Such greyness and stillness I wake into today, as if all of Nature is pausing, loath to go on, suspending Her charade, Her masquerade. This weariness I feel also in my limbs, and on a whim I swim in the lake instead, water up to my head, and am reborn from the dead, freezing and shaking, shocked and blue as the newborn emerging, howling and crying, with only grass and air for towelling and drying, my clothes hanging from trees. And these I wash now, slow as I please, teasing out every last atom of dirt and scent of the words I meant and those I did not, the lot, thrown to the breeze. My past is shed, my chapter read, time to head to pastures fresh.
The sky still so still, static as a grey sheet, but neat, complete as a new white page for writing. But as I walk on I see that autumn is encroaching, curling the leaves at the edges, whispering in hedges of death and decay. But unlike human dismay, Nature delights like a sunset in this phase of her work, the glorious hues soon to be unleashed, gold, orange, pink, brown and red. She celebrates her dead, sends them off in a fanfare of brass trumpets of crumpled and crinkled leaves and fronds. Fond but unsentimental, knowing what we cannot grasp within the petty spans of our lives and shuttered minds, that time and tides bring back all things washed clean, renewed in the green font of rebirth, a cold fusion, remarkable oven fed by dead flesh and broken dreams. Rejoice therefore that our failures are fodder in the grand scheme that redeems our every ounce, cry out in joy as we are trounced. We are not undone but remade, over and over again, and since of necessity not least our minds must be washed, be not surprised that our memories are quashed also in this forge that gorges itself on the rich food of our endeavours. Severed we seem, as roots by the rake, but deeper beneath the earth spread the wiser tendrils that unite us with our children and all the next of our kind, out of sight, out of mind. Few can encompass this vista, but who do, are truly awake.
I cover so many miles. I should be aiming away from Urbis, that distant city crouched on the horizon and its sorry suburbs spread out around it and below me, like the fans and folds of some vast skirt. I should be away to the west and the open sea, the myriad islands, the mild climates warmed in the gulf, or to the high moors and fierce peaks to the north, bitter as gritted teeth which seethe with the bloody history of those born in their lee. But somehow, like a ball on a string, or a hunting hawk loosed from his master’s gloved hand, whichever trajectory I conceive, deceives, and I find myself curving back towards some magnetic centre, falling like an arrow or a rocket confounded by gravity, compelled to face all that I seek to escape, the centre of my orbit. Perhaps it is the worn paths and tracks themselves or the contours of the ridges I turn to climb, but all bluff me, return and rebuff me in time to the scene of my crimes.
Industria, I recall the name my friend Weasel gave it: a pall of grey smoke and misery hangs over the place. Oil refinery chimneys and shipyard cranes punctuate its sky, its sordid buildings drenched in centuries of soot, its clouded windows like the misted eyes of the old or insane. Children play barefoot in its streets their obscure games, enacting in mime the brutalities of their parents, coming home drunk, picking fights with strangers, leering, jeering, eager to maim. I venture, saunter, over the weird edge where their muck and grime peters out into blighted grass, Nature shrinking from the shock and the shame. A once-cobbled lane, now patched and filled with desultory tarmac and drains. Their little faces turn, my ears burn, in less than a few minutes they’ve devised a new mission and enough ammunition to aim the lot at my head, stones, rocks, bricks. I’m wise to their tricks, the little pricks, unrestrained like their parents by police or morals, I pursue them each purposefully then beat them with sticks, until they cry, restored to childhood innocence again, under this reticent sky. Picking on a poor old tramp, the little demons. How can the universe stand by and permit such injustice? Well it doesn’t. Limp off home, you misbegotten splots of semen.
In time I work my way down through the steeply twisting streets, the roofs like the backs of beetles and slaters, towards some kind of a town centre, from where I can see that most of the shipyard cranes are rusting now, bloating the Job Centres with their discarded workforce like lice escaping unwashed clothes thrown on a fire, a pyre. Autumn is indeed the right season right here, melancholy the correct attire. But wait, amid the neglect and degradation, is this gentrification I spy? A joy to the eye! An art gallery fresh-painted, not yet tainted by taunts and graffiti, with a red carpet rolled out to entice to these climes the lesser-spotted culture vulture awash with disposable dosh. Splosh. I’ve just stood in a puddle, which puzzles me since it hasn’t been raining. Yet. Wet. There it is, the explanation: the gallery owner gently washing his Bentley not a metre away. His pride and joy, metallic toy to preserve the up-sized boy.
I hover at his display, posters and leaflets and there within, eyes lifting to the background, coincidence fit to rankle the gut: my brother Zenir’s paintings, a dozen of them, displayed on easels, some larger chained to the walls. I push my way in, ridiculous little doorbell ringing its heart out above me. They’ll just love me, an old tramp from the hills. With a look that kills, a well-manicured young lady confronts me from her desk with a sleeveless dress. Without frills, asks: You in the right place, grandad? You forgotten your pills?
Do you know me? –I retort, not the sort to resort to obsequity in the face of iniquity. I’m his brother, you know, the artist’s…
Really? Her eyes and mouth widen, agape, three great orbits of rouge and kohl. You’re Ithir, his brother? Zennad Learmot is such a genius!
Zennad? Is that what he calls himself these days? –I mutter, but she is rising from her dais in a haze of perfume and curves fit to refract the gaze and nasal cavities, a display I dare say, if I had the libido today.
She comes closer and swings her head, examining my distinguished profiles from various angles like a sculptured bust on a pedestal, and gasps: My word! There is a striking resemblance now that you mention it! But you look pensionable, pardon me for mentioning the unmentionable, while he looks half your age.
Not so! I protest, enjoying a long look down the front of her dress. Indeed I am the younger of us… by about three minutes while our poor mother rested. But he has since had the benefit of the best medical care and doubtless various spurious surgical enhancements, while I have lived off fresh air. But appearances can deceive and usually do in my experience. I shall outlive him, I guarantee it, and am better in bed.
What? You old sot, you’re not right in the head. But come to think of it, he did speak highly of his brother. You don’t play the…
Fiddle and whistle and piano, yes, as well as the fool.
That’s it. And he said you were flippant and perverse as a rule. Rude to a fault, in fact, I recall was his phrase, and a fine one worthy of praise even among his considerable armoury of witticisms. Criticisms? But no, he’d have none of those. You were his fine little brother in all of his prose. You have his nose, distinguished as is the brow. Would you like a coffee now?
Six sugars please, I like to stock up. When do you lock up?
For lunch? Surely you’re not chatting me up you old goat?
Not at all, but I can father you if you like, as opposed to fathering your children, a chore I’ll leave to some other fool dominated by his biology. I prefer ecology, Nature, the birds and the bees, the things they do in bushes and trees as opposed-to to each other. I’ve merely wafted in here on a breeze to ask you about my brother. Where might I find him this weather?
Well, she checks her watch, an elegantly numberless number adorning her freckled wrist like an alluring garter, If you run like leather you might catch him at the pier, he said last night that he was leaving on the next boat out of here, to Oceania, where he boasts that most of his rich clients stay, ones who can pay his exorbitant prices. We only get to exhibit them here as part of some cultural grant given by do-gooders with ants in their pants, sycophants, pedants, who think that the downtrodden poor ought to get to enjoy his work, them being his subject so often. I mean, look at this one here, The Heroic Dockworker he calls it, doesn’t that have you in tears? Of sorrow or laughter we need not discuss here. And this one, The Fretful Fishwife, worrying whether her husband has been lost at sea… it makes a great diptych with The Lipsticked Whore…
But I am gone, gone from her door, leaving her rambling like a prize-winning bore.
