in the restroom mirror, forever too late: the incoming boat of wisdom, a bitter tide, the wrong side of the dawn, sour taste on the ever-flapping tongue. I wish I’d tethered it, leathered it. Outside once more, Weasel shows me the door and I bid gay good day to the first array of my fans, as he draws up his plans to use me, abuse me and hopefully lose me the moment he glances away.

So old Nadith is on the loose again with his antiquated boiler well stoked with animal fat, and I turn to Weasel as if waking up to ask: What is this place called after all if anything at all?

Suburbia, he says and it’s hard to believe, indeed not just to leave when you hear that a town could exist with a communal imagination so depleted and degraded and frequently raided that it could anticipate and celebrate its own eventual incorporation and extinction into creeping polyunsaturated city-spread, so readily and clear-headily without even a flinch. We’re walking the streets, Weasel and I, and now I’m asking him which town my supposed brother Zenir left to go to. Industria, he says, way off to the west, and there to the south is the centre of it all, if there’s a centre at all, the city of Urbis... Foreboding, he points to it, far on the horizon, a collage of blocks and chimneys and steeples, a guddle of people, huddling together forever for warmth and anonymity and finding cold obscurity. Then quick as a flash he’s drawing me a map, with chalk on a wall, worse than nothing at all, and the city it seems is surrounded by four quarters: Suburbia, Industria, Oceania and Sylvia, and Zenir has gone westwards like a clock hand moving backwards, and Suburbia is left behind here as high noon.

Just now someone cycles by and lets out a cry, it’s Mary Winston her winsome smile turned to meet us with her eyes tight shut as seems to be the inevitable consequence of her entertaining a rictus on her visage, her body governed, automaton-like, by arcane archaic mechanical rules that her creator would rue were he even as lucid as me or you. Nadith! Weasel! Good day! –She declaims, waving sweetly, then crashes completely into a lamppost so upright and forthright as to brook no disagreement on the first law of thermodynamics, moreover showing cast-iron devotion to Newton’s laws concerning bodies rest and motion. Crunch! Crumple! Emotion, concerned cries arise from all around the precinct and Weasel and I run to her aid. Too late, something uncanny has occurred we are appalled to discover as we grimace and hover, glimpsing over the shoulders of the jostling crowd as policeman Stout approaches with his gout and oversized breaches, blowing his whistle like a steam locomotive from a former age declaring war on the Beeching report. Mary and her bicycle, all blood and oil, cloth and rubber, are fusing, confusing and intermingling, impossible to single out from one another, becoming some new beast intent on cycling towards Bethlehem, dark and slouching if need be, but more likely smiling brightly in Mary’s case, her face a spinning miasma of radial spokes with ears like handlebars. She’s still alive, her heart beating, fed by oily chains, dynamos and metronomes, battery acid and elbow grease.

Mary dear! Hang on in there! -Weasel hails her as the ambulance wails and white-clad men arrive attended by bicycle engineers and a crack team of councillors briefed on post-traumatic stress disorder who fall on us all like vampire bats and we all scatter, escaping the splatter and novel collision of disparate matter demonstrated so ably by our lady friend the friendly librarian. Oh who will feed her books while she’s away in hospital? Water them, index them? And what in turn, if not her healthy good books, shall sustain the ailing minds of the citizens of Suburbia, assailed nightly as they are by soap-opera atrophy and documentary entropy? –Curable only by cerebral endoscopy?

It’s a poor show all round when you look at it like that, I conclude out loud to myself, and we should tend lovingly to her library like a literary garden of Eden, or we’re not half the men we think we are. Then I remember that I am not even half the man Weasel thinks I am.

Gardening, that was it. My line of metaphoric reasoning before I fell asleep in a large planter basket in the main street, underneath some dahlias and chrysanthemums while Weasel foolishly abandoned me to go into a shop and buy matches. Have I been drunk, hung over? Moreover, why all the rhythm and rhyming, though not rhyme and reason? I feel better after the sleep of reason, no treason surely, but doubtless Officer Stout will Weasel me out if he catches wind of the caper. Enough! But look, it’s John Joyce the gardener coming up to accost us now, I’d hoped that he’d lost us. That’s three that I make, I’ve seen since, of the pontificant participants of last night’s hallucinatory conference, left lurking in the mind. So they were real. JJ smiles, his long hair standing up like fronds of Phormium, baring his teeth and his secateurs, bringing us tidings of his first chore of the day, to go prune the roses of the good Doctor Tolleson. We best tag along says Weasel, a great tagger if ever there was one, and wasn’t that how he found me? I owe him my name and purpose, breakfast and several drinks, but let’s not toast those as virtues just yet until we’ve seen how this current embroilment boils out. Tagger and bagger, not to say tea-bagger. Mine’s a lager.

Tolleson’s lawn is wondrous green and lean, clipped to the bone like a forces crew-cut, criss-crossed by humming bees like droning B52s returning limping after flattening their floral Nagasakis. All sight-lines converge at the noble Georgian façade of his home: well-appointed, anointed, double-jointed and carefully re-pointed in a white lime putty made to a traditional recipe approved by the National Trust, involving horse hairs, neighbour’s stares, builder’s nightmares, and bullshit. Sandstone carved nudes and cast-iron rain-goods abound, and we’re greeted and ushered to white metal patio chairs with floral cushions tied to them with little bows of ribbon that flutter in the breeze like flags and bonnets at a military parade. A tirade, first: we tell about Mary Winston’s unfortunate accident, an incident in which we do not feel innocent, having caught her eye in the first place, and her having caught a lamppost in return, and now being hospitalised in an unfortunate indeterminate state between organic and inanimate matter at the molecular level, such as would confound even Heisenberg or Schrödinger were they to dare to take a look at her instead of her cat.

