The Rhymer ~ Part Three

Mesmerising mist. Sparkling diadems that twist as I open and re-open my eyes, writhing on the boat floor. Grilled like a prime steak by the inescapable sun for days. Amazing. Blazing haze. Burns. Then it turns. The autumn chill and winter storms. The doldrums gone. The punishment begins, for crime unspecified. Puny plaything that I am in the Gods’ hands. Did I really think they’d grant me free passage to distant lands? –with all this water to enact my slaughter? Too good a chance to miss, this hiss and roar of spume and piss. A chance to show a wretch how to retch, a full how to be empty, to starve and die of thirst. Women and Ithir first. Abandon ship, I think not. No strength left for anything but lie in state, rigid as a twig on a river in spate, staring up at my creators’ big sky to ponder why, and quietly, quietly cry. Lose consciousness with any luck and stay out, all spun about but safe within my spiralling mind, falling down through sheets and sheets of dreams, gleaming reams, uncovering, discovering, sniffing like a bloodhound the deeper secrets out. Leave the world behind to find a kinder place with slower pace and fairer face and… grace, grace. I brace myself to meet my maker, or Nature both creator and annihilator absolute and resolute in the crash and clash of atoms, recycling of minuscule molecules. My farewell is heard tell. The old destitute is dissolute.

Or is he? Dizzy certainly, when the storm subsides, and too weak to reason out the vagaries of tides and the cause of that strange rocking motion against the sides. The ocean? The notion comes at last, with the keening cry of a seagull swooping to survey a potential fresh repast, that I have not yet breathed my last, but struck dry land, lodged hard and fast. I grapple and topple, the hull tipping to spew me out onto the sand, served on a fine salad of seaweed. I crawl an inch then a couple of feet, then collapse again, my defeat complete, deep, deep into a deeper sleep.

The slopes are steep of the sandy place I slither to, hitherto unvisited where I meet an old man humming to himself as he takes apart machinery on a workbench in his glass conservatory, except that what’s outside is not suburbia but an endless desert which encroaches, poaches, apocalyptic, on the edges of his once-green domain: a few last potted plants as vestiges and bastions against the coming end. I sense that he is my friend, though he never looks up as he goes on working, but finally says: Ah, welcome, I’m so glad you came, again.

Again? Come again? I ask, but he continues resolutely with his task until I ask him what he’s at, at which he quietly laughs then says: Building and repairing the clockwork hearts of men. At this a tiny clock beside him on the bench explodes into activity and sound, its sudden hour of alarm come around, at which in one short and effortless motion, he hoists a mallet and smashes it down without even a frown, destroying it completely into a mess of crushed gears all smashed and strewn around. With a sense of uneasy threat, I find myself drifting as he goes on working, sifting, shifting, being pulled back away by some intruding voice, until at last by gravity more than choice I am awakened again, back into the world of men.

I am in a hospital bed, not dead at all it seems but small, examined as a microbe under a microscope by a plethora of physicians adorned with stethoscopes, peering at me with their thick spectacles like submariners through the windows of a bathysphere. Stuff this, get me out of here. A flood of tears, I am forcibly restrained firstly by strong hands and rubber bands then by pain and swollen glands. Baring of the arm and priming syringe, cringe, impinging on my liberty and dignity. Fight and kick. The needle’s prick. Doing their duty to sleeping beauty. Sigh. The morphine hurtles in, eyelids drooping, groggy, foggy, useless, lousy, drowsy as sin. Diving under, I blunder with a sense of wonder through a blue kingdom where seals and dolphins swim. Until led through a door on the ocean floor I am no more. And so reborn, begin.

Eyes open, bright daylight stinging. My ears bringing the sound of the sea, somewhere nearby through glass. I look down and see I am in a wheelchair and panicking, tear the tartan blanket aside and grapple and massage until I can decide with pride and relief that I have not been amputated by some over-zealous thief in surgeon’s gown, just taking it easy in my queasy wheezy state is all, it seems, has been intended, I can ease my frown. I call out and soon have the furniture upended, expecting some expectant nurse or worse to come and have me apprehended, but there instead appears a middle-aged woman, looking offended. You are awake at last, Mister Nithna, how marvellous, I must go tell Horace of your progress, he’ll be speechless with joy and restless with questions your attention to employ. Oh boy oh boy!

Questions? Never mind yours. They can keep for a year or two for all I care, but I sure have a few, I can tell you. Horace?

Doctor Horace Stockbridge, my husband. Director of the Institute.

And Nithnawhat-the-hell did you call me?

Nithna, you said it was your name each time you were asked.

Under considerable sedation and hallucination I would wager, and with my mouth scarcely any further open than my ass. Am I out of danger? You’re pretty thorough with a stranger. You’d think I was your brother, not a clapped-out old tramp. I feel like a scamp, a dog in the manger, sitting here in the splendour of this mansion, and not out on the streets. I look about, my eyes popping out.

But we don’t have any streets here, Nithna. You are in Oceania now, the region of islands got about by boats, but… she puts a hand to her throat. My word, that is one of our first clues to who you are and where you have come from. I must get Horace before I blow this. She flees in glee through the door.

Know this… I whisper to myself, turning the wheels of my chair with inexperienced grasp until I find my reflection in a full-length mirror in a gilded frame, where I am shocked at my emaciation and battered complexion. Nithna is not my name, but nor was Ithir, or whatever one I had before that. I flow like a river forever, never quite putting down roots, in cahoots with no man and no place. My face, my face! I grapple with my unexpectedly clipped nails to unclip my human mask, a task, a trick that never fails, but I flail, hearing footsteps returning, my ears burning, I reach up for my hair and nothing is there, or everything rather. Getting in a lather. No electrodes and network, no wig for the scalp lubricated with talc, but the real bloody thing. How long have I been out? Long tresses from functional follicles. Bollocks. My hands leap to my chest and part my vest. Rest. As you were. They nearly had me there, choking, strangling. The dial is still fused to my flesh, some wires left dangling.

Mister Nithna, may I introduce myself at last? His huge broad hand closes around mine and crushes it as would a falling pine tree. I remember his face vaguely from the gallery of scoundrels in gowns who went to town on my premature autopsy. What a blast to see you awake and partaking of the art of conversation leaving my wife Emily aghast. You’ll be eager for your first repast, if you’re able. I’ll wheel you to our dinner table.

Wheel me? Stone me, that’s a lonely homily for an old bum and prize pedestrian to hear or bear. It would do me in to be without me pins. How long before I can stand on my own and get out this chair? And what about my hair? My wig, you dig? Where have you put my neural net, my electromagnetic scalp nexus? –The whole shipment. Connected usually to these flexes, thence to my chest and my trans-temporal equipment?

Woah there! Slow down, our honoured guest, he says wheeling me with extra zest lest I slither off, we’ve much to ask you about that strange contraption on your chest. It had all our best people vexed. We’re quite convinced that it’s completely useless but separating it from your rib cage is quite another matter. Seems it’s fused at a molecular level to the bone, stiff as iron, hard as stone.

Of course it is, you meddling pratt. How else to be sure of where I’m at in time and space? My neural net, can you go and get it yet? I need it, must I bleeding plead it?

Let it go. Relax, I implore you. We have carefully kept all of your clothes and personal effects aside, everything the tide brought in with you, Nithna. Our scientists and journalists have had quite a scrap trying to decipher your spurious retinue of crap. I do recall some rusty wires in a curious grid stretched across your lid, but whatever the thingamajig did it won’t do now unless your can renovate and reconfigure it somehow. Jiggered, kaput, kapow. Capeesh? You’ll walk again in less than three weeks from now, isn’t that the more important answer that you seek?

Meat. A whole plate of it before me. Soon the conversation starts to bore me compared to the simple joy of rediscovering the task for which I must my teeth employ. Glorious taste and nutrition, mastication without inhibition. Placation of the fundamental drive to stay alive. Eventually I look up with a start to see that Horace and Emily have been watching me gorging in a state of both primal horror and incipient quasi-parental pride. Confused, I fart, and soon am offered apple tart. My eyes adjust to the view from the patio doors before me: of a beautiful beach reaching out to the hissing sea which so recently released me, and for a moment She seems like an entity, an empress fraught with enmity that resents my recent egress without her consent. She often has that murderous bent, although today I notice over my pastry lattice that she is serene and calmly balmy. I have escaped her army of white horses by some oversight or insight, heaven sent.