*
I reach the dilapidated dockside just in time to see the white ghost of a luxury yacht pulling out, and on its deck a stout lout of a man waving, misbehaving, engraving his image on my mind: surrounded by young ladies in tight leather dresses and combed-back tresses sipping from wine glasses, and I confess to feeling jealous for a few seconds. I reckon, you know, says a voice at my side, a total surprise, -that bloke looks like you…
And who may I ask are you? I clack, stepping back, -Some cheap hack pursuing that goon for your latest titbits of news to amuse the somnambulating masses?
He takes off his dark glasses and rubs his eyes to peer at me more closely, morosely, preparing to administer some sinister truth in insipid doses. Police… he says, releasing his disguise and watching my eyes widen, as he lifts an identifying pass up at an odd angle to dangle in my face. Brace yourself, Ithir, here comes the revelation. And now can I see your identification?
Mine? I slap my wretchedly empty pockets, eyes bulging out of my sockets. Are you serious? Delirious? I’m a tramp, man, a vagrant, one of the silent army of the indigent, the homeless, the hopeless, the couldn’t-cope-less, the financially defenceless. I don’t do D.H.S.S or P.A.Y.E, just B.Y.O.B in brown paper bags, beg-your-own-booze, born free and keen to stay that way, any day, ever day. Anyway, the answer’s no.
So… you must have a name though?
Wilberforce Fontainbleu
You know what? He grins. I’ve made his day. I don’t believe you. Will you accompany me to the station please?
To do what? I’m not chipped like a stray puppy you know, not yet anyhow. Or are you lonesome and eager for company along the way? I mean, I know it’s a rough area here but it’s not so bad that you couldn’t make it home safely alone, you being a policeman and all.
Not at all. I relish a good fight. Physical or verbal. Your patter, like your breath, is terrible. Walk this way so I can take a sample of your DNA then be on your way. Please, after you.
Well whoopee do, police harassment to add to my fiscal embarrassment, what daring-do you people resort to when bored, instead of remedying endemic street crime and vandalism.
That’s quite enough thank you, of your high-camp lip, rampant cheek to-wit, which all goes to fuel my suspicion that you’re the brother of that twit Zennad Learmot. You’re way too intellectual for an ineffectual bin-raker in my humble estimation, policeman plod, backbone of this nation.
I take his arm. Don’t be alarmed. I’m starting to take to this man, against all my better judgement and carefully distilled prejudices against such fascists in uniform who vote Tory from birth and grow up in posh schools hurling racist abuse at Pakistani bus drivers, you know the type, usually end up in Whitehall or borstal, animal aggression and the will to power being the common focus. Locusts, a plague of them in black suits, sent to torment the rest of us who just want to get on with our lives, from schoolyard bullying to pernicious taxes, praxis, an axis of banality, foul frothing foam rising to the top of a pint of boiling piss, give them all a miss or a wide berth is my advice or shoot them like pheasants if they gain flight and attain high office. Novice, this one, maybe, not yet learned the tricks, beating immigrants with sticks and memorising tattered copies of Mein Kampf like street atlases, the pricks.
What a grubby old town as he leads me through the streets away from the docks. Like they turn back the clocks another year every Sunday. Post-industrial decline in excess, middle-aged men in string vests sitting on flea-ridden sofas, loafers, watching the box all day, behind net curtains, apt to depress the zest of youth if any grows here at doom’s behest, like weeds through cracks in the pavement. Statement in itself: the success of betting shops flowering like dry rot on every corner, you’re getting warmer, knocking back beer and the wife in tears as you waste your money on mirages and the jealous religion of false hopes. Not a stern god, but one laughing constantly in your face. Know your place. Sink. Without a trace.
Now a fog unwinds from the quayside, licking at our backsides with the cold snout of a deathly dog, spreading grey uncertainty in burgeoning clouds before us like a plague of vague ague, as we climb a hill until we find the station, the hornet’s nest at its crest, and they usher me inside. Two at the door, and more at the desk, three-a-breast, like the old joke, even inside their inner sanctum. Let’s rank them, a game to pass the time as they fill out their forms to formalise crimes with. Transgressing the norms. Oh let me be done for something outwith their normal tawdry boundaries. Four constables, two inspectors, a superintendent, an assistant inspector, an insistent prospector, persistent investigator, prospective Phil Spector impersonator, a translator of desultory street lingo, a real-time narrator, a digital recording operator, and an unplugged vibrator. Bingo. The tape is running, the questions cunning.
Photographs of some bloke on the table. Are you able to tell us if this man is you?
Who? Now hold on a minute, guv, this havering is the limit, innit? What’s this geezer done that you want to frame an old wheezer with his misdemeanours? And unless I’m wavering, wouldn’t I remember if I’d done something unsavoury?
My reasonable bobby who’s called Caldwell, now hands over to a knob called Solihull whose hobby is psychology, and a medic called Prezic who probes my skull beneath the hair and finds a scar that interests him, which he rubs eagerly as a clitoris. Then they throw more photos on the desk in random array, X-rays from days gone by. They say that’s me and I shot myself in the head, attempted suicide, failed like everything else I tried. But why? –I cry, half-believing, half interested in this strangely familiar stranger’s tale.
Jumped bail, high-tailed out of the constabulary’s clutches. Last seen as a tramp on crutches. Amnesiac, just like you. And just how much do you remember of yesterday or the day before, Mister Fontainbleu or should I say Learmot? And the crunch is… he slaps the desk with his fist for effect while his friend munches biscuits. This slime spoke in rhyme… all the damned time. How does that chime? Sounding familiar?
Not in the slightest. How perverse. I’m strictly a blank verse man... Damn.
They all look at me accusingly, disapprovingly. Daring me to hang myself with my tongue. I’m sweating, breathing like an iron lung. Why, I repeat quietly, why did this ned put a gun to his own… err… cranium?
A crazy story, of which we believed not a single word. Caldwell chuckles as Solihull crackles his knuckles, amused by a memory flickering in his seedy cerebellum like a dodgy seventies cinema showing soft porn. He said he’d seen into the future and seen the man who was going to run him over, and took a note of his number plate, tracked him down and invited himself over, then stove the guy’s head in with a brick until it resembled raspberry pavlova. Didn’t half make me sick having to peruse that scene and lose sleep afterwards, I mean he might at least have done it over the sink. I hate mess, I must confess.
Why did you grant bail to the slime at the time, if he’d confessed to such a heinous… err… misdemeanour? I ask, sniffing inconsistency like a keen predator of a novel editor.
Nah mate, he only confessed in his suicide note, that was later, pardon me, I have conflated.
Caldwell, being a constabulary of lesser vocabulary, wrinkles his snout, thinking this explains the smell. Well, it was me, nerves loosening the bowels while I watch my vowels, but that’s the least of my postponed confessions in the present session. Friction of cheeks vibrating. Symptom of the large intestine cogitating. Procrastinating defecating. Indigestible herbage of verbs not conjugating.