She doesn’t have a cat, only books. -Weasel interjects at my verbalisation of this last perspective, compelling me to spray him with invective: I’m quoting particle physics, quantum mechanics, dear boy, I’m sure the doctor’s following me.

Not in the slightest actually, Tolleson rebounds, taking off his glasses to rub them with his handkerchief, revealing the tiny vestigial eyes of a mole underneath.

Instead of looking at her pussy then, does that scan better or make more sense?

I tried that, by leering and angling, but she seemed to have a bicycle pump dangling…

Oh leave it, for God’s sake. The point is, the poor woman will live, but suffice to say the next time you meet her you may feel uncertain whether to greet her or ride her.

Tolleson’s eyebrows raise, now re-magnified in fishbowl haze. My word, I’ve never thought of her like that. The wonders of modern medicine and their power to rejuvenate. Perhaps we should all try a collision with something mechanical now and again. I quite fancy a Penny Farthing or a moped.

I see myself more as a Harley Davidson man, Weasel sighs, deflated somehow, set adrift on his own wistfulness. We all stare at the geraniums and delphiniums for a few minutes of happy vacancy, each to their own peculiar fantasy of machine-human hybrid.

Then John Joyce pipes up, hitherto weeding in the background, to say: I would splice my genes to those of a rosebush any day. Plants do it with themselves and half the town without ever getting off their arses, do it with birds and insects too in a way. The dirty buggers.

Why roses though? –Weasel ventures –and risk getting pruned and beheaded all summer, a regular bummer. Why not a cedar or a yew, some a few millennia old so I’m told?

Or a hedge? –I add, hedges live forever, and so do we, if we could but look at it that way.

Roses… JJ pauses and sniffs the wind, engorged of the beneficent spirit of creation, -the most delicate, colourful, aromatic and alluring of beauties but defended like fortresses, they are love and death personified, rolled into one, the ultimate muses.

Amusing… gentlemen, Tolleson nods like a sunflower in the wind, squinting, his twin glasses glinting. You sound like to come back as a femme fatale would be your choice, Joyce.

Yes, sir… he responds bending over, weeding and clipping, throttling and throttled, in a curious voice.

Next we find ourselves at Mary Winston’s abode, let in by a pass-key kept under the door-mat, to water her books and read her plants to each other while she’s away getting re-built as a bike. Or something like that. Mary’s library is even finer than Elissa’s –I pronounce, casting my eye about, what a compassionate and passionate collection, indeed it gives me an erection. A moment of reflection follows. The falling of dust motes through the hushed sunlight of the afternoon air, the grace of quiet interiors on hot days, distant birdsong from the garden, a sudden flash-fragment again of childhood memories, something about glimpses over neatly clipped hedges, orange squash and ice cubes on silver trays.

What did you just say? –Weasel puzzles, waking up from his tussles with a potted hyacinth over by the conservatory windows. Crikey! He suddenly looks startled, rattled. Elissa actually showed you her library? That’s quite an honour!

Really? I slept in it, actually, on one of the shelves.

Weasel stops and looks at me in disgust and incomprehension. Books are for reading, not using as pillows. Next you’ll be telling me she showed you her... There’s a sudden extremely loud noise from the street at this, a car back-firing, after which I only hear the end of his scurrilous sentence …put a plaster on it.

What was that noise?

What? Oh that? That will just be Packer in his Studebaker.

What?

Classic cars, he loves them. Typical banker, too much money and too little imagination of what to spend it on. He’ll have come to check on us, or on Mary’s house, or both most likely.

What would you spend it on?

Me? Weasel pauses, smiling, showing a characterful gap in his rotting teeth, thinking but not taking long: Parties and booze for all my mates, a happy throng, wine, women and song, laughter, partners for everyone, and a personal barmaid wearing only a thong.

Imaginative. Ding dong. The door, the floor creaking under my feet on the way to answer it, glance at it: marvelling at the refraction of Packer’s garish gold sweater and galoshes through the frosted glass. Ahh, Packer, you ass! enthuses Weasel over my shoulder, watering can in hand as they face up, man to man. You look like Rupert The Bear in that ridiculous outfit, you and every other golfer!

Packer is speechless, a rarity I guess, and turns to me for fresh perspective. The most beautiful game in the world I’d say, and one of the oldest…

Isn’t that prostitution? Weasel drolls, returning to the kitchen.

…And an environmentally-friendly way of conserving vast tracts of land that might otherwise fall into the hands of rapacious property developers, wouldn’t you say, Nadith?

Now, I don’t know about that, I muse, aiming for amiable equanimity, -and I must warn you that I prefer to be scrupulously truthful in my answers to such enquiries, not for the sake of community relations or abstract morality or a postulated deity, but because it gives me a watertight excuse for insulting people grossly. Golf, doing Nature a favour you say? Not quite, when humanity buggering off altogether would be an even greater one. On my many enormously long walks across every mile of this country I have often found myself unwelcome and shouted at as I was driven to violate the pristine greenness of some pointlessly banal sterile landscape dedicated to the insipid gods of golf. And the outfits… and the little carriages… and the vast array of clubs like a dentist’s tools, why, it is human idiocy made manifest, so resplendent even as to verge surely on self-parody. In which case, come to think of it, I’m all for it. You’re a travelling clown I see now, attired therefore appropriately. I greet you excitedly and expectantly as a schoolchild and await to be entertained by your tricks. Unhook your floppy braces. May I take your red nose and fill it with tea?