Balmy? Am I Barmy? After sweet and repeated biscuits and cheese, rendering me replete, the patio doors are drawn aside to introduce me to the sea breeze and I clutch the tartan blanket to my knees, fit to freeze. My god, the seasons have changed while I’ve been away in the land of nod, snow and ice cannot be that far off. They push my wheels across the soft fine sand, and guide me with a gentle hand to gaze upon this whole new land: Oceania, a thousand islands of disparate size and dispersed population, stretching randomly to the horizon. And at this moment, mooring, disembarking at their private jetty, I see a uniformed steward with two wards, jumping juveniles no less, explosive charges one might attest. The children are home early! Emily exclaims with joy, and bounding up the beach they come to inspect me as their new exotic toy. Psychotic boy and neurotic girl, they soon have me in a twirl with my stomach lurching, with all the respect due to an ice cream lolly they spin me like a supermarket trolley, but soon repent this immature folly, sent off to bed and a sound birching. At rest again and thankful for the refreshing breeze, I throw my guts up on my knees, thankful for the thoughtful blanket, thinking if I had a child like that I’d spank it.

Later in the study over coffee, Emily lights a roaring fire and I reflect on how I could get used to such a life, notwithstanding the recent strife with the nippers, whom Horace assures me are usually nice as chicken dippers, and smiling at that odd simile I wonder if they just need more battering, but keep that last to myself, the concept somewhat less than flattering to one’s hosts with whom one toasts a new beginning. So tell us now, Nithna, Doctor Horace sighs, rubbing his hands as to receive a prize, commence tonight and proceed as you see fit over coming days, to tell us all that you remember of how you got here and who you were before. Open the door of memories and dispel the haze.

Now, here’s a rum conundrum. I remember plenty that will make me sound mental. Like angling to strangle and smother my own brother, or trying to disrupt his exhibitions and impersonate his style. And that’s just the recent mile of a journey out of deeper darkness. What he’s really harking after is the function of my apparatus, dances with the dead and flirtation with the silent nation of those to come. None of which he will believe at any rate, and conclude my sorry state is ripe for the asylum, which by the looks of this domain will doubtless be on another dedicated island. Deny him that whim, I’d say. I who cannot swim. Trim, trim the truth, True Thomas The Rhymer. Desist to resist. Offer no violence. Prefer, and proffer: silence.

It seems that what I lack, casting my mind back, is most of my recent narrative. Thus pleads this plaintive plaintiff. Perhaps I was mugged and thugged and drugged, flung into that boat in which you found me. I believe I was in Industria, but it’s all a blur of grey confusion and effluvia, as if some trauma to the head leaving me for dead has voided my retention, not to mention some mental bruise, a psychiatric ruse in play to keep my prying poking fingers away from some terrible contusion, a confusion of the id and ego, ergo I best not try too soon to lift that rock and risk the shock of being mobbed by the clacking callipers of a hundred nightmare crabs giving me the screaming abdabs.

Goodness gracious. Such self-lucidity and perspicacity, not to say violently vivid vocabulary. Industria is certainly a rough old locality. It wouldn’t surprise me to surmise a couple of ne’er do wells felled you there for your cash with a quick swipe of a knife with scant regard as to your life. Perhaps you were a man of means whose wife and weans are even now scanning the news each day with bated breath for confirmation of your death?

I take a deep breath. I can see why my supposed name proposes me lame at this sort of game. Truth is more easy than lying, as living is than dying. So soon, like a goon, one is in hell and frying merrily. Verily, tell what is true, and you’ll come through. Affirm firmly, and quit denying. I know not, for I remember naught for sure of who and what I am and whence I came. I have fragments of childhood recollections, and perhaps if I share those with you, starting at the beginning as it were, in time you might accrue a clue or two as to who I am and what to do.

Please… says Horace, lighting his pipe and stretching back in his upholstered sofa and kicking off his loafers with a grin. Begin…

One of my earliest vignettes is of my mother leaning over the sink and peeling spuds in a little red tub which I later found out was a peculiar invention the like of which I’ve not seen since… called a potato peeler, with sandpaper on its base and a little handle to the side with which to commit potato frittricide…

Fratricide? How very Freudian, almost as if you are avoiding…

No, frittricide, as in potato fritters. It is a joke sir, of an unfunny but linguistically inventive kind. Lame, as it were, a joke in a wheelchair. Oh yes and here’s another: soap suds by the hundreds, and my little feet drumming in a green bathtub, and a dream I had of this afterwards in which a world war one biplane fell from the sky and smashed through the frosted glass of our bathroom window and the pilot had a white moustache which seemed to be made of the same white soap suds like fluffy clouds, and I can still hear the loud sound of his propeller blades spinning and recall my terror at his aeronautic error and see his goggles all misted over like the frosted window glass frighteningly shattered. I remembered all this for years although it scarcely mattered. One of my earliest dreams or nightmares I suppose, first evidence of creativity composed in my repose.

Fascinating. Horace strokes his beard. You notice the importance of colours in these memories and dreams? First the red then the green and the white. Colours are like flavours to a very young child in a way that we forget as we get older, immured by constant stimuli of the eye and the neural cortex. Red is the most exciting and appealing, green somehow atmospheric and wistful, but within each nuance of the spectrum a thousand other stories and suggestions are waiting to be detected. This is the basis for our response for instance to oil paintings in later life.

By Jove, you’re right. Because come to think of it, my next early memory is of a curving country lane with a bank of blood-red poppies in the hedgerow by its side. And my brother and father are up ahead, waiting on me because I am so small and slow. And I see that they are walking towards a dark green pine forest at the top of the road, into which I know they will turn and go. Then later that same night we are woken by a leak in the roof in heavy rain, and I am in the kitchen where I see the same red colour: this time in the plastic of the bucket placed beneath the dripping water from a hole in the ceiling. And I remember a smell: dry rot, pungent. But where the hell was all this? I cannot tell. But you’re quite correct, that pale blood-like red has a particular quality quite unlike the security of rich post-box crimson or the gay allure of violet and pink. But what’s the point of all this analysis do you think?

Everything. We have established that you were not an orphan for instance, but had a mother and a father and it seems a brother. Just one, or could there have been another? And on and on the evening goes until I nod off half way through a sentence and drift into repose in my clothes I suppose.

The next morning, my hosts are wakened with a grand surprise. Having noticed their study furnished with various stringed instruments, I open its glazed doors and roll through and after a minute or two have a viola tuned and am administering a sweet reprise as morning medicine to anyone who cares, bringing down the stairs the apparition of an enchanted Emily barefoot in her chemise. I play on, letting the leaves of trees dance in the breeze outside as if in balletic mimetic enactment of my melody, pathetic and affecting in its aesthetic, redolent of the indolent melancholy of angels, pitying humanity to the edge of tears. The years roll over me, music easing as a balm and bringing calm, dismissing fears. Whoever and whatever I am, can rise above this tawdry mortal slot, discard our lot, and offer up a psalm to our unknown creator. Birdsong, word song. No greater honour than holding and unfolding beauty’s banner in this manner, high above the bleak plain of pain’s domain, enjoying momentary sunshine before the grey onslaught of rain.

What was that tune? Emily, now joined by Horace, gasps.

But alas, it was mere improvisation, evocation of my current placement in the here and now. They show me sheet music and it’s all Greek to me. Too much a knave for stave and clef. I know how to play in key it seems, but not to replay parrot fashion other people’s dreams, only my own.

Here, take this instrument on loan. Play and play some more, we’ll teach you how to read and write a score, become a virtuous virtuoso affettuoso.

But no, I smile, I’ll improvise again every once and a while if I may, tomorrow and today, but nothing more rigorous I implore you. It would only bore me. Just ignore me if I sound like an ignoramus talking out his anus, but such is the unanimous magnanimous verdict of my corpus and my animus. I need to take it easy or I feel queasy. Call me pusillanimous if you must, or take it on trust. Motes of dust fall through the morning air as their amazed faces calculate what to make of this florid protestation. Mouths agape, fit to throw in a grape or two.