At any rate and in any case… Solihull sighs, tiredness in his eyes of a thousand lies given and received, deceived, the dancing veils of half truths that have clouded his ken like a Victorian opium den, –We’ll know soon enough with just a swab off the inside of your gob you old knob, saliva and all that, DNA, the old viral double spiral, Lady Godiva, naked mother lode of genetic code. We’ll see if you’re your brother’s brother, or some other unfortunate nutter.
They lead me to a cell to contain my smell, but I can’t contain myself, I must confess, I tell them I could do with a bath and they all laugh but mine’s the last: a bed for the night’s a blessing not a blight for a ne’er do well. And bedded down, my wires unwound and trailing the ground, without a sound I trial the dial hidden on my chest beneath my vest and all my resplendent gowns and then I’m gone, lost and found, voyaging past and future like neighbouring towns. It’s been a jail without fail for a fair while I see, place of incarceration with cruel reputation for ten generations, serving gruel to the nation’s hapless reckless fools fuelled by booze and fights over floozies. Woozy, is how I feel, contemplating it all, right and wrong, fact and fiction merging under the same grey pall, like that maritime fog outside leaking under the walls. I see men in ancient attire, filthy brigands, despairing paupers on death row, footpads, painted harlots with rosy cheeks, lawyers, drunken fighters with their faces bashed up blue. And here I am observing, from behind iron bars, but more free than any of them dislocated as I am from time and space, behind my dreaming face.
How much time goes by? Day and night merges in the dim cell’s half-light, and I voyage into the future too, see that the jail will be demolished soon, pulled down by vengeful bulldozers under the duress of some edict of progress, and a park replace it, my word, resplendent greenery to make a sap complacent, and a monument to commemorate some poor sod who they murder in custody. Justice, conscience, regret expressed in rhapsody. Wonders will never lapse, nor sins to require forgiveness. And in this, I see I am but a minor player. A soothsayer who came this way, went hither and thither, old sot condemned to live then be forgot forever.
I wake at last, into a mighty hunger, bleary and confused and thinking I am younger until I see my chipped nails and ageing suntanned hands, remembering some random fragments of the lands that I have voyaged through, the many faces and voices surrounding me in momentary cacophony, a symphony of prosody without remedy, dissonance and assonance resolving into a dance of chance dissolving to the here and now and anyhow. I wipe my brow to wish away memory and the sweats of night fevers. Fugitive escapee from my self who hides in traces of every life except his own, that which I would disown as long as I am loaned some other mask and task to call my own.
So before I wake too far, let us make use of the magical power that flowers in the twilight of the waking brain. I reach out my hands and part the iron bars inside my eyes as one would some minor irritations, swatting flies, bending walls and space about my face and ears. Reality tears, thin as gossamer, pliable with suitable mental pliers and shears. He who sleeps steps outside of time, and when returning but by habit discards the hazy power he has lazily acquired to make seconds out of years, and more: as some mighty blacksmith to bend all reality to his will, to call halt to events and re-forge their mettle, making courage out of fears. Pop, slop, burp, slurp, I find myself outside my cell, ready to check-out of my hotel in hell. And there smiling is my reception: a plethora of police dumfounded by my deception.
Sitting and poring over reports and analysis, read-outs and print-outs, contemplating and cogitating to the point of black-outs, reaching for white-out, unable to think out how I have circumvented their designs on me. Solihull, Caldwell and Prezic, and several more in tiers, ten-a-breast in black like crows in rows in repose upon the branches of a tree. All looking not at me, but at a screen and a sheet and what it all means: Wilberforce Fontainbleu, you are free to go.
How so? You mean to say I am not the brother of that lauded and applauded piss-artist after all?
A shaking and scratching of multiple heads. We don’t know what it means, Einstein, except that our data is in error and we need to pull in Learmot himself again. When he gave his own sample, he must have been pulling our ample chains something obscene. If you see him abroad in your begging routines then tell him we need to pick his brains and saliva again. Until then, let’s forget the whole stooshie and keep it schtum between men. You still here? Do we have to tell you again?
So there you have it. Turfed out of a fine hostelry without even a bacon butty to initiate the day, no overtures of apology audible to propitiate my indignation per se. I wander in the fine light rain the same grey streets again, but feel lighter of foot and of brain this time, washed clean of grime and dizzy in the drizzle which urges me forward to some route and pattern whose puzzle remains beyond my conscious grasp. Until as the sun comes out at last, I find myself in a kind of city square and plant my arse on the first clean bench I find there to let myself dry off in clouds of steam rising into the sun’s beams and I close my eyes, seeking after fond encounter again with the recently lost land of dreams. Distant sound of thunder, my hunger shaking me, making me delirious, but nothing serious, I am content to savour the free effects of an entirely legal high, and gaze up occasionally, through flickering lids, at the mothering blue sky.
And now who do you think passes by? But that glamorous lassie, a snooty sight for glad eyes, that I so recently engaged in idle conversation in her gallery by and bye. Striding across the square, not on her venerable vulnerable own of course but with her complete toss of a fashionable boss togged up likewise in co-ordinated designer drag of expensive price tag and fetishised name and all that game. Shame, he’ll probably spoil the quality of our intercourse perforce of his premade preconceptions of my social station. No matter, nothing ventured, nothing for breakfast. I break my silence, and the two spin around, expecting violence perhaps, not just from me but from the various other unemployed now newly standing on corners emerging from the shadows after the recent rain. I fancy that the bloke even fingers a flick-knife in his inside pocket (glimmering above ermine satin lining) and am impressed that his dress stretches to such practical lengths. Tense, until I wave my hand, and the lady recognises me at last and laughs, recalling what a jovial fellow I am, what flowing words spout from between my yellow teeth, and gives a decent hearing to my latest verbal scam.
I have misjudged both him and her. For within a jiff they have me seated in some mid-price canteen with a plate of steaming victuals in front of me and I try not to slurp too much while they pick at their cold salad greens, puzzling at what my every cryptic word means, tossed out between mouthfuls of bacon and sausage, potato scone, black pudding and beans.
Are you really Zennad Learmot’s brother? –the bloke, called Pieter enquires.
Shoosh, I say, not really, or to be precise, on this issue I am now entirely confused. The police in whose custody I have just finished languishing for days, convinced me that to say so would be a very bad thing, he being a bad bloke. But then, dispelling my fears, their scientific tests by which they put much stall, have firmly convinced them that I could not under any circumstances be Ithir Learmot at all.
And what do you think? –asks the girl, earnestly, called Cassy, Who do you think you are?
I am uncertain, truth be stated. But some of what they related to me of Ithir disturbed me greatly, rang more than a comfortable number of uncomfortable bells. But tell you what, though my stomach swells I’m still not sated, any chance you could get the waitress to have this plateful reinstated?
Waitress! –Pieter shouts with the unexpected confidence of a streetwise lout, attracting the ire of others seated roundabout. Sounds like you have amnesia, my friend. Did you bump your head or over-imbibe paint stripper as a nipper or at some point in the recent past by any chance?
I know not, but sense and suspect that Zennad Learmot knows some useful fragments of this cryptic plot. I’d swear he waved at me from his yacht shortly after last we three met, a salutation more respectful I wager than he often reserves for just a down-and-out old sot watching from the quayside.