Ha ha ha, very laconic and sardonic… chuckles Packer.

Moronic… echoes Weasel from afar.

I heard that. I’m a banker you know, an iconic Ionic pillar of the establishment, a trusted thrusting member of this community.

A clown, juggling other people’s money more like. A huckster, a trickster… Weasel fumes coming back into the room.

Now now, my friend, if you had any money, and weren’t nearly a tramp, then I would be looking after it for you and doing great things for you with it, doubling your returns, speculating and accumulating.

Expectorating… Weasel interjects, I will be soon, as a well-known precursor to vomiting.

Now now now, Packer claps his large hands with disturbing hairs on their backs reminding me of King Kong swatting aeroplanes, calling everyone to order, just listen to ourselves in front of our new friend Nadith, what kind of example are we setting? Is this not in fact the very measure of the value of our Secret Skygazers Club, that people so diverse as you and I, from every weird walk of life can find ourselves together of an occasion disagreeing agreeably over the exact nature and niceties of things? And didn’t our one deranged and unknowable God make all of us as his daft little toys in the hope that we would all be good and play nicely together when he laid us out on his floormat and shoved us around putting on silly voices? And look at us here, all hurrying together to help out our recently injured friend out of concern for her and her property.

Property? Weasel unwinds, defused like a truck bomb. Our friend Nadith here has even less property than me. Not even a home, other than his own body, and at times he seems to be only renting even that from an absentee slum landlord. Isn’t that right?

Righter even than you know, I affirm with a nod of my snout, and seeing my doubt, Packer leaps into the breach: Listen, my friend, I’ve heard things, indeed great things, about your abilities to theorise and proselytise, appetise and anaesthetise, on the abject subject of your famous brother’s inspiration, his inclination, propitiation, preparation, initiation and substantiation for his expensive and expansive canvases, his paintings apt to cause faintings and fits of hysterical adoration in pubescent girls. Would you be willing to do same, and speak publicly about him, on a big wooden platform adorned with colourfully striped party buntings, in front of the whole populace of our charming little town? Popcorn may be involved.

I try to argue, but am beset by fate in the form of a maniacal hacking coughing fit, from which my voice emerges hoarse, saying: Anything of course, for a charming little clown.

Cynthia Beiderbecker finds me brooding in the old churchyard, dappled with the tiger-stripes of shifting shadows of leaves of ancient trees, communing, attuning, afternooning on the mossy slabs with my wires plugged in to yesteryears, a jester’s tears. Who on earth sunbathes on grave slabs? –She exclaims, you are a rum fellow, Nadith, who does not feel the chill of death and shiver at its solemn insinuations.

Insinuations, implications… I mutter …bold, emboldening implications if you once cease your flight from fear and stand your ground, turn around to think things thoroughly through. And we should do, each of us, me and you.

How so? –She pauses, wrong-footed, wrong-headed. She must have seen me over the dry stone wall, her cranium floating disembodily by on the way to ordering her supposedly retired limbs around to a not-so-pressing, perhaps depressing, appointment. Instead of which, as if faintly fascinated, she now sits down on the green mossy velvet cushion of this ecclesiastical lounge. Pull up a pew.

Each single life must begin and end, but the threads of lives of which we are made lead outward from this point in every direction, escape detection, forward and back in time, like the reins of a galloping mare, if you will, which we hold in our hands. And yet, we fail to see this power and chance, clutching but weakly for our day in the saddle, dither and addle, rarely seizing the crop or the spur. We are more than ourselves it seems, is what I mean to say. We can reach out and touch those who came before and who will come hereafter, know them intimately, and their company is a comfort, warm not chill.

Cynthia, eagle eyes wide, spies my wires and wonders. You’re not just talking about nippers and wrinklies, are you? You’re reading the stones somehow, is that what you’re at? Can you, could you, show me what you see?

Alas, I sigh, for that, you would have to shear all your lovely golden locks like the fleece of a lamb, as have I. I take my long mop of peppery grey and black tramp’s hair in both hands and lift it right off its Velcro patches, and hand it to Cynthia, savouring the shock that stops her talk. Tick tock, a penny drops, she looks from wig to bald head and bald head to wig again, marvelling at the mass of electrode patches, neural nexus of flexes from neck to crown, temple to auricle. Oracle, hard-wired in the electronic age, but tuned to every other one. Her mouth is a great ‘O’, trembling and quivering at the threshold of gnosis, neurosis, pondering what form to take for its next incantation, prayer or lament. She opts, wisely perhaps, for humour:

I’ve been wondering how you kept it so clean. A quick dip in the sink and your all-weather polyethylene mane is brand new. A toupée which has duped a fellow or two, no doubt. Now tell me, what do all those wires do?

They convey to my serene cerebellum and amiable amygdalae the signals that the wires in my frayed and foppish cuffs take in. The hypnotic trance state, a quirk of fate, is a rare but distinct pattern in human neurological activity. Years ago, I recorded and mapped it in a clairvoyant subject, an obliging patient, who shaved his head thus to allow this cranial apparatus so to be applied. My contraption, as I disarmingly think of it, has recreated that state on my bald pate on demand ever since, weaving and leaving an electromagnetic field around me that forces my brain into receivership. Then all I need do, is find some stimuli, traces of past and future lives, recorded in stones.

