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.
~
Mesmerising mist. Sparkling diadems that twist as I open and re-open my eyes, writhing on the boat floor. Grilled like a prime steak by the inescapable sun for days. Amazing. Blazing haze. Burns. Then it turns. The autumn chill and winter storms. The doldrums gone. The punishment begins, for crime unspecified. Puny plaything that I am in the Gods’ hands. Did I really think they’d grant me free passage to distant lands? –with all this water to enact my slaughter? Too good a chance to miss, this hiss and roar of spume and piss. A chance to show a wretch how to retch, a full how to be empty, to starve and die of thirst. Women and Ithir first. Abandon ship, I think not. No strength left for anything but lie in state, rigid as a twig on a river in spate, staring up at my creators’ big sky to ponder why, and quietly, quietly cry. Lose consciousness with any luck and stay out, all spun about but safe within my spiralling mind, falling down through sheets and sheets of dreams, gleaming reams, uncovering, discovering, sniffing like a bloodhound the deeper secrets out. Leave the world behind to find a kinder place with slower pace and fairer face and… grace, grace. I brace myself to meet my maker, or Nature both creator and annihilator absolute and resolute in the crash and clash of atoms, recycling of minuscule molecules. My farewell is heard tell. The old destitute is dissolute.
Or is he? Dizzy certainly, when the storm subsides, and too weak to reason out the vagaries of tides and the cause of that strange rocking motion against the sides. The ocean? The notion comes at last, with the keening cry of a seagull swooping to survey a potential fresh repast, that I have not yet breathed my last, but struck dry land, lodged hard and fast. I grapple and topple, the hull tipping to spew me out onto the sand, served on a fine salad of seaweed. I crawl an inch then a couple of feet, then collapse again, my defeat complete, deep, deep into a deeper sleep.
The slopes are steep of the sandy place I slither to, hitherto unvisited where I meet an old man humming to himself as he takes apart machinery on a workbench in his glass conservatory, except that what’s outside is not suburbia but an endless desert which encroaches, poaches, apocalyptic, on the edges of his once-green domain: a few last potted plants as vestiges and bastions against the coming end. I sense that he is my friend, though he never looks up as he goes on working, but finally says: Ah, welcome, I’m so glad you came, again.
Again? Come again? I ask, but he continues resolutely with his task until I ask him what he’s at, at which he quietly laughs then says: Building and repairing the clockwork hearts of men. At this a tiny clock beside him on the bench explodes into activity and sound, its sudden hour of alarm come around, at which in one short and effortless motion, he hoists a mallet and smashes it down without even a frown, destroying it completely into a mess of crushed gears all smashed and strewn around. With a sense of uneasy threat, I find myself drifting as he goes on working, sifting, shifting, being pulled back away by some intruding voice, until at last by gravity more than choice I am awakened again, back into the world of men.
I am in a hospital bed, not dead at all it seems but small, examined as a microbe under a microscope by a plethora of physicians adorned with stethoscopes, peering at me with their thick spectacles like submariners through the windows of a bathysphere. Stuff this, get me out of here. A flood of tears, I am forcibly restrained firstly by strong hands and rubber bands then by pain and swollen glands. Baring of the arm and priming syringe, cringe, impinging on my liberty and dignity. Fight and kick. The needle’s prick. Doing their duty to sleeping beauty. Sigh. The morphine hurtles in, eyelids drooping, groggy, foggy, useless, lousy, drowsy as sin. Diving under, I blunder with a sense of wonder through a blue kingdom where seals and dolphins swim. Until led through a door on the ocean floor I am no more. And so reborn, begin.
Eyes open, bright daylight stinging. My ears bringing the sound of the sea, somewhere nearby through glass. I look down and see I am in a wheelchair and panicking, tear the tartan blanket aside and grapple and massage until I can decide with pride and relief that I have not been amputated by some over-zealous thief in surgeon’s gown, just taking it easy in my queasy wheezy state is all, it seems, has been intended, I can ease my frown. I call out and soon have the furniture upended, expecting some expectant nurse or worse to come and have me apprehended, but there instead appears a mid
dle-aged woman, looking offended. You are awake at last, Mister Nithna, how marvellous, I must go tell Horace of your progress, he’ll be speechless with joy and restless with questions your attention to employ. Oh boy oh boy!
Questions? Never mind yours. They can keep for a year or two for all I care, but I sure have a few, I can tell you. Horace?
Doctor Horace Stockbridge, my husband. Director of the Institute.