But you must have learned or been taught such skills of hand and ear, then here we have a clue to be sure of your former life, and must hold it dear. We’ll recover your memory yet, before you leave here. I have taken the liberty of sending copies of your fingerprints and X-rays and DNA to a colleague in Switzerland and expect to hear back from him soon. If you’ve been in the hands of doctors or police anywhere then there’s a chance we’ll learn some more of who you were before.

Snore… I decide to mimic sudden narcolepsy to get me out of future fixes like this. Brain damage can play all sorts of tricks. Strangely, the subterfuge is no gimmick and I find I’m out for fifteen minutes. Woken abruptly by the offspring breezing in with a barrage of ululation, which brings me to a late and unexpected realisation: that they are two too young for parents such as these. Then I hear Emily warning that she’ll tell the girl’s mother if she doesn’t behave and cease to tease her brother, and I have my answer. They are your grandchildren… I observe aloud, as one swerves to avoid the flying dropkick of another.

Indeed, and a blessing though they are, Emily smiles sweetly, it is a sadness that their mother cannot be with them during the week, while she works several hours away from here in Urbis. Turbulent economic times such as these dictate such crimes in these climes, where one must make sacrifices to earn even a crust. If their father could just have lived, one might forgive our vindictive creator for this sorry state of affairs.

Tut, tut, Emily! Horace splutters. Must we thus bring God into our utterances? –And not keep our lamentation on a scientific foundation?

What befell their father? I ask and touching Emily’s hand for a second receive the transmission of what it takes her tongue somewhat longer to unfold: He drowned in a boat capsized, was lost at sea, and so you see there is a certain symmetry in your coming to us, washed up as you were like a dead man on our beach, bereft of identity and speech. It is as if…

Tut, tut… again old Horace shakes his head at his wife’s irrational intuition tantamount to treason, at odds with his own medical mission to shed the light of mathematical reason upon the sea and land.

…As if by God’s own hand He sought to return to us a message manifest in man, as a test from above of our love and capacity for faith. And if we could but embrace this stranger, so too will He guard over the soul of the lost and drowned one. The children’s father you see, was our only son.

Tears fill my eyes and hers, instantly. I am so sorry for your loss. The death of he who was your child is a terrible cross to bear, and yet… and yet we must rejoice that he leaves two children of his own so fair. My hands and Emily’s pile over each other like the vaults of a little cathedral wherein votive candles flicker, honouring the hope she gropes for, which I know to be alive: that we do not die, but fly to a place which no eye can spy, nearer than a heartbeat, more distant than the sky.

And Robert, our son, you see, he played the piano and the violin, and though we’ve tried to get the children to take lessons, you are the first person to truly bring those sweet instruments to life since last we saw his beloved face. Truly, it is God’s grace that has guided you to this place, from wherever it is that you have come.

I am humbled, madam, and a little afraid, of the importance you attach to my appearance at this moment in your life’s parade, but suffice to say though I am not your son nor any spokesman for the divine one in which you believe, I can offer you news of the afterlife for such is a place that I visit daily in my dreams and visions, and I shall pray for your son.

You are a psychic? A priest? A monk? I see her spirits rise, in her widening eyes.

A mystic and a seer I fear, of just the kind that your good husband would seek to debunk. But I’ll say no more on this for now, lest I darken your brow or his and cloud your domestic bliss with an issue that I see divides you.

Emily opens her mouth as if to protest this perverse cessation of verse, but Horace interjects with the converse: Quite wise, quite so, Nithna, let’s let it go, all this to and fro on the dubious subject of the human soul. Whether its dissolution is absolute or relative I cannot know, but that the living must concern themselves with life, you, I and my wife can agree, despite our recent blow. Come, play the piano for us and inspire us and the choirs of angels that crowd our invisible environs for all I know.

And struggling to approach the pianoforte stool, I note the boy dressed now in his best and ready for his lift to school, is no fool, but has been taking note as if to learn by rote, from the doorframe’s edge, all that we have said on the subject of his father’s demise and cannot disguise his curiosity.

Next morning, apt as a warning, I find Horace Stockbridge’s daily copy of the Oceania Advertiser lying before my eyes on a silver tea tray by the porch. And there on the front page is a reference to an article inside on the artistic mage of our age, Dirze Learmot. Who? My brother so it seems, is of as nomadic nomenclature as my mature self, perennial, evergreen and eager to be seen. And there he is on the Arts pages, espousing the delousing of our effectively infection-inflected age with the wisdom of a sage, or a charlatan more like. A harlot and a tyke, with paintbrush in hand, leading his devoted acolytes like deluded Carmelites and Canaanites, ammonites, dripping like stalactites, sanctimonious and trite, as the Pied Piper in full flight, off to his nowhere lair. Who cares? What is this ire I feel rising in my gorge, ere I spy his visage and his daily dressage? What dread deed does this anger feed? What event does this bent of mine presage? But wait. Satisfaction comes late to those who wait. The news is that a scandal brews, added as an unauthorised addendum to this piece, the wily weary reader to amuse. Rumours of booze and loose morals on his boatly cruises of late. Oh cruel fate. A bruise, a stain upon his reputation. An accusation, made by some as yet unnamed woman, disavowed and disabused, pregnant and indignant, cast off by the upstart artistic toff as easily as he weighs anchor. Queasily, the approbating public weighs its rancour, dries its powder, loathe to loose its outraged arrows until the approaching reports grow louder, erring on the side of charity, awaiting clarity. Ironically, for just a minute I feel sympathy for the scoundrel. As if the lives of the great judgemental ‘they’ are any better, or would be, if they but had the opportunity to have their gossamer morality tested pell-mell. Given a free run in hell I’m sure most of them would have my brother bested. But mellowly they dwell in their suburban purgatories of sanitised sanitary ware and air-freshener smells.

What is it attracts you in that story? –Doctor Horace asks over my shoulder, looking older from his night’s sleep pushing Sisyphean boulders up blue remembered hills in heaven or hell he cannot tell without the right equipment.

Deportment. In a word, it does not seem quite seemly or sporting how this famous man conducts himself in public.

Quite so, Horace agrees with a hearty grimace, it’s enough to make you vote for a new republic, communist utopia or such like, wherein such cavorting shrikes could not impale their shite on the tree of life all day and night. But do you like his paintings? –Surely this is the real issue, which even he has forgotten in the sodden haze and misbegotten blaze of his name’s fame. It’s all a game, but at its heart there’s still a puck flicking to and fro.

Fucked if I know, I sigh. There’s something there, or was once, but now it’s just an endless echo of itself, to produce more produce for the shelf. The man excavates himself but is a quarry long since scooped, no longer serving marble but exquisitely marbled poop.

Guffaw, guffaw, old Horace holds his sides and yawns his maw, You have a wicked way with words as he with turds. Come let us try our exercises for the day. Firstly, on the beach, to walk a few yards on sticks with your unaccustomed legs and loafers, then afterwards with all those memories out of reach in the comfort of my study and my sofa. And though I’m eager to stand upright again, less like a wheelbarrow and more like the sons of men, I am less enamoured with the glamour of uncovering my past to order, some of it best left over the border in no man’s land out of the reach of prying hands.

Reading alone some of Horace’s weighty tomes in his leviathan of a reliable library, the little angel Annabel saunters in on snow-white feet to whisper in my ear that her brother Nigel says I am a witch who can talk to the spirit of her father. To which I reply I’d really rather not attempt such intimate communication with a relative of theirs so dear, for fear of causing upset and dismay.

What!? Her eyes flash, as her grandmother shouts on her to get ready for bed. You commune with the dead in the domain where the dead’s laws hold sway and yet refuse us news of those we love. Are you a raven or a dove? Just with whom are you hand-in-glove? –The devil or the one above?

Look, I say, and lift a candle by its brass chalice handle, Let us watch the falling wax as it spills across this page, revealing the words of the dead and secrets of the ages…

I’ll tell! I’ll tell! Squeals Annabel. –Tell Grandpa how you desecrate his books!

No you won’t I wager, when you take a look at what the hot wax spells. And sure enough, the white spots congealing reveal by what they conceal a different text plucked at random from page 113 of Horace’s original 1903 edition of Erskine Childers’ The Riddle Of The Sands, as follows:-

Solitudes of sand, ephemeral shallow sea, deeper arteries surround the great convolutions as it were the veins, tide throbbing, infest our fine days by daylight manifest an innocent stranger verify our true course new excitements not in any danger at all, stranded in a spot the constantly recurring question this time we were.