He recognised his own likeness you mean? –His semblance, your resemblance?
Or his sibling… troubling, trembling. No trifling matter, when your twin is mad as a hatter, an escapee from the loony bin. Rifling through his grey matter to find a way to put a quick distance between me and him.
Not so! –Cassy exclaims, strange triumph in her eyes, For in a few days he has another exhibition in a rival gallery already rallying an audience, sworn rivals of our good selves, a few miles west of here. He kept this one quiet, but it sounds like a riot.
I devoutly thought west of here held nothing but water, Davy Jones’ Locker, my memory retains no name for there but Neptune’s domain, excuse me if it ought to…
Ahh, then you’ve not been in Industria long, friend, or your memory loss is more extensive than my hair loss… Pieter laughs good naturedly, for these steep streets and antiquated quays are but the ancient and smaller part of a vast diaspora of mud flats around the cliffs from here, which stretch out towards the setting sun, where great ships are still built and welder’s torches burn.
Here, Cassy says, fishing in her pocket to retrieve a writhing glossy fish, a leaflet, one of just three left, of boastful superlatives and other advertising pish, declaring Zennad the greatest contemporary painter of his age, nay, a sage of visual prophecy to topple the current mediocracy, to coin a well-aimed phrase I bet they wish they’d thought of, but they’re not half as good as me, hooligan of neologisms wasted on the begging trade. A tirade of brag, interspersed with photographs of two paintings and one of his self-important face, an expression I long devoutly to replace. At the Anchor Gallery at nineteen hundred hours in shirts and ties, canapés, vol-au-vents, petit fours, crap crêpes and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
The man’s a wanker. From this firm conviction I will not be swerved. But too much rancour’s apt to disturb the stomach at this early hour, so let’s leave the knave inside his ivory tower of the mind where we can find him later, the great masturbator. Coffee arrives and I contrive to smile, swallow back my bile and share small talk with my kind benefactors who ask me questions dazzled by my bohemian lifestyle:
Oh how can it be that you escape employment and attain enjoyment consistently, constantly, so fancy-free?
Come, come, don’t look so glum, you talk out of your bum surely, I reek like a lum and kip in tips, sipping nips of industrial-strength booze. Surely that’s no ruse to outwit the glittering lifestyle of gurus such as you? I pay a price to escape the vice of wealth which makes you slaves, measured in my dirty fingers and malnourished gums. Your fears are only phantoms of humiliation and diminution, mere mental irritations, while mine are the urgent peril of whether I shall eat or starve, find a dry bed or writhe in rheumatic damp and chill. My vocation has the power to kill, while yours just to break your will. And there’s the irony perhaps, the grain of wisdom in your effete longing after what heroics you hallucinate in my wretched state. My will is honed and validated daily by the indomitable deathly power it opposes, while yours languishes, soft, unkempt, amid a bed of roses.
We salute you, Ithir, or whatever name you wish to take, for sharing with us your morning break. Your eloquence with words makes all our verbosity seem dull and brown as turds. Fear not on account of your unwashed status. To you we open our hearts and close our noses. It is a triumph of our will to pay this bill and your departure saddens us at the prospect of a long hiatus without your wisdom, your warming air, your cerebral conflatus.
So it’s done. I shake hands and wave my goodbye thanks. That girl’s revealing dress is surely fuel for half a dozen wanks, should my memory and strength be willing now the flesh be weak. Streets open up before me, and my hand grips a little sketch Cassy and Pieter drew me, to guide me to the Industria docks. Overhead, flocks of geese fly south and the few trees I pass throw leaves down at me like lover’s notes. All orange and gold colours, the wind turning cold, autumn murmurs and whispers everywhere, building its insistent insidious argument towards a mighty declamation of wind and fog and rain, a veritable roar to settle up the score with spring and summer.
I walk and walk again until the narrow streets drive me round the bend, quite literally and viscerally, as passing around the base of a headland I am at last released and unleashed into a broader vista. Hey mister! –Croaks a nearby voice and I am amazed that anyone believes I possess the wealth of choice to throw them coppers. Then I realise, tears in my eyes of gratitude, that my breakfast hosts have gifted me a new jacket from off their shoulders, making me look bolder and with attitude, perhaps the means and latitude to attend tomorrow’s vernissage, that’s a Private View, to me and you.
What a vast landscape unfolds before me now, of rusty girdered cranes, of rails and trains, of flat scattered bodies of water stretching to the sea-filled horizon, where steel and iron clang and stammer as ships are built up from scaffold. Tiny figures flicking to and fro, lit orange and red by the frequent glow of oxyacetylene torch and glancing hammer blow. I walk on for hours into the heart of it, the heat and beat of it, passing clanking goods trains and old canals whose cobbled walkways slither hither and thither with moss, the cries growing louder of men at work shouting one to the other from derricks and gantries and gangways and wheelhouses, edifices of riveted steel plates surging and curving, towering and glowering around me and over me.
A relict, a prelate, old derelict entering a derelict sector, with a predilection for good diction and prediction, I rest at last, on an old rusting capstan still twined with frayed ropes and threadbare hopes and consult my makeshift map, a folded square of tat, not much to guide me or make sense of where I’m at. My fingers trace the ink lines like vines eagerly searching for bowers to bear fruit, when a near voice sounds at my oxter, making me jump like a toaster: Are you lost or in doubt, doubting Thomas as I make you out?
What? I spin and turn about, giddy as sin, fractious, anxious not to let this intimate voice raid the sanctum of my cerebrum, hectoring like plankton unstoppably microscopically vectored to in-swim. What did you call me? I find myself facing an old hag, whether bag lady, destitute or prostitute or inmate of an institute I dare not hasten resolutely to avow.
Thomas! –She laughs with open mouth and gaps in blackened teeth, an exotic dancer of the heath no doubt by moonlight when nowt’s about, a witch I mean, clean off her trolley, old dolly with no lolly, dressed in rags. She takes my hand in hers and starts to read it like a book, lifeline, deathline, every clammy cleft and fissure, cranny, crimp and nook. I look around, expecting to spy her pimp then finding none turn to contemplate her fanny, and my cock which needs a sook. But no, that thought’s all rotten, misbegotten and as sordid as the actions such sordid words denote. Christ, for all I can tell, she might be a bloke, a tranny. Best play canny. My name’s not Thomas, madam, you are sore mistook.
Bollocks, Thomas, quit babbling like a brook. I knew you straight off from a distance as I saw you recently in a dream. You are ancient and reincarnate, come by this way again to test the ways of wayward men.
Come again? Queen of rubbish, you dazzle me with your compendium of impudence, your hot air hotter than the synchronised flatulence of ten fat men.
Ah! Haha! How sweet to hear your vile entreaties of abuse break loose again!
Again? Again? I beg you please don’t take advantage of my intermittent amnesia. I entreat you, if it please you, I beseech you, to leave that topic well alone and tell me only truthfully if we’ve ever met before.
Not in this life, then, if answer that I must. But trust me, take it as a primer from one old timer to another, brother, you are True Thomas The Rhymer.