And Nithnawhat-the-hell did you call me?
Nithna, you said it was your name each time you were asked.
Under considerable sedation and hallucination I would wager, and with my mouth scarcely any further open than my ass. Am I out of danger? You’re pretty thorough with a stranger. You’d think I was your brother, not a clapped-out old tramp. I feel like a scamp, a dog in the manger, sitting here in the splendour of this mansion, and not out on the streets. I look about, my eyes popping out.
But we don’t have any streets here, Nithna. You are in Oceania now, the region of islands got about by boats, but… she puts a hand to her throat. My word, that is one of our first clues to who you are and where you have come from. I must get Horace before I blow this. She flees in glee through the door.
Know this… I whisper to myself, turning the wheels of my chair with inexperienced grasp until I find my reflection in a full-length mirror in a gilded frame, where I am shocked at my emaciation and battered complexion. Nithna is not my name, but nor was Ithir, or whatever one I had before that. I flow like a river forever, never quite putting down roots, in cahoots with no man and no place. My face, my face! I grapple with my unexpectedly clipped nails to unclip my human mask, a task, a trick that never fails, but I flail, hearing footsteps returning, my ears burning, I reach up for my hair and nothing is there, or everything rather. Getting in a lather. No electrodes and network, no wig for the scalp lubricated with talc, but the real bloody thing. How long have I been out? Long tresses from functional follicles. Bollocks. My hands leap to my chest and part my vest. Rest. As you were. They nearly had me there, choking, strangling. The dial is still fused to my flesh, some wires left dangling.
Mister Nithna, may I introduce myself at last? His huge broad hand closes around mine and crushes it as would a falling pine tree. I remember his face vaguely from the gallery of scoundrels in gowns who went to town on my premature autopsy. What a blast to see you awake and partaking of the art of conversation leaving my wife Emily aghast. You’ll be eager for your first repast, if you’re able. I’ll wheel you to our dinner table.
Wheel me? Stone me, that’s a lonely homily for an old bum and prize pedestrian to hear or bear. It would do me in to be without me pins. How long before I can stand on my own and get out this chair? And what about my hair? My wig, you dig? Where have you put my neural net, my electromagnetic scalp nexus? –The whole shipment. Connected usually to these flexes, thence to my chest and my trans-temporal equipment?
Woah there! Slow down, our honoured guest, he says wheeling me with extra zest lest I slither off, we’ve much to ask you about that strange contraption on your chest. It had all our best people vexed. We’re quite convinced that it’s completely useless but separating it from your rib cage is quite another matter. Seems it’s fused at a molecular level to the bone, stiff as iron, hard as stone.
Of course it is, you meddling pratt. How else to be sure of where I’m at in time and space? My neural net, can you go and get it yet? I need it, must I bleeding plead it?
Let it go. Relax, I implore you. We have carefully kept all of your clothes and personal effects aside, everything the tide brought in with you, Nithna. Our scientists and journalists have had quite a scrap trying to decipher your spurious retinue of crap. I do recall some rusty wires in a curious grid stretched across your lid, but whatever the thingamajig did it won’t do now unless your can renovate and reconfigure it somehow. Jiggered, kaput, kapow. Capeesh? You’ll walk again in less than three weeks from now, isn’t that the more important answer that you seek?
Meat. A whole plate of it before me. Soon the conversation starts to bore me compared to the simple joy of rediscovering the task for which I must my teeth employ. Glorious taste and nutrition, mastication without inhibition. Placation of the fundamental drive to stay alive. Eventually I look up with a start to see that Horace and Emily have been watching me gorging in a state of both primal horror and incipient quasi-parental pride. Confused, I fart, and soon am offered apple tart. My eyes adjust to the view from the patio doors before me: of a beautiful beach reaching out to the hissing sea which so recently released me, and for a moment She seems like an entity, an empress fraught with enmity that resents my recent egress without her consent. She often has that murderous bent, although today I notice over my pastry lattice that she is serene and calmly balmy. I have escaped her army of white horses by some oversight or insight, heaven sent.