And this from page 204:

Enough! I shall never in reality shudder for our self-invited guests with puffing risen for a demon of that unearthly light, they stood like delinquents at judgement passively to accept morning on return finding a shore meant for his friend, anxious little vessel come so far drinks pleasure alone of three since the fog cleared.

But what does it mean? –Annabel leans in, eyes wide, intrigued.

You saw me pluck the book at random from these shelves, did you not? And yet it speaks eloquently of my life and your father’s death, as stars set within the same system, linked in some strange way that none of us can yet know. It tells you not to be afraid, but to go on seeking answers as to the true nature of life and death, to revel in the mist of the mystery of the voyage of life, with all the breath we have left. Now off to bed. And banish all this nonsense from your head.

That was my father’s book. Look, at the front pages where he’s signed it, see? –Are her last parting words to me before she scuttles away, yielding to her grandmother’s pleading. And after she is gone, the candle burning low, I take the old book and press it to my brow and from this fragment forge a voyage through time towards their hapless father, Robert. I see him twist in black space, his face distorting in the last rigours of drowning, then his body rising and falling with the distant tides carrying him far from all the living, forgiving in their kissing motion of nourishment and dissolution.

Closing my eyes and lifting a pen from the table, I let his spirit enter into the husk of my body for a minute and write a message rapidly in the opening leafs, beneath his own signature. And when I revive with a shudder I read there the words of another, but written in the same distinct handwriting:

Dearest Bell and Jell, weep not for whom the bell tolls,

but as the wave rolls, move on and love,

content with the consent of your dad who smiles above…

A door clicks behind me, and I catch a vanishing glimpse of little Nigel withdrawing to his granny’s calling.

Idling in the study in the evening late, tuning a violin a thought occurs to me as to how to re-animate my contraption which my host has been subtly and persistently recalcitrant in providing me with electrical wires for. I shall take up the playing of vigorous and violent traditional reels, get the whole house dancing and in the midst of their squeals break a string with a little razor blade most cunningly concealed. It’s either that or take the cabling from their lights and heating, which would in winter be somewhat self-defeating and ill-befitting a guest so pressed to the breast of his gracious benefactors. Laughter, sounds of delight from a distant room… the children’s mother come home, not a moment too soon, good-timing. I’ll have the whole brood miming my scheme as a team. The miracle of music, none can refuse it.

Then Mrs Stockbridge swoops in and I lose it. The tune, the melody of life. My strings sag. I view by osmosis for a moment, by a dead man’s eyes, this woman as my late wife. And in truth, though I am often over in business in the darkened lands on some supernatural enterprise or another, it hits me hard for once the waste, the bitter taste that death leaves in the mouth of life. She is beautiful and lonely and so lost to him who so comforted her until recently. And who could approach such a monument to love as she-without-he, without defiling such grace indecently? Presently I recover my composure, plastering over my emotional exposure.

You must be the mysterious Nithna, Horace’s prize patient and guest dilettante savant and clairvoyant fiddler. My little angels Nigel and Annabel have been telling me about your secret sideline as a medium. I am Gladys, pleased to meet you.

I take her hand and shake it, shaking a little that she already knows what her children have disclosed of my supposed powers. And there over her shoulder, old Horace appears and glowers. I see the thought flowers in his head that he has let something unwholesome and unnatural into his erstwhile rational nest, that a weed has seeded in his bed. To boot, can’t get that thought out of his head once it’s taken root. Thinks I’ll fill a swag bag with loot as soon as my pins are operational, and be for the off, having ripped off a toff. Sensational. Not to be scoffed at, such a scenario, but I avoid criminality as a rule, being conscious of the penalty in this life and the next. Nonetheless, I shan’t vex myself with the complex hex of people’s expectations born of their prejudices, just content myself with avoiding the constabulary and the judiciary.

And so, dear lady, well met. I shan’t impart tidings of your dear departed yet, but weave the riddle of my fiddle music’s sound to gather all your wounded family round for an innocent evening of reunion and celebration. See the little ones’ feet dance in among their elders as saplings in the forest yearning for, turning towards, the light. Upwards, onwards, wisdom lives in rhythm as the deeper language our bodies speak to our creator, even as our minds sleep, intoxicated by exertion, making this assertion: that life is good among good company, as trees among a wood.

So true to my plan, as often as I can and tact permits, I let the occasional string let rip, with a zing and a whip, accompanied by a witty quip, and quick, quick, Horace hurries to find me a replacement each time, which I untwine and tauten up, slipping around the keys to appease the waiting dancers. And so Nithna: chancer, necromancer, secretes the broken strings, the wires he needs in his back pocket, to earth himself to the unearthly socket on his chest then so to lift as a bird with wind under its wings and joy in its breast. It will take a while, each methodical theft, fabricating a yarn on a loom all warp and weft, just as walking each day on the sand leans more on right then left, soon to recover all of what I have been bereft. Right, left. Right, left.

Next Doctor Horace Stockbridge calls me to his office to offer this: that he has received a letter from his esteemed colleague in Switzerland who in turn has found another man: one Doctor Erno Schwitzer, who claims to know my true identity, indeed that he handled my peculiar case two decades ago. Schwitzer says that your real name is Thomas Leermouth, a former physician struck off for your unauthorised experiments on patients, involving hypnotic regression and electrical currents applied to the brain. Some of your subjects were damaged or went mad and you went on the run with a gun after some kind of procedure you performed upon yourself went wrong. A reward was offered for your arrest dead or alive, and the former of the two you took it upon yourself to do but botched it with a bottle of scotch and a Luger point two two. He has sent me fingerprints and photographs and here’s the laugh: they do look quite a bit like you. So now tell me, Mister Nithna, washed-up brain-washed stranger, what are we to do?

Fuck. Stuck like a rat in a hole. And another sudden resort to narcolepsy would be too obvious, though more relief than I can tell. And what do you know, but snow at last begins to fall at this moment, visible in gliding sliding parachutes of white, through the window behind the good doctor’s shoulders, white as his white hair, like a hit-squad of divine mercy falling to cover up my shite. How like ballerina’s dresses and the swinging tresses of lovely girls all this cascade and swirl of crystallising ice. Snowdrops falling, how very nice. Suffice to say, I think it rather lovely in an abstract way, compared to my predicament today. I have heard similar accusations and suggestions before, all folk lore put about by louts, what a bore, I seem to recall being tested for my prints and spittle by policemen who found little to confirm their theories and much to make them scratch their neurologically-challenged heads. That Leermouth man is doubtless dead, while I, as you can see, between you and me, am very much alive. You may contrive to test my blood and saliva and all that jive and pish, if you wish. But I promise you this: when I am fully well, soon I trust, I will be on my way and leave you alone, as leave I must.

But Nithna, my dear boy! I wouldn’t dream of such escapology and all-for-bugger-all-ogy. My studies of your neurology are scarcely started. I’d be broken-hearted if we parted at this early stage. And these accusations seem to be rousing further buried recollections, the browsing of which I would recommend we undertake as a matter of urgency. Your memory could be undergoing a resurgency!

You have been too kind to an old tramp in a bind, sir, and I would be better gone and out of sight and mind, away from your good family and good people of their kind.

The doctor continues to be horrified at my convincing concoctions and confabulations. Why are you talking like this so suddenly, Nithna? What’s caused this catastrophic loss of self-respect and self-esteem? Have we been paying enough attention to your dreams? What repressed and sublimated and re-directed guilt from your past is this we’re witnessing? Surely it merits harnessing for several months of study? My god, the old fuddy-duddy shames me with his goodness and credulity. I haven’t told you yet of my latest proposal: to rid you of that foul excrescence on your chest which you hide beneath your vest. Remove it lest it fester and turn septic. Doubtless put there by some jester or cynic to delude you that you’re psychic. Why, I could perform the procedure on you in my very own clinic!

You are a sceptic then, as to my supernatural abilities? He nods his head like a buoy bobbing to infinity on the grey concrete sea of confirmed modernity and rational certainty, strapped into his sinking boat unable to admit to himself what he can plainly find: that I, and others of my kind, can float. These accusations… tell me for my information, where is it that these events are said to have transpired? –Here, Switzerland, Swaziland, Timbuktu or Buenos Aires?

