The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

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

  Other?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Rollover and take it, man, you’re a wino, a dino, supplanted, superseded, succeeded by a weed in tweed, who has all that you need without knowing.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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

  *

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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