The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  Also by Douglas Thompson from Elsewhen Press

  Entanglement

  Elsewhen Press

  The Rhymer, an Heredyssey

  First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2014

  An imprint of Alnpete Limited

  Copyright © Douglas Thompson, 2014. All rights reserved

  The right of Douglas Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, magical, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Part of Part One appeared as Heredyssey in Sein Und Werden Magazine Summer 2013 ‘Not Quite Human’ issue; and part of Part Two appeared as The Rhymer in Ambit Magazine Issue 213, July 2013. Rupert the Bear is a trademark of Express Newspapers; National Trust is a trademark of The National Trust (Enterprises) Ltd. Use of trademarks has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by the trademark owners. The passage quoted in Part Three is from The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1903.

  Illustrations © Alison Buck, 2014. All rights reserved

  Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

  www.elsewhen.co.uk

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-908168-41-2 Print edition

  ISBN 978-1-908168-51-1 eBook edition

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

  Converted to eBook format by Elsewhen Press

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, galleries and events are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, venues, places or people (living, dead or regressed) is purely coincidental.

  Introduction by Rachel Kendall

  Part One ~ Suburbia

  Part Two ~ Industria

  Part Three ~ Oceania

  Part Four ~ Sylvia

  Part Five ~ Urbis

  Acknowledgements

  For Rachel Kendall

  In memory of Joel Lane (1963-2013)

  the greatest of all of us.

  When Douglas Thompson submitted the first part of The Rhymer (titled Heredyssey) to Sein und Werden it made me feel a little bit giddy. I’d published his work in previous issues and was a big fan of this self-labelled Glasgow-surrealist but here was a story unlike anything I had read before. In the best possible way. Here was an excerpt, workable as a stand-alone piece, written almost entirely in verse. Obviously Thompson is a risk-taker, a dare-devil member of the literati, to propose such a feat as this. Should the measurements be out of sync, the angles a bit skewed or the trajectory off course, this could have been disastrous. But Thompson’s risks are calculated. He is a master craftsman, pulling out all the stops with exceptional timing (comic and otherwise).

  When I accepted Heredyssey I told Thompson I would love to read a full-length novel written in the same poetic style. I knew Heredyssey was already a longer piece but when Thompson told me there was a whole novel in the pipeline I was thrilled. Barely a couple of months down the line, Heredyssey, now titled The Rhymer, appeared in my inbox.

  Let me just say, at this point, that Thompson works part-time as an architect (and full-time as a writer if his literary output is anything to go by). This is not something I’m mentioning in passing. To me, architecture is one of those mysterious schools that straddles both science and art, one that demands artistic freedom within the constraints of mathematical equation. Taking much of his influence from the whorls and fronds of nature, the architect can create in months what nature took a billion years or just a few seconds to develop. But whether he is inspired by the crystal or the snowflake the architect must be a methodical, patient perfectionist with a healthy mix of left and right brain activity, someone who can work on the delicate minutiae whilst keeping sight of the bigger picture. And these traits are not limited to Thompson’s day job. I believe he builds his stories in much the same way he plans his physical structures. To Thompson every word, every sentence is significant. He is one of those authors for whom writing is more than just the telling of a good story. It is a finely honed craft. This is true of all his work, not just The Rhymer. Take, for instance, his short story My (Ruined) Father, an immaculately constructed piece of prose that juxtaposes the slow disintegration of a building with the deteriorating health of the narrator’s father.

  ‘I have seen the old photos. My father had a fine face (façade) once, a good (bone) structure, captivating pair of big eyes (windows), and a strong dignified looking mouth (shopfront).’

  Evocative, tender and visual, Thompson’s writing creates feeling in everything, be it natural or man-made. Similarly in The Fallen Woman he creates emotion and intuition in physical constructs, merging the sentient with the composite and turning solid into fluid.

  ‘Look: a falling figure hits the water and half the world collapses inwards. Lurching of heart and lungs. Towerblocks double-over in pain, bridges spin round in half-recognition.’

  Just as Duchamp’s Woman Descending a Staircase was an attempt to portray movement and altered perspectives, Thompson uses rhetoric to expose every point of view, every narrative and every context until characters begin to converge in bas-relief. Because emotions are never just black or white, and personality is not a linear composition, Thompson’s characters are complex and intricate with changing attitudes and inconsistent behaviours. In what may almost be called a study of form, another work by the author – Sylvow – begins with a man taking several photographs of a flower, from every conceivable angle, only to discover that ‘every flower and leaf has turned itself towards him’. In Thompson’s world nothing adheres to the laws of physics, solid floors liquefy, human-machine hybrids emerge and reality and memory distort and converge, and like Escher’s unfathomable stairs and Dali’s melting clocks, The Rhymer is a visual mind-bender, a puzzle to be solved.