Sylvia, the south-easterly suburb of Urbis, due east of here. He nods.

Well now that’s queer. Because I have the strongest feeling that’s where I’ll be heading after here. Having read that Dirze, until recently Zennad alias Zenir, is eastwards-bound to escape the hounds of the press whose smiles he’s found less toothless than desired recently, indeed ruthless, having acquired bad breath and a latent inclination to harry him to death.

And so the scene is set, the stage prepared, for me to get myself out of their hair, the noble family in whose care my recuperation has progressed so well. –So nearly ready to throw away my crutches and slip silently from their tender clutches. Last time I tried I nearly fell, but the fallen snow as night arrives gives me my final jigsaw piece for quick release. The estuary of Oceania is fresh water and apt to freeze. Imagine that, a thousand islands in a sea of ice, myriad mirror fragments in which to fish for glimpses of my true identity. Oddity on an odyssey to divine my provenance and heredity. A rarity, a man without a name, without temerity. May God judge him and his dim life without light, its hopeless brevity, without severity.

The candlesticks are filled and lit, the curtains drawn tonight as Stockbridge’s island sits frozen fast in its sea of glass, and Emily and Gladys conspire against the patriarch to permit the one-night only indulgence of a séance. A joke, a party game, so harmless a distraction indeed that the children are to be invited, the whole family united, with Nithna as the stand-in for its missing piece: tragic drowned Robert whose photographic portrait adorns the mantelpiece. I hear his lost soul tapping at the backdoor of my brain, anxious for release, contact, communication. Meanwhile an hour before: I hide myself in my room to weave my violin strings into the tresses of my hair, placing a tight skull-cap borrowed from Horace over all to bind the contacts to my scalp, then connect all the wires to my chest-dial. None shall suspect. My curious headgear giving me the appearance of an elderly Jew, all orthodox and kosher, a mystic, a magician priest. Quite a to-do. Oh what a hullabaloo will follow when I show them what I can do.

I emerge from my quarters and make my way to their drawing room which I enter with suitably dramatic flourish and the flickering of guttering candle flame. The tall red velvet curtains are closed, the room disposed to melancholy and expectation. I wheel myself to my place, legs slotting beneath the table as if for a moment I am a necessary accessory to family life rather than an abomination who courts damnation with his divinations. Hearken unto darkness, my dear gathered friends… I begin, connecting by the wires in my cuffs to the stone of the old cottage walls behind me. I shall be the conduit for the evening. For you I shall entrance and enchant myself, placing my soul suspended where all the voices of the night can find me. –Bind me to their lost spirits as the drowned grapple for ropes and wreckage of the life they remember. It was September I see, when Robert’s boat floundered… an autumn storm snapped their mast… There was another on board with him, one James… James… Je

Jefferson, Jim Jefferson… his friend and pilot… Gladys prompts, and I see a restraining hand cross the table to discipline her, old Horace suspicious of cold-calling, the appalling exploitation of grieving he has read of in his dusty journals, beyond believing, the charlatans exposed with accomplices and ropes, wires wrapped around their toes, disembodied plaster hands whisked out from their robes to shake hands with the credulous believers eager to be deceived and thus to avoid the nameless blackness of unknowing, the wall of God’s silent indifference to suffering. As if She would speak in English, when all of Her creation speaks more eloquently already of hope and rebirth, of arbitrary savagery and necessary survival, than any human rival could contrive in words. It is human echoes that the dial I turn upon my chest will hear, like a radio scanning the airwaves, playing the ancient stones of this abode like a vinyl record pricked with a pin. Oh the dim din of the ague of ages.

Robert says that he sends his love to little Bell and Jell, his nicknames for the children…

This time it is old Emily who nods her head vigorously, while Gladys endeavours to be a good girl, unable to sever the strict gaze of Horace, the old bespectacled owl, fixed upon her fevered brow in the dim light. The stone speaks and I tune into the voices of Robert and Horace, raised in an argument, the week before he set sail, then sense the brooding silence, the turbulence in both their heads afterwards. He went to the waves, unreconciled with his father. You fought, Robert and you, Horace, harsh words, three days before he sailed, and failed to make up. He asks for your forgiveness and understanding. On the upstairs landing, the worst of it took place, you with your hand on the banister, he with the light from the attic window on his face.

Horace has sat up rigid at the first mention of this, but now I see his head bowed in strange tension and shame. On the subject of his inheritance… six thousand pounds he sought to borrow to pay for another boat… the words of begging sticking in his throat, a failure in your eyes in these difficult times. He begs again your forgiveness for these crimes.

No! Enough of this impudence! Horace stands and bellows, his composure ashen white and jaundiced yellow. This is intolerable! Who has been sharing their gossip with this impostor in our home?! Emily, aghast at his chair thrown back, covers her mouth and babbles and weeps all in one unintelligible scribble upon the air, while Gladys rings her hands, festoons her hair in deranged bunches, and only the children hit a simpler tone: crying and wailing quietly, less at the supernatural air than at their grandparent’s deranged behaviour.

I find myself mouthing a prayer to our saviour Jesus, the last that passed poor Robert’s lips as the distant waves come close and lift me by the hips, pushing on the table and knocking away my wheelchair. Our father who art in Heaven, keep safe my beloved Gladys, Annabel and Nigel…

Mummy, mummy, Nithna is flying! Look! He is flying! –Little Nigel shrieks, more enchanted now than scared, while his sister’s hair lifts up as of its own accord, charged with crackling electricity.

But I am not flying but drowning. More Stevie Smith than Robert Browning. More disappointed than uplifted by Nature’s wonders frowning on my blunders. Thunder, lightning, lashing of rain and gales. My limbs flail. I cry out. I am lifted up until I float above the table, writhing in blue mist rippling, water filling my lungs in involuntary gulps, the loss of air crippling, my mind going dim as the pain in my chest passes beyond the bearable, the table thrown against the wall, and all my audience cowering away before the grotesque display of a man defying gravity. Levity, literally, importunately but fortunately also: brevity, the nearest window smashing, unable to withstand the severity of proximity to my thrashing extremities. Out, out, I am blown, with the few brief candles left, by one last ghostly wave from beyond the grave, to the comparative safety of a freezing December night, landing in soft snow and waking sharply looking outside-in upon the forlorn domestic glow of which I know I must now take my leave. Unbelievably cold, the ice upon my outstretched palms, but relievingly useful to a man without full use of his disobedient legs. I scramble and tumble then rumble out across the ice, my jacket bunched-up below like a makeshift toboggan, groggy, walk like a doggy, thrashing froglike, then devising a method out of desperate necessity to propel me face-down across the ice. Oh thank you kindly obliging moon so nearly full as to prove a useful tool, God-held torch to light my path. Behind me, dimly, I hear figures shifting in disarray, attempting pursuit but recoiling in dismay at the greater danger that their lesser footprints represent, stiletto point-loads of boots producing fissures and cracks, held back by all the focussed weight I lack. Hocus pocus, practical application of the levitation tack, I’m mastering the knack, just don’t look back. To surge with adrenalin bubbling in my ears, to differentiate between the tears of loss or rage I seek to leave behind me, for an age, for years.

My arms thrash and I progress famously towards another island and some gladsome pile of junk, a veritable trunk of treasure for my pleasure to secrete myself within at my leisure, a tether of old boats and nets and tarpaulins in which to smother my memory of all human blether, severing the bindings of consciousness, falling, falling into sleep instead, caressed with thankyous of the dead for the brief bridge of net I weave to let them have their say. At last I reach the shore and grab up onto the planks of a swaying boat and lever myself aboard, and covering myself over: snore, snore until I am no more. A door closing over, losing all connection with what is to come and what has been before.

How much time goes by? In sleep, we live and die the forgotten lives of centuries. When I awake, from deep exhaustion and ache in my arms, my first task and trick is to prise the mask off my face, done quick, several months too late. The noise abates of who I was, my blood deflates before the gates of possibility. And finally, after suitable repose, I stand up, under cover of night once more, and walk, walk on firm and sweetly crunching shores, my knees tender at first, as if new to this art of bending. Bones shudder as if rending. The sinews tighten, the muscles obey their old logic, rediscovering habit. I sway, nearly stumbling, mumbling, grumbling, but at length am on my way with regained strength. My head, mouth open to drink the chill night air, rejoices at regaining its former altitude redolent of natural attitude and rectitude of limbs. A glimmer of light in the night ahead draws me on and I keep walking, talking to myself, until dawn.