Holy help, Cynthia yelps, this is like a smoke, a toke, sold by some dodgy bloke, of something Lebanese purchased in Amsterdam. You were a doctor of medicine before? A weighty scientist of some arduous discipline?

I think so… perhaps…my memory comes and goes like April showers.

As a result of the… contraption? Like some freelance tramp’s trepanning, you’ve damaged or altered yourself by using it too much, or such and such, over the years, to the point of tears?

I shake my head. I don’t think so… but it’s hard to be sure, to be sure, of anything anymore. Except what I see, which is people from history and from the other place…

Other?

White, always white, and silver. Dashing around in anti-gravitational gyrations and incomprehensible incoherences. The futurists, the ones who will doubtless, redoubtably, come after.

But only stones? You said stones permit, transmit and store these signals, nothing else, not metal or wood nor plants and trees or birds and bees?

It’s a peculiarity of the illogical atomic, not to say, anatomical logic of stone, like a vinyl record scored by a needle or a tray of silver nitrate exposed to bright light. Metal’s no use for the trick, electrons go straight through it, but stone alters every time, under the right conditions, it records.

What? You’re talking about ghosts are you not? The supernatural? Just what are the right conditions to mint, to imprint, ourselves into stone?

Stress, sadness, terror, horror, despair, the moments when the human spirit tries hardest to depart from the body, and it seems that it succeeds, leaving its mark in the dark, a kind of distress beacon that resonates across the waves of the sea of time. Oh yes, and thunderstorms and lightning-struck days, by chance, will do it too, like making milk curdle in a pail, not just an old wives’ tale.

And what were you watching on this psychic television of yours before I chanced by? Cynthia smiles, convinced perhaps of my evinced clairvoyancy, buoyancy bobbing on the seas of time, or more likely humouring a man with a brain tumour, probably.

And I so nearly tell her, to dispel her sceptic demeanour. But just then, one chance in ten, her spouse a mouse the male of the species Beiderbecker Eiderpecker comes trailing by as my hairpiece settles back down onto my Velcro crown. I see he’s a cardigan which dreamt it was once a man, or a strawberry flan. Now I’m shaking his hand like an elastic band stretching tight to propel me upright until I let go and brace for the blow, expecting one of us to fire away and roll in the grass like a prize ass. Rollover and take it, man, you’re a wino, a dino, supplanted, superseded, succeeded by a weed in tweed, who has all that you need without knowing. My heart bleeds.

The pub beckons I reckon, my money-less method of procurement of nourishment, continue the punishment. Just throw me a fiddle again, fine gents and dear ladies, and let me dispense with a ladle the hot broth of music, the froth which doth (he quoth) replenish the soul and dispel all hell’s demons. And after you have each and all been served well so shall I, like a servant in the basement quarters, receive my plate of ritual victuals, pie beans and chips served up with a quip from Clarissa the trusty and busty barista. Dusty! She proclaims and swishes and blushes with her shiny shammy while we all hoist our beverage headwards until the saloon typhoon has blown through. Your music was so lovely, Nadith, she croons, winking, now for an encore, what shall you do? The old Joanna tinkles under my pinkies, ebonies and ivories, sweets and savouries, like Jonah in the whale I lose myself and earn myself a pudding, toffee and clotting cream.

A clapping of hands and clearing of throats and clearing of tables. I turn to see it’s Tolleson emerged like a circus ringleader from the esoteric backroom to announce tomorrow evening’s big attraction, that Nadith shall be giving an intellectual lecture on the work of his brother the great artist Zenir Learmot, and isn’t that simply marvellous? And certainly it will be, if I can summon up anything half convincing to say about a man I wouldn’t know from Adam, Cain, or Abel. But hark, the silky Cynthia slides down to my table, gliding from somewhere to sit by my side. Then I see Heaney and Packer, dispersing and mingling to chatter too, they’ve all been unleashed, from the weird light at the end of the room and the world, from an afternoon’s gazing up the rectums of celestial spectres. Etcetera. And rumour has it, Tolleson adds, as a spicy afterthought, that the renownedly reclusive Lady Elissa herself may be joining us for the occasion. Amazing. This seems to tickle the whole room who rise to the vocation and strike up a tune. Someone else’s turn sawing the strings and vibrating the reed, now I’m up on my feet being spun like a bobbin on the golden threads of Cynthia’s hair and smiles, a nicer place than Elissa’s sickly lair.

And over her shoulder I spy Weasel returned to the fold, conferring with Heaney and Packer, discussing me over glowing pints of amber, my mood edges blacker, remembering I’ve seen the sum total of three paintings by the brother I’ve never met or known. Yet I must praise or denounce him, bless or wound him by cutting my own scrap of fame off the end of his robe, to feed with myself to the dogs. My mind fogs at the prospect, less appealing than sleep. The sheep, time to leave their fold.

Outside this time, night time. The right time. Under the sailing and regal moon in her gossamer negligee of clouds blowing white light like cold fire, ancient watchful eye remembering all that we forget again and again across ages and aeons. And there, like a prayer, suddenly, is Cynthia quietly by my side. And what did you really see today in the churchyard, Nadith? Tell me, whisper it, unravel it for my ears, unlock the years, let me have it, the present of travel to the non-present, conundrum which may end in madness or tears.