Confused, upright, twisting to go and escape her entwining arms like ivy, these last words make me pause strangely instead, as if I were dead and she picking wildflowers from my grave. All energy leaves me for a second and I slump back down and she takes a place beside me and we both fall still, gazing outwards to the wave-frosted seas and distant trees. Years pass over me, blowing fleetingly, as migrating birds and the sun-dappled tides of falling leaves, shadows of clouds that have passed over centuries of days. And for a second, I lose my place in the order of things, then grasp it more deeply, as a beach shelving steeply at my feet gives way to depths too dark and out of reach to contemplate without barbiturates. Who am I really? Or any of us, when these momentary faces, customary pleasantries, as curtains: time takes and pulls away? The thought makes me dizzy, as if the ground of all the world were not land at all, but sudden-turned to glassy ocean smoothed flat by some chill and unfamiliar hand, mirrors on which I dare not walk for fear that like ice they’d crack and let me fall.
I remember so little… I say quietly at last. And supposing this the case, what purpose can it serve that man should live and live again?
The witch takes my hand and smiles a small flicker of solace on her lips like the first flame on dried tinder. Live well, is the only answer to that ancient riddle, press on and trust that the great prize before us is great indeed, and who could doubt that who looks about and sees the wonder of creation? What task and goal except a glorious one could summon up such power and invention, mobilise so much beauty and organisation to its cause? Only a fool would hope to meet God. Better to tremble at the thought of being in the presence of such genius and savagery, judging by the evidence he leaves around us. It is enough to be part of it, joy enough and terror enough.
Terror? Savagery?
As the eagle tears out the heart of the dove, as the playing child drowns in a summer riptide, the swollen river plummets over misting cliffs, stars explode and galaxies collide. The scale is too vast to support significance or hierarchy. No conscience could sanction it, nor strong man bear its load.
You are as mad as I am, clearly. I sigh, shall we go?
Where, dare I know? The witch laughs, just where does your little map lead I wonder, heaven, purgatory or that other place below?
Nothing so grand, I say, unfolding it again from my hand. To an art gallery where my scoundrel brother is said to be scheduled to appear, tomorrow or the next day. My name really is not Thomas by the way, but you can call me anything you wish and regale me further with your tales although I think them wind and pish, while we amble there together. One need not be erudite, to see that you are no urbanite with the packed diary of a socialite, but indigent and desolate and rather lonely and eager for respite, a condition I can understand, as well I might. What name shall I call you by?
Mary… she says quietly, falling in at my side to match my stride. Scary Mary to the local youths who uncouthly abuse me for my toothless looks. Fools dodging schools, they should all go read books if they want to escape this hellish nook, instead of honing the skills of torturers. Evening is coming on now, and the rain which has held off the last hour or so out of decency, is now rearing up to strike in sunset clouds of purple, black and blue. A breeze lifts and I fancy we shall be soaked as seals in another mile or two.
Och, tut tut, they’re only children… I sigh, they often hassle me too, my solemn advice would be to kill some of them with bricks, if I were you.
She chortles and we enter some dingy streets of partially inhabited façades, some by ivy and moss and weeds, others by people with glowing lamps and window frames. Cobbles beneath our feet are ruptured and fissured with green veins of decay, that like panicking fever seem ever about to overwhelm the eye and win the day. Who was this Thomas then? Some ancient figure, some hero of yesterday?
You do not know the fairy stories, the children’s rhymes? But if you have forgotten even your own childhood that need not be such a surprise I suppose. He lived eight centuries ago, a writer, a soothsayer who predicted many things. Future battles, the deaths of kings, that London will sink beneath the waves. People said that the fairies gave him his powers in return for the dangerous condition that he must never tell a lie, and neither did he until the day he… I nearly said died. But of course they say he never died, he simply went away one day, abandoned the castle where he lived, when the fairies sent him a sign.
What sign? And what on earth were fairies anyway? –Things so ludicrous that they’ve packed their bags and fled our world because educated people are no longer able to contain such nonsense in their heads?
Ahh… Scary Mary laughs an old dry croak. As if the capacity of human heads for nonsense were in any way limited, as if they haven’t established that with gusto over recent history. Fairies will be aliens now, and ghosts or something else in centuries hence. You protest too much! You’re fooling no one! Tell me honestly, that you have never seen into the future or witnessed passing legions of the dead, felt the very ground shaking where they tread. Tell me that, as you plead anonymous, then I will believe that you are not True Thomas.
The rain has come on now, in huge fat drops, and Mary leads by the arm through some ruined doorway into the shell of a church, the interior piled high with the rubble of its own demise. Like the scene of a sacking or bombing in some chapter of history which must have passed me by. Here, I hide here often, she says, when the rain is heavy or the tide is high, my bread unleavened or the end is nigh.
We walk into the centre of this dismal stage set, surrounded by high ghostly shards of ecclesiastic vault and groin disassembling in the grey mist of rain. What? You talk in riddles… I whisper as she ushers me through a ragged entrance into a cave of piled rubble at the centre of all this, and kneeling down beside her as we kiss, she puts a hand inside my shirt, caressing my nipples until she finds… the dial, and cries out, whether in delight or fright I can’t decide.
‘Tis just like my dream, She wonders wide-eyed in the half-dark, and the wires too trailed down your sleeve. Oh do not leave tonight but stay and show me pictures of the worlds that you have viewed through your strange device. Show me the future of mankind freed of sin and vice. Show me nobility and hope, there’s a nice boy, now.
This is no toy, you silly cow. If I show you your own future, your death, have you any idea how that would send you potty? And the future of humankind, like its past, is one fraught with pointless slaughter. If you were my daughter, I would strike you blind before I would annihilate your mind and brain with the strain of what you’d find there.
Aha! Scary Mary chuckles, placing her old claw hand around my whitened knuckles. So now at last we find an answer, a reason for your loss of recollection. You are a victim it seems of your own contraption. You could not bear the burden of the future any better than I, hence this suture. Her fingers have found the wound on the back of my head, the same one the police found so stimulating. Irritating. And is amnesia so bad? She croons more softly. It was the greatest prize, the Greeks and Romans believed, given to the good at the end of their virtuous lives beyond the fields of Elysium. Wisdom in that you see. Forgetfulness meaning death and birth, is the price we pay for immortality.
And yet, only recollection can be our salvation, our waking up. I sit upright, spurred on by a new realisation. I must wake up and remember. We must all wake up and see ourselves in time, as the watchful head of some great multi-bodied creature rousing, rising from the slime of millennia of grime and crime. But Mary has her hands on my shoulder dragging me down and slumber comes heavy, dancing on my twitching eyelids and the aching in my rheumatic cracking bones, contracting sinews and muscles. No need for tussle, just give in, sleep is no sin but the beginning of all healing and erudition, an appointment with the divine intermission, quenching of ephemeral ambition. The music of rain invades my brain in a grand serenade, a parade of fading images falling as leaves from trees, see-sawing and gnawing on the breeze, fleeing all light and sound approaching the ground, and longing, longing for the shade.