I wake again. Island after island. This place is tiring. Ice breakers have been through now in the larger channels. Crunch, crunch, brittle and dirty shards bunched up like toffee icing. Steam rising from shouting mouths. Accosting boatmen, I barter some of the good flannels on my back for the money I lack to pay for the crossings, turning and tossing, grabbing old rags and tarpaulins instead for clothing, reverting to self-loathing. At last I leave behind the rash of various trivial skerries serviced by ferries for a landmass of respectable size and semblance of sophistication, civilisation. I step out of the boat and walk up into some streets of discreet charm, panache and élan. And passing my reflection in a shop window, recall who I am. No easy question or answer to a man on the run from himself pursuing his phantom semblance and terrible twin. Again therefore, let me begin:

Let me in! I rap on the glass of a window I pass. Shucking fight! What ridiculous quirk of shirking fate is this? Squirting piss, I’m irate. Inside, hung up on walls like appalling crucifixions, a spectacle apt to exhaust my extensive diction: are seven paintings I recognise as my own. My, my, such a long way from home. I’m suddenly all erect as a dog with a bone, and of a mind to be direct and as tenacious as this gallery is spacious. Specious and facetious. In time, the world-wearied owner of grey hair and half-moon spectacles makes his way to the door and hoists the blinds with his liver-spotted tentacles. I am the artist! –is the only ridiculous appeal I can muster through the glass, all fart and bluster. And to my surprise, not for the first time in these travails through tearful vales, I am treated to the unexpected good in human nature threatening to unravel my settled scepticism. Get knotted nihilism! The old guy unlocks his door though I must resemble the worst of the threatening poor, and offers me a place by a fire in his back room where he makes me coffee and sweeps the floor with a broom as if I am some prince come out of the darksome night carrying the light of the world through all the days of winter. Such kindness. You believe, I stammer, –that I, Ithir, am as I claim, the author of these paintings? Such blind faith has me close to fainting!

Only guesswork is blind, my friend, and faith is something else entirely different and inspiring. For here… he brings a painting to me taken from the walls, –is evidence that I do not guess, nor do you lie, at all.

And there sure enough, written rough but clear in queer handwriting not my own, is the name Ithir The Rhymer, dated last year. How strange, perhaps those arty types in Industria did not turn clypes as might be expected after I was last rejected and ejected, but valued my work on its own merits after the dust had settled, and stashed it away like ferrets. Or more likely, as this current outing has me doubting, hooded it in cloth but brooded on it nightly, then sold it proudly as the work of a new artist of note, not the usual copyist of Dirze.

Yes… my host muses, eavesdropping my mind, anticipating my line of thoughts like ink blots, introducing himself as one Mustafa Hakim, …your work shows the influence of Dirze alright, but you are your own man. The world is tiring of his work, among sophisticated circles at least, self-referential and self-indulgent as he grows, whilst yours is leaner, keener and meaner, one might propose: a whole new style for a future suture of the wound of the past, a dark century drawing to a close. Don’t quote me now, these my private thoughts I hasten to disclose.

I am speechless. A rare condition for me. And penniless and clueless (not so rare). How come you trusted such a threadbare apparition as me to let me over the threshold of your locked door?

Mustafa smiles, his eyes hooding in modesty in the firelight. I was an immigrant once, helpless as you, off the boat from furthest Asia, and yet good people sheltered me as I see now that God has granted me the opportunity to do for you. Nearly fifty years ago. So warm your toes. My faith teaches that hospitality is a great honour and obligation, when one comes asking of it in such abject misery and desolation as you. I see myself and my salvation in your situation, for without giving freely how can we accept what is given freely unto us? Some huge hand above us writes up the tally of all our lives in his ledger, always moving and writing, and though his calculations spin far as stars beyond our mortal ken, this I know: that to receive happiness we must give happiness, and that this alchemy is the opportunity we are all put on earth to do.

Dark though the winter morning outside lurks, I weigh Mustafa’s recipe and calculate on balance that I buy it, indeed it probably works, I can’t deny it, should I ever try it. The man is no dewy-eyed fool, but has plans afoot already to help me find my feet, discreetly calculating my capabilities and options, my potential function with the utmost unction. Luncheon! He exclaims, I am to meet an artist this week, and with a lift of the phone I could make the date today and bring you with me anyway, to introduce, to start as his assistant, understudy and paint-mixer. He’s the real thing, an honest impoverished artist and no trickster. You get my drift? Move swift and true, work hard as I know an immigrant like you will do, and you will have access to paints and easels. Weasel yourself in there and you could soon have new work of your own, lurking in the studio recesses, of which I must confess I’d like regular perusal and first refusal.

Your kindness shames a knave such as I, who has so signally failed hitherto to try to apply himself to humanity’s everyday endeavours, shirking responsibility to the best of my abilities, quick to sever ties despite the sighs of those I leave behind to despise me. Size me up if you must, but do not trust the scallywag that lurks inside this raggle taggle gypsy. Tipsy, all too often. Soften not your heart, lest this scoundrel break it apart. I am a bad lot, sir, to summarise, a sight for sore sighs, from end to start. But there is more, I must confess without duress, in the presence of your kindness. I harbour hatred in my heart for my brother, who I pursue with ill-intent to do him in. Jealousy I dare say, for all the good fortune that has favoured him rather than me since we were both grasshopper knee-high, if a shin. A twin with which I have often tussled, and our muscles well-matched we have well-nigh seen the other off to hell more often than I dare tell and more often recently. Indecently sore and near to death’s door how I left him last. Aghast, bereft of him likely, one night soon.

Mustafa laughs aloud but sadly, seeing through me with old wisdom. You lack confidence like a child, traumatised by the wild life you’ve led. But banish and put behind you all the baggage of the years. You crossed this threshold with no past that I need or wish to hear. These paintings which I see are yours betray a soul more sensitive and astute than the one your description parodies for my ears. Besides, these dread turmoils which you describe are classic fodder with which the tortured artist can exploit his fears for fruitful seasons. These are reasons to paint, and not to be faint-hearted. Once you and your art are united, you’ll not be parted. Choose this chance and complete what you have started. In self-esteem through toil you can redeem your soul and thence spare your poor brother all your erstwhile ire. His only sin it seems is to have had god smile upon him, therefore the squabble you pick is with yourself. For god has smiled on you also, but you were too envious to see it. To be blessed in this world you must first know what a blessing is and how to accept it.

You are more like a priest or a mystic than a gallery owner. How comes such an oddity about? I am a lout, but amongst the crowd you are more a shepherd than a ticket tout.

Who knows what ways the winds of fate blow each of us about? Take this new hat and coat on loan. I will see you out, walk about our island until noon then meet me at the café by the harbour where I’ll introduce you to the artist I’ve described. After we a few glasses have imbibed I’m sure he’ll take you under his wing. It’s just the thing, such good luck this tide that to our island Ithir brings, to join the tribe of artists, the noblest minstrels to nature’s praises sing.

Church bells ring as I step out onto the cobbles and hobble through the piled up snow. Strangely revived, heart beating, my blood heating me from inside, I regain my stride and perambulate this pretty town as would the usual tourist. Fine Hanseatic brick and pediments, all pointed lintels and dentils and finicky mimicking of maritime details: iron gibbets from gables and stables, lofts for merchant storage and portage. Delicate fretwork painted iron railings and balconies and external staircases cascading like the unfolding parasols of delectable ladies, falling like dropped hankies to the street below, deigning to dare you to pick up the rhythm, quick, quick slow. All picked out nicely in white ice highlights by the celestial artist in meteorological modus operandi, glissandi: this still-lightly falling mist of snow, steady as she goes, crystals as shifting sifting petticoats crackling, each microscopic particle spinning like a ballerina in full flow. I am spun as in a grand dance down an avenue of partners before I am given away and let go. The music of Mozart or Strauss orchestrates and delineates the shop displays and alleyways, the exuberant renaissance order, soberly on show.

