The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Obstreperous?

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

  A musician?

  That as well, certainly. A polymath.

  A mathematician?

  A polymathematician then, shall we settle on that?

  Appallingly. Assuredly. It accounts for your extensive education.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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