Woken the next day, the air has been washed fresh by the torrents from heaven. I poke my head out of my bomb-crater midden and enjoy the new sun on my face and my place beneath the soaring blue sky. And asking the perennial question ‘who am I?’ this time there are suddenly fragments of answers, jigsaw pieces, shards and slivers tumbling in. I struggle to hold them all at bay, all out of order, a house of cards, ill-fated, images of murder, mayhem and dismay. I killed someone once, an innocent man. The contraption on my chest was once connected to some larger apparatus of which I was master. The power overthrew my reason, made me commit treason against the natural scheme of things, bringing… bringing, all this long slow disastrous season. I clutch an autumn leaf in my hand, borne to me magically by an obliging wind. Yellow, red, pink at the edges, like the burned paper of sheets I once held in my hand, destroying instructions on how to create the monster that I am. The fall of man is as the fall of God, trying to forget his own power, seeking hopelessly some hiding place, some bower in Eden beneath which to bury the memory of a deed. Clang, clang, The Big Bang. The bell tolls for thee. The black dog of guilt will dig it all up, no fear, sooner or later, there will be tears.
In gratitude for the dubious favour of a glimmer of self-knowledge, I turn my dial as I gaze at the sky and tell Mary what I see there, hearing her murmur and wake and take my hand. High above where only aeroplanes traverse the sky, there will in future be canals made of glass or some other material or miracle we lack the current words to grasp. I see what look like slow boats moving in these arteries, although their speeds must in truth be fast, our whole atmosphere one vast net of these conduits converging at vertical roots which dangle from the clouds down to hubs where people wait to be fired up like grapeshot or seed. No war and disagreement only this glorious aerial interconnection as the canals and folds of some ethereal brain…
But what? She is strangely silent, and disengaging my wires from the stones in which they have entwined all night I find that a shaft of slanting morning light has penetrated our den to illuminate a state of things beyond my ken. I see now to my dismay that she is only bones. A skull, femur, tibia, claw of hands clutching faded old fabric shawl wrapped around her. Some fragments of hair still blowing in the air, white as thread, one of the dead, a victim of whatever horror once happened here. War refugees fleeing to a sanctuary which proved fleeting. I hear the bleating of the last cries of their children, then tears in my eyes, cover my ears, tear at the dial on my chest and stand to leave, swaying, bereaved and grieving for the invisible years like glass through which I have unwittingly peered. My friend cannot help me any longer, nor I help her or ever change her fate, and alone again as ever, I must go on.
Wounded, haunted, hunted by all the emotion that I flee, I limp again onto the road, my heart sagging from its load of human sentiment and hope. My little map still guides me. As I walk west again along the canalside paths, I find one road rises rapidly and the more I follow it, climbing, I get out of breath, until looking back I can see the waterways below me and the ruined church some way off behind. The hill rises higher still as I go on, until I reach the end of its irrational and unexpected topography. I stand at the edge of a cliff, the ramp to the apex of a vast slag heap of shale from where I ogle at the scale of everything around me, astounding me: the shipyards and the furnaces. The blue sky above growing pale again already, shrouding all too soon in the pall of hazy smoke from all this toil and spoil. Curling waterways surround me as the coils of some vast serpent within whose constricting embrace I am embroiled. A dead end, no easy way back down to ground, I retrace my steps a little then flounder, sliding down some dusty rampart like a refuse chute, vanishing in clouds that choke my lungs, until at the long-awaited bottom, I stand up shaking, emerging like a clown, caked white from head to foot with pink holes for startled eyes, a pretty sight to dazzle passers by.
A passing crowd of dockyard workers in blue overalls applaud me as a variety act, a stray minstrel from an impromptu daytime cabaret, and I pick up a nearby bucket to use as a makeshift bowler hat then take my bow. I grapple in my pockets, my ash-appropriated apparel, looking for my map again, and everybody laughs, thinking this mime is timed for them. I carefully unfold my crock of gold and sit down to interrogate its treasure: some measure of meaning to these streets which delude my feet in ongoing displeasure. There it is, ex marks the spot: Anchor Gallery, emporium of jewellery and fine contemporary painting apt to produce audible awe in educated men and in ladies fits of fainting. Corner of Admiralty Avenue and Tobago Wynd, a voice says not unkindly, head leaning over my shoulder, you’ll get there if you follow this street west for three more miles. He smiles, helping me up. I’ve just finished my shift, could give you a lift that way, if you don’t mind sitting in the back of the truck, seeing as you currently so closely resemble three cubic feet of walking muck.
So I do. So what. A bit of luck at last. Thank fuck.
Jump up. What’s up then? He shouts over his shoulder as he drives, as if such a mode of conversation is normal where he comes from, communicating from astride steel beams a hundred feet apart. What is this lark then? What brings you to these parts and what draws you to an appointment with the arts? You don’t look like the pretentious type I have to say, more the kind for a pie and a pint washed down with some vigorous swearing and a manly game of darts and several loud ingratiating farts.
Nonsense, I laugh, appearances can be deceptive and human beings seldom selective or receptive I find to those whose characters run contrary to all the stereotypes they keep constantly in mind. As you’ll be gathering any minute now, I have the vocabulary of an educated genius and the verbal wherewithal to deploy it any time and place with reckless haste any old how. Silly old cow! I shout aloud to a wobbling hobbling old woman my chauffeur has just narrowly missed mowing down, so sideswiped and blindsided is he by my dazzling diction and grammatical know-how. In summary, I may look like a down-and-out, but in fact I am an intellectual lout, unplugged and disconnected from all the usual rules of etiquette, more inclined to cross my eyes and dot my teas than watch my peas and queues. A ruse, you see, this disguise, to misdirect the eyes, do you not surmise?
Bloomin eck, mate, you’re a flaming nutter, I don’t want no trouble mind, I’ve got no quibble with your kind. I’ll just drop you off at the next available corner where you can reacquaint yourself with the gutter. Sorry, but I like to run a decent law-abiding lorry. Just pose as a ball of dirt again and the next refuse van comes by might take you to a quarry.
No matter, I retort as a last resort, truth be told I was already growing weary of your patter. It would have been football next then doubtless your unsavoury views on immigration, how to save free kicks and this drowning nation by enlistment in The Front, The League, and stave off inundation by the barbarian delegation. Frankly I’m proud to be mad, black or queer, or whatever hallucinated terror you mistake me for in error, to get me out of here. What’s dirtier, my face or your mind? And what place shall I find more of my kind? Not this planet, and not this time. The verbally flamboyant were long since deported, out of sight and out of mind.
No matter indeed, for I surmise my trusty map has failed me not, and my destination requires a walk of just one more block. Thar she blows, the Anchor Gallery, an establishment redolent of outlandish blandishments, manned already I see through its glowing window display, by a regiment of anal artisanal aficionados, connoisseurs, poseurs and raconteurs. Mine’s a glass of Chardonnay, what’s yours? All Armani suits and champagne flutes, silly shirts and giggling flirts. Laughter in bacchanalian baritones and soprano semi-quavers. Oh do come in, don’t stand there, don’t waver, don’t dither, come forth, come hither. A drooping banner all aquiver, substantial signage to declare that Zennad Learmot is here, there and everywhere, with even a photo of his veritable visage to fix passers-by with his studiedly difficult and complicated stare, those brooding eyes to vex and hex and sex and hypnotise. Strong spirits on hand to retrieve the swooning from the land of sighs.