And in this quiet street we walk through, how all the trees and bushes and hedgerows seem hushed and hunched over like monks in hoods immersed in green hymns, asleep in their pews, the timber fences of suburbia which keep them confined and subdued. Here the roadway is steep and my heart slows, and all my fear of life drains and goes. Fear of life, yes that’s right, not of death, for throughout all my lonely existence and travels it is them, those spectres of life gone and life to come that have sustained me, thrilled me with their light. But it is the hot breath and beating heart of another living being which terrifies me most, a penetrating stare straight to my heart, seeking me out where I can no longer hide, hermit crab deprived of his shell. My fingers sweat, my pulse and heartbeat race, oh not because I am cold as many think, but the opposite, so much the opposite that I can never speak it or explain, but long to confess and take off this mask which chokes me every breathing second. I am in pain.

Here at the head of the hill, I seize Cynthia by the shoulders and press my cheek against her ear and hope that she can see what I see, as I turn her around to face her little town while my dial rotates and the voltage buzzes, my wires sizzling against her nails, her hair standing on end. There is where you played as a child the day the carnival came to the town, late summer with thunder in the sky, the players going by, the clowns on their wagon, the tattooed lady, the midgets, the trapeze, the beautiful white pony cantering with disciplined legs. And here years later at the next corner, is where you saw your little brother struck by a blue sports car driven by a lady with silver hair tied back with a red bandana…

Horrified, Cynthia spins away like a top released from my maelstrom, ricocheting off moonlit fences and hedges in dismay and confusion. Who told you all this? –My intimate secrets, what brigand has sold you my past at what price? Her eyes blaze orange, brimming with stinging hurt. Who are you?

I recoil and cringe at her vituperation, however expected and inevitable, however many times witnessed before, wanting to cover my face with the cage of my fingers and hide and hide. No… I must defend myself, even though the denying words themselves somehow sully me, brand me with some vague crime. All that I speak is divined, gleaned from the air and the stones, from the windows that open for me that show me glimpses through time. Trust me, believe me, I can prove it to you a hundred times over unless your mind is closed, in which case all is in vain. Did you not see it yourself as I held you?

I, I… she ventures to speak, but stumbles, her eyes searching inside herself, uncertain, her life’s whole sober foundations quaking mirage-like, brushed away by a sorcerer’s hand. She finds herself on the edge of a cliff which no man can see, for it extends inside herself, offering her the chance to be free, but which gripped by fear she sees as death in some sly disguise. Which it is not, but the opposite. Deathlessness, the realisation of the continuum of which we are part, stitched in forever, safe, bound. Found.

Unable to cope, tearful, fretful, her lip bitten and quivering, she runs away, turning back and back, again and again as she wends her way, her long hair swinging like a pendulum, metaphor for the human soul tormented by memory and regret unable to look forward. I watch her dwindle down the dimming alleyway towards her house and know that I and the moon are to be wretched companions again under the stars for one more night in this unfathomable universe.

My dreams come swift and terrible, of edible horses of candy arrayed in a bay of white sugary sand, dissolved by frothy tides of lager shandy, chewing at each other’s limbs while they play in the waves until the cannibalism turns nasty. The sea turns red but I can’t turn my head away, and then regiments of pork pies parachute out the skies pursued by black flies with the faces of ex-lovers. I want to switch this dream for another, a power usually granted me but on this occasion suspended. I float out to sea until my boat pie is upended, and I clutch to the edge of it like a raft, along with two Edwardian ladies dressed in white meringue and a minister all in black and white who I begin to suspect is made of liquorice, so quickly does he melt in the sun. His moustached face frightens me so I hide underneath the ladies’ dresses and pressing my head to their intimate places find the taste of cinnamon.

Next day in a pile of hay she finds me, by what way I know not how, for I thought I’d concealed my miserable tracks well enough, through some hedge and bush to an untended acre at the edge of the town’s river. Nadith, Nadith, how can you sleep outdoors like this? It is too terrible, too pitiable, you must sleep in the spare room we have over our garage in the spare blankets and pillows we keep there… Her mouth and sweet breath are close to my ear, her hand on my chest, my heart still calm and methodical as a tolling bell, from all its travels through the wellsprings of sleep, undersea currents of dreams.

And what I wonder, I waken and blunder, will your spouse make of a mouse concealed in his loft like a maggot in an apple, wriggling its way nightly to the sweet core? Do not pity me, please, I am not worth it. A tramp, a down-and-out, a scallywag, a ne’er-do-well limping his slow sad way to hell. I can survive hunger and cold but pity, spare me that, only that can do me in. It’s dignity that keeps me and every other creature walking, and the likes of me can only maintain theirs by shutting out everybody else’s shitty view of their shitty state. Although I am prepared to concede, that in diluted form, I might just have coincidentally described and circumscribed everybody else’s fate there too.

Nadith, do not speak disparagingly, dismissively of yourself anymore. I am sorry for all that I said with the winds of last night blowing through my dishevelled head. I could not handle what you offered me, and though I still can’t, I have slept on it a whole night now, and with the bright morning light it strikes me that what I saw and heard are a wonder not a terror, and that you are an angel, an agent, of something good, and not of that dark other. Make me your friend. I am your sister, brother.

And there for a moment in the dawn light, she unbuttons my shirt and touches the dial upon my chest, the raw puckers and tears of red flesh, the marks of tape and glue, the numerals and increments, puzzling over what they do. I am the supple shuttle of the present, master of the warp and weave, the bobbin through which the loom of time speaks, threading and knitting and sewing all past and future into my fabric, my soul. Cynthia kisses me once on the mouth, a moment of infinite possibility and promise, as vital as the sun, then hurries away, promising to meet me at the library at two.