Quaysides and boats and capstans and thick-ply ropes are never far away, and well-used; never far from frayed. The leaded glass windows in the Corn Exchange make light glimmer like candles, glimpsed shimmerings of winter silver. Fortunes rising and falling with the tide of history. Blackened gothic pinnacles and buttresses above, like those on the cathedral, dark accretions of carved craftsmanship, smoked, sailing, dangling, as the golden balls of the pawnshops, gold ships of the merchants’ domes and spires, the skyline vies for attention from the divine like a line of hawkers and talkers all pining and miming for our coins and our time. It is no crime, I assure myself, merely to wander and enjoy the clamour of haggle and bargain in passing, as a boat myself a-sail, meandering through myriad islands on which one has no interest in alighting, preferring the flighting, a snake of motion pursuing its own tail.

And thus happily, distractedly, do I pass my morning in preparation for the promised appointment, my newly-blistered feet (laid up for weeks) in urgent need of ointment. To the harbour then I wander lastly as the snow stops and the weak sun at its paltry zenith tears the gossamer grey cloud like winter woollens, and the thought of melting replaces pelting. This is Kenneth Astley Kettering… Mustafa introduces, loosing hither and thither the flaming arrows of his sparkling gaze, to spear at us both. And this is Ithir The Rhymer or so he calls himself these days. I anticipate you two artistic bohemians will have much to say to each other, like unto brothers of the painting, roving trade.

Then begins the tirade of Kettering’s outpourings, appetite-whetting whitterings, as Mustafa seats us in a shiveringly off-season café perched at the water’s edge, frozen condensation dripping from the window ledge:

Pleased to meet you, old man, Mustafa tells me you’d make a perfect apprentice, being a painter tentatively taking his early steps late in life, unburdened by a wife but rich in inspiration. Emancipation in the techniques of mixing paints and stretching canvases and even framing are the skills I’m naming in this jolly offer. Not that the wages shall be apt to line your coffers, being next to nothing but bed and board, still not to be ignored, sniffed, spat or scoffed at. All in all well worth the time of day to doff your hat at, wouldn’t you say that?

And pray, what would you say, dear reader, were you ever desperate and destitute as I? Wouldn’t you rather take a job without pay than languish in such freezing poverty as like to die? Say nay now and meet my eye. Not so? Thought so. We are not so different, you and I. Over hot broth, quaffed slow as a sloth, I doth quoth my troth to this harebrained serfdom for the promise of respectability, a tradesman, to the best of my meagre ability. But Mustafa smirks I surmise, knowing that Kettering will have a cuckoo crowing every sunrise, an artist greater than himself in the making, watching, learning, waiting from the wings, his stifled urge to sing not long abating.

Hands are shaken on it, then Kettering dons his jaunty bonnet, being very much the archetypal arty type, more apt to write a Shakespearian sonnet than waste time cogitating on it. And we follow him through the cobbled streets, huddled now against an icy north wind, to reach his creaking antiquated attic, up many stone steps worn by the boots of centuries. Do you know… he opines over his breezy shoulder from above us ascending, that these lodgings were once the abode of Pintorello? Holy smoke and liberate the ghetto! Robed angels from heaven bending down to pluck their harps of gold, I am enchanted as of old to hear this brag, backed-up by a plaque upon the brickwork, warmed by such knowledge against the fiercesome cold, as if a fire were lit inside me. Rattle of ancient keys in the iron lock, creaking nudging of ship hulls moored in the dock, we are inside soon and gathered round the hearth and mantelpiece eyed by a solitary clock to navigate the ages. And we three sages are arrived at the nascent rout of the complacent, the birth of an artist fit to recover the renaissance. I mean myself of course. Not lacking, despite the act, self-regard or the necessary patience.

We find ourselves inside a tall attic roof criss-crossed by beams, much bigger than it seems, a veritable Noah’s ark in which to flee the winter’s dark, creaking in the wind as an ancient galleon beached upon these shores, an echo-chamber for Kettering’s snores, as I am treated to later on that night, as into the upper timbers I take flight and hang my hammock. But before that: we part with Mustafa on the steps outside, his eyes confiding that he sees me as the prize with which to buy his way to heaven. One so uncomplicatedly deserving of his alms in my palms without qualms being surprisingly hard to find, short of the lame and blind. I am honoured by his charity, or more precisely: his faith in me.

As through a tree, each night and morn now I descend and ascend through the spars and rafters of the trusses holding up this medieval roof. Forsooth, when my hours of mixing paints are done and I am spied by none, Kettering being gone out along the quays to take the sea breeze, I feed my wires into the old stone walls and rotate my dial as if to search for Radio Luxembourg. Radio Thanatos more like, a wavelength thronged with voices, and there I find old Pintorello himself sooner or later, son of a dyer, rebuked by academia, who chose instead the harder self-taught route. God loves a tryer. A town-crier, charged with desire, whose lit fire could not be extinguished by all the grey sea of envy that rippled around him daily like ruffled feathers. In every weather, he paced these streets, living and dressed but simply as a peasant, to draw and paint scenes dramatic and pleasant. Then portraits, of patrons by steps more influential by the year, boosting the credentials of this queer misfit resolutely non-compliant and self-reliant. A giant to history, and as such men often are: but an apparent dwarf in life to the apparent dwarves that surrounded him. A slim glimmer lights the way to genius. It is the task of those who would follow such a path to find the strength to wander unaccompanied through the long and thankless dark, the challenge stark. Hark, hark, the distant hunting horn of Apollo, the lyre of Orpheus. Pay no heed to idiocy, but follow your Eurydice.

Mustafa visits every second day then once a week. His demeanour kind, his manner meek. Encouraging me in my studies under Kettering to consolidate my mysterious abilities, seemingly unlearned or borrowed from some previous life. With a palette knife I learn to restrain my violent passions and harness them to more considered lashings of paint, and observe the industry and discipline with which Kettering approaches each work, taking time to catch each fragment of inspiration where it lurks and not rush the whole enterprise into compromise. Mustafa my friend, accompanies me on walks at each day’s end, and although his faith will not permit him a drop of alcohol we learn not to let this come between us at all, but go instead to visit all the island’s grand palaces and churches to stand and wonder, then at last to his mosque where he bids me kneel and pray with him each day. We dare to say that the God we each spin in awe of, lectures in architecture, our eyes lifted to each carved and singing detail, exalting the dead overhead, is the same deity inspiring piety and easing anxiety. It is in the everyday that we will find the way to Him, Mustafa preaches, in a thousand small steps towards the sacred reaches.

Then just when I begin to dare to believe my inner demons bested, ever-wary fate sets its snares to have me tested. Word reaches the artistic loft of Kettering and Ithir of a controversial exhibition opening soon to whose private view but a few local bohemians are invited. The press are to be slighted, it seems, for their ignominious role in hindering this artist’s plans to get himself knighted. His blighted career seeks to be re-ignited, his enemies indicted. You are right, dear reader, it is Dirze himself on which our narrative has once again alighted.

Kindly Kettering lends me a shirt, one unusually devoid of dirt or paint, and helps me trim my beard fit to make the ladies faint. Then before Mustafa can warn us off, dressed as a dandy and a toff we set out from our loft to walk the several blocks and canals to where the party’s planned. Kettering can’t understand my seeming reticence in praising his eminence Dirze, dismissing all the media slander as irrelevant to his genius, and apt to get on his gander. But I remind him that it is the man himself who first wedded his fortunes to the media circus, drowning content in pout and portent. Sleet is falling as we briskly go, to and fro between the ebb and flow of the rivers of people and water stirred at eventide, the Oceania citizens intent on retiring to where they each habitually reside. As Kettering talks, I watch their million eyes and long to confront them with my prize: my many paintings planned and underway to show them to themselves, unmasked and nakedly displayed.

We arrive at last at a suitably vast disused warehouse at the cobbled quayside, its dirty windows dirtied some more of late with diluted whitewash to defy the avid critic’s gaze. Our passes verified, we pass through a haze of chattering bodies, the old vernissage assemblage rife again, towards a small but welcome blaze held in an iron grate at the centre of the space, throwing an orange glow on each eager face which gravitates towards the warmth and nibbles on a plate. And yes, unfortunately, free glasses of the demon drink are also there displayed, in varieties and quantities profligate. The hubbub of conversation grows, as Kettering constantly darts around intercepting those he knows, and some kind fellows introduce themselves, fellow artists and a few gallery owners, my unaccustomed hand to shake, two types differentiable by their attire and demeanour, the first like Technicolor waifs, the second inflatable dirigibles tethered at the waist.