I’m looking all about to find my brother, like a wolf in the henhouse sniffing out the greatest concentrations of fluttering feathers, I find instead the gallery owners who introduce themselves as Eustace and Polly, he somewhat feminine in lace silk curtains, she somewhat macho in braces and Doc Martens, a gender juxtaposition I ponder abstractedly while I help myself to nachos. Their own dress so laissez-faire that they seem to take my sartorial degradation as symptomatic of a new one-man movement of vagrant street art with attitude and court me for a platitude on the painting of the great Zennad. I am unable to resist, while flicking olives with my wrist and other tricks like firing cocktail sticks across the room, to resume my interior monologue, externalised temporarily for the masses, on the subject of my sibling, whilst endeavouring to knock back several wineglasses without dribbling.
Learmot, I would say, in his infinite resistance to definitive definition, is loath to give ammunition to the crass critic and the avid admirer alike, by riding on a trike across the paint-splattered canvas of his reputation with a few careless words tossed over the dyke. Of course I’m mixing metaphors, splitting infinitives, and quoting clichés like there’s no tomorrow, but it would be a matter of sorrow were the man to unmuddy the waters of his complex allegories and thereby to stand naked before you, so it falls to pseuds like me to do it for him. I’d say his work is lewd, crude, food for thought of a kind best served as antipasti rather than a main, which is to say it is not altogether plain nor altogether good nor wholesome, indeed at times it’s rather nasty. Take this one here for instance… I wave my hand and part the retinue, leaving me feeling somewhat lonesome as I continue, I’d say that in this one he has nothing at all to say, but passed a day contriving a whimsical puzzle to keep your muddled brains at bay. But while he may be glib and taciturn, recalcitrant and intransigent, I though apparently indigent, have much to say to him… and come to think about it, I’ve come all this way to cross swords with the master. Where is he hiding amongst you, the bastard?
But… but… says Polly, unable to restrain her giggling as if my lecture has been an entertaining interlude of folly and whimsy instead of my burning of the widespread flimsy drapes of blindness, a kindness that I’m only slightly tipsy. You’ve just missed him. He breezed out an hour ago to return to his ship for a good night’s kip before ploughing the ocean’s waves in coming days. His autumn tour advances as the seasons of the year. Oceania beckons, so up and off he must be out of here.
No! I clench my fist and buttocks, close to tears. He eludes me again, this could go on for years. Can you tell me where the brigand moors his frigate, rests his vessel, parks his barque, corrals his coracle?
What do you think, oracle? –Eustace leers laconically. The nearest pier to wherever he can bank his anchor, just like parking a motor car, ironically, which is to say: not far, basically. Nine hundred yards straight out that door ajar past the whisky warehouse and the Fishermen’s Mission.
Don’t be a wanker. No need for rancour regards my stupidity at which you’re hinting. Thank you. There now follows a short interlude of sprinting.
*
I find Zennad’s yacht down at the dilapidated dockside without too much trouble. As if contained in a bubble I slither my way on board past his bodyguards using a subtle mixture of blackmail threats and physical violence. Met with silence. They’re black-suited gangsters’ men who Zennad likes to surround himself with for reasons of glamour, clamour, carefully releasing spurious stories to the press every six months about how their bosses are threatening to kill him for unpaid debts and bets. These play almost as well to the adulating millions as his invented mental health issues, stories of which I find particularly offensive, given that I am, in the current parlance, the real deal in that regard. I have read Zennad’s stories in newspapers I’ve pulled from bins, wrapped my feet in and stashed under my head as pillows for my cardboard bed. I fell hard after my diagnosis with schizophrenia, I seem to have been remembering recently. But whether before or after my botched attempts at self-trepanning and putting a bullet through my head, I am more hazy on.
I reach his cabin and it seems confusingly empty until I turn and face its full-length mirror, and I see him there disguised as a tramp. Still rhyming all the time, brother? –He drolls. Come to treat me to some couplets and sonnets in Iambic Pentameter, have you? Or is all this claptrap rap? Chap chap (he taps his head in the age-old gesture) Just what part of the brain did you mess with to start all that stuff up? Pass over that cup, and I’ll pour you a brandy. Handy, a drinks cabinet cabin, wouldn’t you say?
Just dandy. I sit down at his elaborate antique table and he joins me.
And the time travelling, he sniggers, how’s that going? You still got the wires down your sleeve and the dial on your chest? Where you been to recently? Thirteenth century France or the Yucatan meteor strike?
I can only go where people were, I tell him quietly, gritting my teeth. There were no people around in the time of the dinosaurs. I told you, it’s like hypnotic regression, past lives. I can go back down the chain of births and deaths, but only so far.
And forward? Zennad laughs, indulging me, not believing a word, the turd. You’ve been to the future too, right? That’s what you told me last time, that night…
I nod, slowly and silently, starting to shake violently, little splashes of brandy spilling down my sleeve like blood.
And that’s when you really dropped the ball I recall. Just what could you see there, dude?
The w-w-worst thing imaginable… I stutter and splutter into a spasmodic cough, rough, hoarse.
Ahh, I see… your own death I suppose. Hardly a surprise, we’ve all got to go you know. He grabs a Turkish rug from an ebony chest and wraps it around my shoulders to warm me up and stop my shivering and leads me over to the cabin window, from where we both look out at the sea, the patterns of waves, opalescent, transcendent, nascent.
No… I manage, pulling myself together, sipping the drink, trying to remember, trying to think. That was the first time, I should have left it at that. But I took matters into my own hands, killed the man who was going to drive the van that ran me over. Would have run me over. Tenses, damn, so hard.
Which is why you always talk in the present tense now I suppose, as well as rhyme, no crime, one word’s as good as another. But murder, are you serious, brother? And why tell me now anyhow?
Murder’s the least of it. Causality, casualty. The future changed, I changed it. The world ended. Will end… if I don’t die, didn’t die as planned. The butterfly’s wings, changing things with each tiny beat of its tiny wings.
Hence the gun, and the bullet through the head. Zennad nods sagely now, accepting, philosophically. It’s a pity you botched it really, isn’t it, sunshine?
Did I? Or am I, perhaps, I sometimes wonder, are we, could we be, already dead?
It’s always there as an existential possibility, granted, he muses, eyes to the ceiling, –even without resort to amateur ballistics and supernatural statistics. But you’re a whacko, Ither, out of your box, brother, we both know that as well as we knew our own mother. And while we’re on weird thoughts, here’s another: what is a twin sibling anyhow but the ultimate, organic, personified rhyme?
I’m nodding back at him, agreeing, lifting my eyes, and he’s reaching out his hands to embrace my shoulders as I lift mine, to his neck. An embrace, he thinks, but his face now, stunned, chokes, turning slowly blue as I throttle and throttle. Horrible sounds of diphthong and glottal. He catches the bottle, the brandy with his flailing hand, I duck, luck, and it lands against the mirror. Shiver, shuddering of a whole world cast asunder. Thunder. Silver light forever, all tumbling down to the ground, the fragments resounding, surrounding, astounding. Turn around to the glittering sea and run, run like a river.
The thugs let me out without a whisper. Just another one of Zennad’s eccentric excursions, down the gangplank and out to the dirty-black town. Maybe he goes out some nights as a woman, a master of disguises. No prizes for guessing how he gets his kicks and inspiration, undressing all the repressed with his eyes, as he passes them, wearing dark glasses. Sizing them up for a canvas. From the hull, one particularly dull-witted henchman hails me: Still sailing tonight boss? No loss, the loss of my brother. But it hadn’t crossed my mind that I could steal his identity. Heaven sent, if I meant to. If I wanted to.