  But Thompson never insults his readers’ intelligence by giving the game away. He does drop a few screwy clues here and there and plants some cock-eyed signs to lead us on our merry way, but never does he give us more than he wants to. The fun is in solving the mystery ourselves after all and The Rhymer is a mystery, albeit an existential one. Who is this man, this philosopher-poet who seems to have lost his memory of time and place? Is he a seer? A mad man? He is searching, but for what exactly? Is it love that drives him on? Or the question of self? Or the even bigger question of God? Like a character in a computer game he must find the clues along with us, gaining points with every correct answer and to reach the highest level is to reach enlightenment is to discover who he actually is.

  But is enlightenment reached through affirmation or denial? Is the personality established through a process of building up or cutting down? The Rhymer’s characters wear masks, hide their features and change their appearance in true dream-like form, but do they do so in order to cast doubt or to raise questions? These characters are more than just members of the chorus; they’re part of the vehicle transporting Nadith (let me refer to him thus, to avoid confusion) through time, space and sur-reality.
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  ‘This mask thing is a metaphor of course, but then again it isn’t. I really am a new person every time, made instantly into what the first of my lost audience yearn for. In that sense, this polished metal face is a mirror, dragging everything in from around it, and by the very contours of its features: fluidly distorting.’

  Nadith, then, isn’t just a seer; he’s also a truth-teller. He is the reflection of society’s whims, mankind’s mistakes. He empathises, but he doesn’t attempt to cross any bridges. He teaches through disclosure, yet this is not his calling. He has fallen into the realm of sooth-sayer while all he really wants to do is find his brother and gain some insight into his past.

  Zenir (let us call him) is his brother’s polar opposite. While Nadith, the humble drifter, isn’t always likeable, Zenir is always detestable. Vanity, greed and superficiality are just some of his vices and he is rolling in the excesses of a profitable artistic career. Because of this he always seems to be one furlong, mile or art gallery ahead. And so Nadith chases his brother’s shadow through Suburbia, Industria, Oceania, Sylvia and Urbis where geography and grey matter seem to converge. We see nature encroaching on the concrete jungle in an effort to reclaim its space; we see the prophetic vision of (wo)man-made machines...

  ‘... a carefully substantiated and cross-referenced theory with footnotes, that only dreamt it was a woman, only a pale worm left behind like a thing spilled from an anatomist’s pickling jar, broken on the wheel of learning. And crucified now on the spokes of a bicycle.’

  and the plight of the suburban lawn...

  ‘And in this quiet street we walk through, how all the trees and bushes and hedgerows seem hushed and hunched over like monks in hoods immersed in green hymns, asleep in their pews, the timber fences of suburbia which keep them confined and subdued’.

  ...all, perhaps, sites of longing and mourning for that which Nadith seeks. As a transient, he is the leaf blown this way and that, into the onslaught of traffic, the noise and fury of the material world. He will never fit into their spaces, but that’s okay because he prefers the sky as his roof and the grass as his bed. And so he drifts, from beginning to end, destined perhaps to repeat and repeat ad infinitum.

  Should this book come with a warning? ‘... contains surreal imagery and disturbing verse. May offend.’? I don’t think so. If anything, I think it could prove to be a pleasant surprise for the unsuspecting genre-reader. And it’s not as though this technique has been employed just for a bit of fun. I’m sure it was fun to write, almost as much fun as it is to read, but there’s more to it. Language is a hinge and verse is a lubricant. There’s no easier way to teach and inform someone learning to read than by repetition and rhyme.

  ‘Uncurling, serpent Zenir slithers through the contours of their bowels, lengthening their vowels, promoting their taste for pretension, distancing themselves from each other by claims they can lay to his vision, acquisition in material transposition of the spiritual windows he opens.’

  By the time you reach the end of The Rhymer you still won’t have all the answers, though you’ll be surprised by those you do have. Just as this tale refuses to squeeze into any one genre, so it will baulk at fitting within your expectations. I promise you will want to go back and re-read sections, reacquaint yourselves with characters, re-imagine logistics, and still you won’t know, for sure, who is what or why. And that is how it should be. There are clues to the past and there are hints at the present, but who’s to say if these are dreams, reality, or the ravings of a lunatic. Read it, enjoy it, and when you’ve figured it out, give me a call.

  Rachel Kendall, Jan 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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