Balmy? Am I Barmy? After sweet and repeated biscuits and cheese, rendering me replete, the patio doors are drawn aside to introduce me to the sea breeze and I clutch the tartan blanket to my knees, fit to freeze. My god, the seasons have changed while I’ve been away in the land of nod, snow and ice cannot be that far off. They push my wheels across the soft fine sand, and guide me with a gentle hand to gaze upon this whole new land: Oceania, a thousand islands of disparate size and dispersed population, stretching randomly to the horizon. And at this moment, mooring, disembarking at their private jetty, I see a uniformed steward with two wards, jumping juveniles no less, explosive charges one might attest. The children are home early! Emily exclaims with joy, and bounding up the beach they come to inspect me as their new exotic toy. Psychotic boy and neurotic girl, they soon have me in a twirl with my stomach lurching, with all the respect due to an ice cream lolly they spin me like a supermarket trolley, but soon repent this immature folly, sent off to bed and a sound birching. At rest again and thankful for the refreshing breeze, I throw my guts up on my knees, thankful for the thoughtful blanket, thinking if I had a child like that I’d spank it.
Later in the study over coffee, Emily lights a roaring fire and I reflect on how I could get used to such a life, notwithstanding the recent strife with the nippers, whom Horace assures me are usually nice as chicken dippers, and smiling at that odd simile I wonder if they just need more battering, but keep that last to myself, the concept somewhat less than flattering to one’s hosts with whom one toasts a new beginning. So tell us now, Nithna, Doctor Horace sighs, rubbing his hands as to receive a prize, commence tonight and proceed as you see fit over coming days, to tell us all that you remember of how you got here and who you were before. Open the door of memories and dispel the haze.
Now, here’s a rum conundrum. I remember plenty that will make me sound mental. Like angling to strangle and smother my own brother, or trying to disrupt his exhibitions and impersonate his style. And that’s just the recent mile of a journey out of deeper darkness. What he’s really harking after is the function of my apparatus, dances with the dead and flirtation with the silent nation of those to come. None of which he will believe at any rate, and conclude my sorry state is ripe for the asylum, which by the looks of this domain will doubtless be on another dedicated island. Deny him that whim, I’d say. I who cannot swim. Trim, trim the truth, True Thomas The Rhymer. Desist to resist. Offer no violence. Prefer, and proffer: silence.
It seems that what I lack, casting my mind back, is most of my recent narrative. Thus pleads this plaintive plaintiff. Perhaps I was mugged and thugged and drugged, flung into that boat in which you found me. I believe I was in Industria, but it’s all a blur of grey confusion and effluvia, as if some trauma to the head leaving me for dead has voided my retention, not to mention some mental bruise, a psychiatric ruse in play to keep my prying poking fingers away from some terrible contusion, a confusion of the id and ego, ergo I best not try too soon to lift that rock and risk the shock of being mobbed by the clacking callipers of a hundred nightmare crabs giving me the screaming abdabs.
Goodness gracious. Such self-lucid
ity and perspicacity, not to say violently vivid vocabulary. Industria is certainly a rough old locality. It wouldn’t surprise me to surmise a couple of ne’er do wells felled you there for your cash with a quick swipe of a knife with scant regard as to your life. Perhaps you were a man of means whose wife and weans are even now scanning the news each day with bated breath for confirmation of your death?
I take a deep breath. I can see why my supposed name proposes me lame at this sort of game. Truth is more easy than lying, as living is than dying. So soon, like a goon, one is in hell and frying merrily. Verily, tell what is true, and you’ll come through. Affirm firmly, and quit denying. I know not, for I remember naught for sure of who and what I am and whence I came. I have fragments of childhood recollections, and perhaps if I share those with you, starting at the beginning as it were, in time you might accrue a clue or two as to who I am and what to do.
Please… says Horace, lighting his pipe and stretching back in his upholstered sofa and kicking off his loafers with a grin. Begin…
One of my earliest vignettes is of my mother leaning over the sink and peeling spuds in a little red tub which I later found out was a peculiar invention the like of which I’ve not seen since… called a potato peeler, with sandpaper on its base and a little handle to the side with which to commit potato frittricide…
Fratricide? How very Freudian, almost as if you are avoiding…
No, frittricide, as in potato fritters. It is a joke sir, of an unfunny but linguistically inventive kind. Lame, as it were, a joke in a wheelchair. Oh yes and here’s another: soap suds by the hundreds, and my little feet drumming in a green bathtub, and a dream I had of this afterwards in which a world war one biplane fell from the sky and smashed through the frosted glass of our bathroom window and the pilot had a white moustache which seemed to be made of the same white soap suds like fluffy clouds, and I can still hear the loud sound of his propeller blades spinning and recall my terror at his aeronautic error and see his goggles all misted over like the frosted window glass frighteningly shattered. I remembered all this for years although it scarcely mattered. One of my earliest dreams or nightmares I suppose, first evidence of creativity composed in my repose.
The Rhymer Page 9