*
So the plan is laid, and slept on seems almost sane. Soaked by overnight rain and kip in a skip placed next to a drain, I court sympathy at the rear door of a charity shop with my best puppy eyes and emerge some moments later with a whole new attire: smart jacket and trousers not quite completely ill-fitting and a fresh shirt and tie only torn and stained in places hidden from the eye. I stroll back to the Anchor Gallery with growing confidence in every gliding stride, borne up and inspired by my sartorial magnificence to impending acts of verbal munificence, eloquence and sleight-of-hand too quick for the eye or the ear or whatever orifice one’s audience cares to bring to bear. People turn and stare as I pass, an ass come back as a messiah. A liar? But True Thomas would fail at any such endeavour. Therefore some deeper truth must here be being divined, I devoutly opine. I vow to sever any links with my recent past, and emerge resplendent, should anybody ask, not as Ithir but as Zennad, artist and entrepreneur, and catching a glimpse of myself in a passing shop window, pause and decide to go in there where they shall cut short my hair.
Have you had any holidays yet? –Asks the charming young lady who shampoos my head, along with penetrating questions like: Have you always had a beard? In return I regale her with verbal virtuosity for ten minutes as she crops my wig into the debris around my chair, portraying myself with such skill as a freewheeling divorcee millionaire that she is too much in a tiz to respond as I whiz out the door without paying at the conclusion of the procedure. Such behaviour is permissible for sheep, and I forego her steep rates in the hope that she may choose to weave my famous and wealthy plaits into something useful to stave off the winter for a family of three. Now I am free, and several grammes if not a kilogramme lighter. Next time I’ll invite her to my luxury yacht on the seven seas.
And so I breeze into the gallery disguised as my brother and announce my intention to follow my recent sell-out exhibition with another. Aghast, Polly and Eustace smother me with kisses while I grasp their asses, both of them so as not to be deemed sexist, or should an unknown observer exist and insist to my face; as if I’ve just misplaced my glasses. It’s off to the adjoining studio at once with sleeves rolled up and canvases stretched like groaning victims on the rack, and Polly dashing out to buy more paint waving and winking saying she’ll just be right back. Eustace collapses in a chair and smokes a Gauloise in a state of heady ecstasy as I unfold my troubled psyche in a frenzy onto the easel in front of me. Surprising myself as to how much I remember of all the faces and places I’ve seen in recent days: I watch them all emerge transfigured, transplanted, revealed in different ways for the hidden spirit within them peeled like fruit then pealed out like bells, announcing their taste, their texture, their sound and smells. Belles, beaus and portmanteaus at work, in action and in sweet repose, all the panoply of human kind engaged in financial monopoly, enrichment, enslavement, or decline. I pluck it, crush it, and distil it into wine.
But look, this can’t be me this thing, these graceful curves and skilful lines so unrehearsed but just right each time. The colours sing. It’s as if I’m just a twit, a conduit, for some force unearthly or divine brought to earth through the lightning rod of my current state of possession, obsession. The paint moves as if it is blood from my very veins, the canvas flexes like human flesh, beating, responding to the touch in a way too familiar. I lean a finished canvas on a pillar, and start straight off upon another then another. Damn that brother of mine, this stuff is easy, occult transgression, allowing demons intercession. I’ll teach the twat a timely lesson.
This new work, Eustace groans with hand to temple, it’s the best yet, vigorous and tempestuous, in fact I may be getting an erection.
No problem, I say sportingly over my shoulder, the toilet’s just over there and I’ll hold the fort while you give that some attention. Tension, pent up for weeks it seems in my body like a spring, is easing now in this flood of inspiration and the consolation that it brings. I didn’t know I could even paint, where do these skills come from? –I find myself whispering just as Polly returns and in shame my cheek burns.
Astounding, astounding… she pouts, that in these bouts you seem so returned to a naked beginning, devoid of self-belief and giving birth to yourself again, phoenix-like from the ashes. She bats her lashes, and I contemplate the stash of cash they’ll give me when I’ve lashed fifteen of these fuckers to the mast. What a blast.
But now you ask… I say, are you telling me I’ve expressed sentiments like this before?
Oh yes, she says, impressed, every time as if you’ve forgotten all ability, and reeling in incredulity at your own pictorial virtuosity. Just as Rilke said about remaining an eternal beginner, or Ernst said of a painter never finding himself, as Picasso said of how painting must regain the eyes of innocence, or Blake of course who thought himself a fake dictated to by intercourse with an angel with unusual forehead muscles…and what was that other quote… from that bloke in the bowler hat from Brussels?
I stand back and survey my own efforts and see dockworkers straining shoulders and the curving hulls of ships all knitted into quips of colour and lines entwined like cosmic decoration, a constellation of human labour forged into a visual broach, encroaching… I find my head swimming and my legs growing weak until with the slightest tweak I am tumbling and gone over like the Tower of Babel, unable to resist gravity’s insistence, dropping my sable, hitting my head off the corner of a table…
I wake sweetly cradled between Polly’s bobbing breasts while Eustace takes off my socks to massage my feet in some misremembered fragment of First-Aid, bringing my eyes to tears, releasing smelling salts from beneath my seasoned socks which could put him out for years, when calling out an ambulance would be less of a performance, a paramedic less of a headache. Have I only been out for seconds? The telephone is ringing and when Eustace goes to get it I get a sinking feeling reconstructing the tirade I soon surmise his ear is getting. What a pity when I was enjoying such a rest between Miss Polly’s breasts, now starting pitching, heaving, as a mighty galleon setting out on stormy seas. The man on the other end of that phone, you see it seems, is me, in a manner of speaking. And Eustace’s voice is squeaking now, useless to explain the contrary information leaking, inundating his overloading brain. But how can this be? I thought I’d smothered my brother or put him in intensive care, at least partially succeeded in getting him out my hair. Not fair, not fair.
Oh misery. I am unaware how he has pulled off this latest escapologist’s mystery, the logistics of mesmerising mist by which he has wriggled out of such a twist, Houdini-like eluding my grasping angry fist. But clearly the time has come, dear brother, for one magic trick to be mirrored by another. It’s up and away, with a leap and a push and shove, still staggering, out through the first window I can get to without a set to, and into the thrilling freedom that I love. Sprinting down the street with my clothes still dripping with paint like blood on a murderer’s mitts, racing like steeplechasing, running like the shits. Warehouses and street after street speed by me, breathless I look back, expecting pursuers to defy me. I race towards the quayside, spotting the sails of that blackguard’s ship but what’s this? His boat is sailing off, and on the bridge I see some shady figure wrapped in blankets resembling he, with a telephone to his ear and waving fondly, fondly ridiculing me. Desperate, I glance about and untie some unlikely skiff to jump aboard and before I’ve thought things even half-way through I’m rowing and floating, boating while Zennad’s gloating, sailing out into the blue. And by the time I weigh the oars exhausted, an hour hence, I’m nowhere, drifting out into the estuary, pulled by mysterious tides, along for the ride, nowhere to hide from the sun up above or all the storms to come. But at least the land is lost behind me and my pursuers overcome. Whatever. Whatever I have done is done.
~