Music is provided, quietly in contrast to this cacophonic set, by four ladies of a string quartet performing Bach in mathematical precision with a certain frisson beside the disused gibbet of a packing hoist, the great black hook hovering over them like the deathly symbol in a parable of choice. Promising ascension to an exalted dimension. Attention! Into this demented noise a voice makes an unexpected incision. And then suddenly there is Dirze, received not yet with derision but still with an air of awe apt to make the acolyte paw, attended by a flock of black-dressed priestesses in glamorous dresses and coiffured tresses, fanning out like pickpockets to seep through the crowd and then; at his signal reach up and remove each shroud from off his surrounding canvases. Glasses are put down so that the masses can gasp and then applaud, gawping at the sudden visual onslaught encircling them like wagons. I reach for further flagons of ale, irked to think that Dirze has not yet failed, his much trailered descent into obscurity with all that it entails not yet arrived. My stomach jives, my entrails fester at the performance of this jester. His paintings, needless to say, all look like nothing new, the same re-hashes of his stale and steadily heady brew of garish hue and caricatured chiaroscuro. But what do I know?

But now for once my sick and addled mind fixates on something new. From amongst Dirze’s slick entourage I begin to notice a face I cannot place, and yet whose beauty holds a curious weight, her lovely eyes and cheekbones resonate, as if I’ve nearly met her once before, but what occasion I cannot calculate. I fixate, cogitate, try to look away, but catching my gaze, to my astonishment she reciprocates. And over several minutes by way of circuitous social rounds and routes with intervening parties, we contrive to glide together without a sound and there by the burning grate to achieve a slight collision followed by apology, unction and introduction. Collusion, this illusion of two strangers met by chance, culmination of a balletic dance by flickering firelight. Pathetic affettuoso melody is struck up virtuoso at this moment by the feminine quartet as further fate. We talk, stuck fast as needles on a record to rotate about each other, sister and brother, bathed each in the light flowing from the other.

I tell her of my artistic aspirations and inspiration, and bit by bit she lowers her voice and whispers close to tears of the last dismal year she’s spent in the company of the dreaded Dirze, touching my wrist repeatedly to remind me that all this is in strictest confidence and imprudence, but that his impudence can no longer pass without remark and incident. He drinks heavily you know, more and more, before and after every show, consumed with terror as to how things will go. And his mounting debts mount higher than anyone can know. And as to my wages, well, I am ashamed to say I should have left his employment long ago, but hang around as do the other girls, in the hope that we’ll be paid late at last and taken up again in the swirl and froth and frills of an exciting life of exotic travel and popping pills. But what’s the use? Perhaps I envy you your basic existence of artistic persistence, free from the pestilence of wealth that threatens human health. I am an artist too you know, a student of drawing and painting once, but like a dunce I’ve let that man parade me for my looks alone and turn my sorry heart to stone.

Cold though the night is, to hear ourselves better over the buzzing fizz of talk around us, we walk out onto the quayside and sit on a capstan each, to preach each to each our plans to transform our lives and shed our former skins. You are so beautiful… I venture, in this mysterious maritime illumination, if you would forgive my voicing such an indiscreet rumination.

Her eyebrows lift. Oh that old chestnut. How tedious to be judged constantly by one’s looks. Do you and other men suffer the incessant indignity of the knives of stares? Yet some women must it seems, and is that fair? To be hunted and observed everywhere, insidiously and unawares? I am like a mobile statue with a living soul entombed inside, and all the fools I meet project their childish fantasies and dreams onto this blank canvas which is not me at all, but just the accidental shell that I am wrapped up within. Our appearance is but a random roll of dice, and yet the shallow Pierrots of this world pursue this phantom half their lives, descending into vice on its account. If this is life as God intended, then politely, prithee, count me out.

Such words of truth to hear at last from such a mouth is a relief enough to make me shout with joy. Her sad eyes gaze worldly wise, world weary and austere, through me to the core as none before and I at last have nowhere left to hide. I must confide you speak as one who has sneaked into the attic of my head and read the diary of my mind… I reply in shock, I have been blind to the possibility that a soul as lost as I could be hidden so close at hand, and we could wander unknown to each other forever through this darkened land. But aren’t some men likewise cursed by the adoration of girls frivolous and shallow, fixating on their matinee idol surface, entirely unaware of the depths, pleasant or unpleasant, which wash in waves below, resounding between unknown shores? Do not despair, for surely there is hope and grandiosity in Nature’s plan that has spanned so many millennia to bring us to this here and now as never before?

Perhaps, but higher genius though reality may yet be, let us not suppose that it is of necessity symmetrical… She answers, tilting her head as to weigh it all with scales calibrated and metrical, We have but one heart each for instance, and it does not sit at our centre, nor do the appendix and spleen. All is skewed, perverse, adrift and obscene in the obscure constellation of human life, a project underway on the scaffold of the universe, too vast for any perspective to reveal. Women by and large, listen to the voice behind the mask, while men see no further than its surface and do not think to ask. What is the task then? –the grand enterprise of which we all fall short? The ultimate gesture and last resort?

My retort is of a sort not verbal or ineffectually intellectual but instinctual for a pleasant change: I find that I have done something deranged and taken her in my arms and kissed her. The dockside mist like a clouding of the brain swirls in slow drifts around us as I vanish blissfully into this sustained osculation. Wheeling of stars across the heavens and aggregation of centuries like sediment. From my mortal impediment I am freed and chained all at once by the spark of concern that once lit burns in the brain and floods the veins of two organisms reaching out towards each other, two trees straining to intertwine their branches. Both enflamed and drained in the aftermath, I discover something astonishing as we withdraw and pull away: a loud cracking noise, a shudder and a shiver, as if all the mechanistic cogs of physics are giving way in dismay. With not a little pain and confusion we see that both our faces, interlocked and bonded, have now peeled away. My damaged metal mask, impacted into hers, and now both falling to the cobbles in disarray. Crash, crumple, gasp and tumble. Our reaching hands encounter and entangle each other’s, bending over. And looking up, what do we see now of each other’s true appearance? Eyes widening, nearing revelation, our disparate throats break into ululation.

But the warehouse doors are thrown open, light spilling out in sickly yellow degradation, our recent scene sullied by observation. Dirze’s retinue of hired muscle emerge and tussle with my Aphrodite before I’ve even caught her name. And pushing me back, administer to me the same brutal treatment. Defeat, even in the moment of triumph. I cry out after her, but get a fist in my face to focus my thoughts and my dental health plan. Second-best as ever to my dread brother. Where are you headed with her, you fuckers? –I shout, spitting out a canine and a molar. Hands over her mouth, she is dragged away kicking, but her eyes meet mine one last time. And that is enough to determine my mission, for all eternity.

Bleeding and stumbling, mumbling profanity and inanity, I pursue as best I can along the many quays and piers that Dirze’s demons make their retreat along. One even produces a gun, a few blocks along once we’ve left the throng, and shatters the brickwork of each doorway that I duck inside and hide in. Until gaining ground they reach a harbour with the tide in and all flee on board a boat and hoist their anchor. The wankers. No doubt Dirze himself is in the cabin at the centre of their infernal machinations, poring over a nautical chart and devising some new stratagem of the heart and soul to confound my longing. But he bolts the stable door too late, and fate it seems has turned the tide. For wounded and breathless as I am, and collapsed at the water’s edge, now I have glimpsed my salvation in another soul tormented as myself. Now I am deathless and where once I was outcast, I understand belonging. I am of this world again at last, and destined to master it. Do not ask one who has once tasted it to abandon it: the elixir of life I mean, unleashed between two beings, which opens a door to immortality, the ability to transcend and escape our sordid physicality. Undaunted, I climb down a harbour ladder and steal myself a boat and paddle, and although I may be slow and addled by fog, with hard slog I will achieve my goal I know. I will never be alone again, and this thought gives me the strength of ten men and the patience of a hundred. I set sail, and will not fail to regain the treasure my brother has plundered. I shall grace these shores no more. When night next lifts its veil, I will be in Sylvia.