Before that, there’s Weasel chasing me to help out in another garden errand with JJ and broom and rake and secateurs. On a salubrious side of town in an enviable gown of greenery and preenery, a mammoth hedge is ready it seems to be pruned and sculpted by a master with a ghetto-blaster. Radio on, JJ sets about it derangedly with enormous shears, deafening the ears of neighbours while we, his collaborators, beat time like vibrators, sweeping up clippings and chipping them into huge sacks of Hessian as part of an elaborate impromptu dance. Paid in advance, we don’t envisage a chance of curtailment of this entertainment, until Heaney trots by with news of derailment, bids us look up at the sky. Rain on the way, lads, and trouble brewing.

He offers us cigarettes and the sour taste of regrets, sitting down to rest on a fence. Always check the weather report before you commence. And don’t get into things that you don’t mean to complete, eh, Nadith? Like talking sweet to another man’s woman? What? I object to this rumour! But humour him, playing it down to the ground ready for sweeping, keeping my secret anger and shame, even to hear him speaking her name.

Then JJ laughs in comic conclusion, supplanting threat with the illusion of harmony, bidding us guess the design in relief which his shears have half-created out of branch and leaf. Can you see what it is yet? Kismet. Traces of two lovers’ faces in kissing embraces. But perhaps it is all Rorschach ink blotting rather than anyone plotting. No time to learn what anyone else is seeing anyway. For next rain begins falling, in big drops, fat, splat, black as any ink. Heaney, heinous, intravenous doomsayer, you have found your calling. Nose up. We mere men can dry out later, but the ghetto-blaster, inspired to rise to the challenge of its nickname, hisses and blows up.

I wait outside the library, which doubtless would not admit me were it not for who will come in with me: Cynthia, sliding, gliding down the road to meet me, a smile swimming in her eyes, glinting with the sunlight. She puts a motherly arm around me and ushers me in, through the ancient hardwood spinning doors, the deep smells of dust and furniture polish, over the ornate floor tiles speaking of the orient and Arabia, of the great lost days of empire.

Cynthia asks the staff for the maps, and when they come rolls them out proudly, huge and ancient across the ornately carved table, filling the air with motes of fine dust in the fingers of light from the skylit lantern sailing high overhead at the intersections of plaster carvings and pillars and pendentives. A grand old space for a daft little town. All yellow and brown: these ancient charters. A Roman wall ran here, she says, right through the churchyard where you described it, and a monastery stood here likewise where also you clapped eyes on ghosts of times departed. And you’re telling me you’ve never seen these records, that you knew this only by mysterious illumination?

Divination. Second sight as some have dubbed it long since before now in centuries gone. An inherited glitch, which I have enhanced and accentuated by electromagnetic tricks. Nothing new under the sun. But better than that, better yet, Cynthia, I can read you the map that has not yet been drawn, can see the view beyond this present dawn. All these houses here for instance, will be bulldozed and this road re-routed through here where I point. And machines beyond your understanding built on this hill in vast phalanx like silent white armies to power the city of Urbis which will crawl from the horizon yet further until it kisses right here, eating and drinking at the beloved river that nurtured your town.

Can you show me such wonders, with my own eyes? –She marvels, and I grow afraid and timid of the spark I see I have lit, the dangers therein which she can’t guess yet. Her golden hair weaves the celestial light in that bibliophile hush, and I shrink from the gush of future which assails me. I raise a hand to her tresses, it distresses me, the price my trans-temporal device exacts of a mortal. Nadith, Nadith, throttle your desire.

A distraction, man of action. Take me, Cynthia, to the sections displaying newspapers and books of contemporary art. I must learn by heart the works of my brother to satisfy my audience and their thirst for titbits on his greatness, his lateness, he who has blazed through this town like a comet and left so much adulation, dazed in his wake.

And at length we find him, his photo portraits, the trickster and huckster, self-promoting at functions and luncheons, and in the background his works lurking and towering, over-powering, dominating the feeble-minded who cannot dream for themselves and need his lead to look into the next world where the faerie flag unfurls. Uncurling, serpent Zenir slithers through the contours of their bowels, lengthening their vowels, promoting their taste for pretension, distancing themselves from each other by claims they can lay to his vision, acquisition in material transposition of the spiritual windows he opens. They clutch his frames, the curtains, fixate on names, missing the message, the space in between all that they can contain with their slippery fingers, while he runs free, rich as I am poor. Let them sniff and lick at his spoor. I spy the sky in which he flies, and I shall climb cloud by cloud and catch him there.

Tonight is the night, the moment just right. The moon waning from its fullness, the game up, time for the new order of things I bring, ring ring as churchbells tolling. The village hall, in front of them all, the hordes of Suburbans, I must hold forth on Zenir. Tolleson stands to do the inducting, introducting, educating, electrocuting us all with his rapier patter on ecumenical matters. While I sit on the podium I caress a dark varnished wood baluster, letting its time flow up my sleeve and show me Victorian tourists in black powdery dresses and oily tresses traversing the room in chilling transparency as Tolleson’s words echo to vacancy. We are very honoured to have here tonight to speak to us, Nadith Learmot, esteemed brother of the renowned oil painter Zenir. Nadith will offer us insights into the creative process of his brother and indeed what it means to grow up so close to so talented an other with whom one shares a mother. He may even go further and tell us how his own musical style on the fiddle and whistle is an aural acoustic component, an alternate exponent of the same deranged muse, of self-awareness, self-exploration, and self-abuse. Enough! My tongue has got loose and lacerated the patient ears of my best audience in years. I am brought nearly to tears, and the occasion has scarcely even farted. I give you, Nadith Learmot, journeyman and musician, rhymer and out-of-timer, seer without peer unaged by his years…

I stand like a tornado rising from the dry plain, gathering and looming over prairies of ripe wheat. The pale pasty indoor faces before me shrink from the shadow I throw, and like a wolf among the chickens I go. Zenir Learmot is a charlatan! I proclaim. A mischievous demon who has deceived your eyes and your ears over many sorry years. His talent mediocre compared to his gifts of self-promotion and proclamation, promulgation of his own personal myth, which you all like silly sheep repeatedly buy into.

People begin to titter, then laugh whole-heartedly. Oh what a jolly jape to ape a disgruntled critic when we all know you are an ardent fan, they muse, a ruse of rhetoric and repartee designed to bring us all guffawing to our knees. Why do they think I am joking? Am I dressed as a clown, in a golf outfit perhaps, like Henry Packer, with my buggy and clubs parked outside? Clubs, yes, I might be needing those soon.

Look at these daubs! I shout, holding a few library books up. You so want to believe that this daft little country produces great art and artists, I understand that completely, but you are looking in the wrong places. This man is a cartoonist, a lampoonist, a harpoonist of the great white whales of modern art who passed this way and sank beneath the waves, Picasso, Beckman, Matisse, over fifty years ago now, and who knows if their like will ever surface again. But if they did, you certainly wouldn’t notice! He is not recording or dignifying contemporary life, he is caricaturing and cheapening it, laughing at you all while you give him your money and misplaced adulation, reputation in spades, but it fades… it fades, my friends, and history makes its true judgement in due course. It judges you for all the other figures you passed by and left in the shadows, struggling for their whole lives for an audience and a living wage. It has been ever thus, as history books attest, but I protest, here and now, to your faces, and I accuse you each for the shallow fools you are. I am the voice of history, a tramp who wanders the wilderness from town to town, but browned by the sun, I live in truth while you live in pale white lies. That is my gift, the gift I offer you, more valuable than all your money and possessions, the materialist trinkets you surround yourselves with like children’s toys.

The laughter has been gradually thinning out, discomfort fermenting in twitching arms and legs and hands and feet. Then something happens, the door at the back opens, and a blinding yellow light floats in with a long white dress beneath it. It is Elissa, lighthouse of suburbia turning all their heads, dazzling, confusing, blinding… yes… even me. I stumble, I stutter, something changes, I have to keep talking but lose track of my thread, my own words. I hear myself continuing to speak, but no longer recognise my voice or understand it:

Yes, it is true. I grew up with him. I remember him painting and drawing, just as I was always writing and making music, since we were old enough to stand. Can you imagine what it is like to share a bond like that? We read the same books, marvelled at the same stories and films. We fantasised together, created our own shared imaginative universes, even our own language, made-up words. We knew deep down that we would both conquer the world one day, each in our very different ways. And so we have. I am hidden while he is seen. He appears to be understood, while in fact is universally misunderstood. I appear to be misunderstood, as if a failure, a penniless tramp, but in fact I am understood only too well by all those who turn away and try to forget and ignore me. He appears to be rich, but he is lonely and trapped and frightened within the fragile glass palace that you and he have built for him. He appears to be rich, but I am free and so I am the richer. His star will fall, but mine will never falter… He was a great artist once, not least when we were children together, but your adulation has destroyed him, corrupted him into self-parody.

Tears seem to be welling up in my eyes, but whether of emotion or simple reflex, my eyes smarting, I am unable to decide. The light from Elissa’s head seems to be blinding me and the whole room, throwing everything before me into shadow. My words are petering out now… What… what’s happening? Can somebody tell me… I don’t seem to be able to see anything any more…

Then as quickly and mysteriously as it first happened, the yellow light blinks out as Elissa stoops and leaves discreetly by a side door, which is left open for a moment before a new apparition rolls in: Mary Winston or what used to be Mary, some living fragments thereof most certainly, but rebuilt and subsumed into a bike, a trike, a shrike, a fright of machinery and person intertwined. Wheels lifting and turning, pistons churning, her cheeks burning, facial expressions twisting, forehead puckering in gathering of abstruse literary thoughts garnered and nurtured in the infinite shelves of a lifetime’s libraries. Mary has become erudition manifest at last, borne on the sweet waft of foosty paper, a carefully substantiated and cross-referenced theory with footnotes, that only dreamt it was a woman, only a pale worm left behind like a thing spilled from an anatomist’s pickling jar, broken on the wheel of learning. And crucified now on the spokes of a bicycle.

The audience love it. Uproarious applause and spontaneous outbursts and ululations. Whether at my errant ruminations or the safe return of Mary Winston to their warm bosom from the attentions of engineers and surgeons, I know not, nor care a jot. I turn to leave behind this lot, all chatting, scatting, platitudinous platypuses clapping and snapping their beaks open and shut to void their gullets, their glut of gelatinous gossip which drips weakly in ooh-ahs and tut-tuts. All mates and darlings like chattering starlings. They’re moving on to the pub, Weasel and JJ and Packer and Cynthia’s hub’ who does like a tipple he stipulates on weekday nights only and mixed with soda in a cup. Meanwhile I catch his wily wife’s eyes and retire by a back door to the sight of night skies, the myriad stars curving over as we retreat down the street in strangely tacit deceit, the world at our sweet feet.

Oh how to describe her kiss in the dark of her doorway? Her leading hand in the hush of her stairway? Kneeling in the attic like abasing myself before the altar of the sky, where her telescope rests aimed at the stars. Unwrapping her clothes like the gift of the present: sweet musk of cloth on fragrant flesh, the taste of her nipple in my mouth, succour given by mothers to men, eternal dispensation lost and forgotten in the daily rush, the masked ball of banality we rise to each morning, donning our costumes like clowns doomed to futility, voluntary insanity. Her tongue in my mouth, our reaching out to insert each tentative tentacle into available orifices. Creatures fusing, confusing, losing the boundaries of the disparate worlds our hearts push blood to in tides. Oh where does it reside? Your soul, Cynthia, as I push you upwards to heaven, the distant frightened creature sliding away behind your eyes, timid, blind, wondering what it rushes and yearns towards, not just now, but all of its life? Wondering who I am, this stranger, and who you are, made stranger still. It kills us, this moment of thrill, not for itself but the window it offers of infinite possibilities of escaping the flesh and transcending the will.

It’s over as ever too soon, but I’d swear that time stopped there just for a moment and eternity lived in the space of one breath and half a shared heartbeat. Shall we be discreet? Shall we speak when we meet? Or look down at our feet? None, for now, let us sleep, entwined on the floor with clothes strewn around and half off us like broken chains, escaped slaves careless of the wrath of their master, distant thunder vibrating the horizon as the reed of a hunting horn. Scorn, shame, infamy, doubtless await us, but for now joy, exhilaration placates us.

And when is it we wake? The chasm, the break, when self-consciousness floods in on the children of Eden? Suddenly he’s there, Eiderpecker on the stairs, crying and swearing and lifting handfuls of blonde hair up in his hands, his eyes bulging in unbelieving, his senses leaving him. All this the price of just four rounds of beers. And there I am: still clutching the incriminating scissors, standing proudly over his lady wife, my pupil who sits naked and entirely bald on her chair at the telescope, with my net of electrodes spread over her scalp like a hair net, asking Are we there yet? -as I lead her voyaging through the landscape of past and future years. This was doomed, of course, to end in tears. She hasn’t even heard him yet, so locked is she in the vista of her transfigured town from this privileged loft, with time pulled aside like a curtain, satin soft. She turns and their eyes meet and his throat erupts in wails that rotate my entrails. I decide to depart before all that entails. He raises a hand, attempts harm, assails, misses, flails, caught unawares. I dart down the stairs then off out into the night, out of sight and out of mind of all of my kind.

And so it is over. As so often before. And out into the loving roving wilderness I go, fleeing all that is behind me, eloping with my sweet soul, hoping that none shall follow or find me. And nothing binds me. I live outside their grid, without money or cards or papers, or even a name which I can’t dispose of. How I have loathed Nadith, and look forward to another. I will seek out my brother and see what he names me or defames me in retribution for my stain on his reputation. I doubt any such disputation, seriously now, there must be some compensation for my diminution, tiny fly who crawls through all the muck of the world, sustained thereby.

Walk on, walk on. Tick tock, the implacable clock of time talks on, but I am going out of hearing. Nearing enlightenment by dint of each weight I shed, led by my nose, struck as my heart has bled, the clothes of affection left dying in their unmade bed, sorrow I shall not disclose even to myself. Rumour of love lost behind me, pining in repose. Cynthia’s sweet smells still enclose me, winding and intertwining as invisible threads about me in the air and everywhere. I shall not seek to wash, but rain no doubt shall shower my body soon enough and roughly scourge this old brain, purge it of its amorous aspirations and all its vain hopes of acceptance anywhere, gurgling down the drain.

Suburbia’s tarmac fades out from beneath my feet until I meet the moor, and gaining height there after hours look back, content to have concealed my spoor. That little town is littler still now, small enough to hold in my hand and understand one day, should I choose to turn my mind back there. I sigh goodbye and take to the track and walk for hours, leaving my shadows behind, each peeling off with the passing trees, my memories going with them, like discarded clothes or skins, a peeling onion man, this accounting for the tears in my eyes, should anyone wonder. Fat chance, distant thunder, who but me walks in these domains today far from the living? Come the rain, fat drops forgiving in rapturous baptismal blessing, purge me clean.

At nightfall I chance upon a dark lake in a hollow, large and elliptical, swirling in purple shadow reflecting the blushing watercolour sky, and I stop with a start, struck to the heart, seeing its true form: a vast eye, black pupil rotating at it centre, seeking me out. And I sit down on a rock at the edge of the woods which smudge its shore like an eyebrow, fearful of this apparition, full of contrition. Then behind me footsteps I hear, thinking them imagined, clear out my ears and shake my head. Wish myself dead. But they’re there and gaining volume and ground, someone running, pursuing me from town. I reach up my fingers to my face and they linger, finding the trace of my true nature I forgot. Just a flick and twist and I’ve got it, the whole lot, off in my hands, my mask, my false face, just metal mirror again, reflecting the leaves dark and green above me. I turn smiling to greet the stranger, and it’s Weasel, mouth open, about to speak, convinced he has found me at last, but aghast, hovers, bereft as a lover, unable to complete the sentence he’s framed, until shamed, confused, disabused of his illusions, he turns to retreat the way he came, and plods off, slow and distraught, disappointed in deed, deep in thought.

Another hour on, light gone, I bed down. I wash my face in the water and kick off my boots, lay my head back among the roots and leaves in the green bosom of trees and sleep, dreaming of naught.