The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  And so, dear lady, well met. I shan’t impart tidings of your dear departed yet, but weave the riddle of my fiddle music’s sound to gather all your wounded family round for an innocent evening of reunion and celebration. See the little ones’ feet dance in among their elders as saplings in the forest yearning for, turning towards, the light. Upwards, onwards, wisdom lives in rhythm as the deeper language our bodies speak to our creator, even as our minds sleep, intoxicated by exertion, making this assertion: that life is good among good company, as trees among a wood.

  So true to my plan, as often as I can and tact permits, I let the occasional string let rip, with a zing and a whip, accompanied by a witty quip, and quick, quick, Horace hurries to find me a replacement each time, which I untwine and tauten up, slipping around the keys to appease the waiting dancers. And so Nithna: chancer, necromancer, secretes the broken strings, the wires he needs in his back pocket, to earth himself to the unearthly socket on his chest then so to lift as a bird with wind under its wings and joy in its breast. It will take a while, each methodical theft, fabricating a yarn on a loom all warp and weft, just as walking each day on the sand leans more on right then left, soon to recover all of what I have been bereft. Right, left. Right, left.

  *

  Next Doctor Horace Stockbridge calls me to his office to offer this: that he has received a letter from his esteemed colleague in Switzerland who in turn has found another man: one Doctor Erno Schwitzer, who claims to know my true identity, indeed that he handled my peculiar case two decades ago. Schwitzer says that your real name is Thomas Leermouth, a former physician struck off for your unauthorised experiments on patients, involving hypnotic regression and electrical currents applied to the brain. Some of your subjects were damaged or went mad and you went on the run with a gun after some kind of procedure you performed upon yourself went wrong. A reward was offered for your arrest dead or alive, and the former of the two you took it upon yourself to do but botched it with a bottle of scotch and a Luger point two two. He has sent me fingerprints and photographs and here’s the laugh: they do look quite a bit like you. So now tell me, Mister Nithna, washed-up brain-washed stranger, what are we to do?

  Fuck. Stuck like a rat in a hole. And another sudden resort to narcolepsy would be too obvious, though more relief than I can tell. And what do you know, but snow at last begins to fall at this moment, visible in gliding sliding parachutes of white, through the window behind the good doctor’s shoulders, white as his white hair, like a hit-squad of divine mercy falling to cover up my shite. How like ballerina’s dresses and the swinging tresses of lovely girls all this cascade and swirl of crystallising ice. Snowdrops falling, how very nice. Suffice to say, I think it rather lovely in an abstract way, compared to my predicament today. I have heard similar accusations and suggestions before, all folk lore put about by louts, what a bore, I seem to recall being tested for my prints and spittle by policemen who found little to confirm their theories and much to make them scratch their neurologically-challenged heads. That Leermouth man is doubtless dead, while I, as you can see, between you and me, am very much alive. You may contrive to test my blood and saliva and all that jive and pish, if you wish. But I promise you this: when I am fully well, soon I trust, I will be on my way and leave you alone, as leave I must.

  But Nithna, my dear boy! I wouldn’t dream of such escapology and all-for-bugger-all-ogy. My studies of your neurology are scarcely started. I’d be broken-hearted if we parted at this early stage. And these accusations seem to be rousing further buried recollections, the browsing of which I would recommend we undertake as a matter of urgency. Your memory could be undergoing a resurgency!

  You have been too kind to an old tramp in a bind, sir, and I would be better gone and out of sight and mind, away from your good family and good people of their kind.

  The doctor continues to be horrified at my convincing concoctions and confabulations. Why are you talking like this so suddenly, Nithna? What’s caused this catastrophic loss of self-respect and self-esteem? Have we been paying enough attention to your dreams? What repressed and sublimated and re-directed guilt from your past is this we’re witnessing? Surely it merits harnessing for several months of study? My god, the old fuddy-duddy shames me with his goodness and credulity. I haven’t told you yet of my latest proposal: to rid you of that foul excrescence on your chest which you hide beneath your vest. Remove it lest it fester and turn septic. Doubtless put there by some jester or cynic to delude you that you’re psychic. Why, I could perform the procedure on you in my very own clinic!

  You are a sceptic then, as to my supernatural abilities? He nods his head like a buoy bobbing to infinity on the grey concrete sea of confirmed modernity and rational certainty, strapped into his sinking boat unable to admit to himself what he can plainly find: that I, and others of my kind, can float. These accusations… tell me for my information, where is it that these events are said to have transpired? –Here, Switzerland, Swaziland, Timbuktu or Buenos Aires?

  Sylvia, the south-easterly suburb of Urbis, due east of here. He nods.

  Well now that’s queer. Because I have the strongest feeling that’s where I’ll be heading after here. Having read that Dirze, until recently Zennad alias Zenir, is eastwards-bound to escape the hounds of the press whose smiles he’s found less toothless than desired recently, indeed ruthless, having acquired bad breath and a latent inclination to harry him to death.

  *

  And so the scene is set, the stage prepared, for me to get myself out of their hair, the noble family in whose care my recuperation has progressed so well. –So nearly ready to throw away my crutches and slip silently from their tender clutches. Last time I tried I nearly fell, but the fallen snow as night arrives gives me my final jigsaw piece for quick release. The estuary of Oceania is fresh water and apt to freeze. Imagine that, a thousand islands in a sea of ice, myriad mirror fragments in which to fish for glimpses of my true identity. Oddity on an odyssey to divine my provenance and heredity. A rarity, a man without a name, without temerity. May God judge him and his dim life without light, its hopeless brevity, without severity.

  The candlesticks are filled and lit, the curtains drawn tonight as Stockbridge’s island sits frozen fast in its sea of glass, and Emily and Gladys conspire against the patriarch to permit the one-night only indulgence of a séance. A joke, a party game, so harmless a distraction indeed that the children are to be invited, the whole family united, with Nithna as the stand-in for its missing piece: tragic drowned Robert whose photographic portrait adorns the mantelpiece. I hear his lost soul tapping at the backdoor of my brain, anxious for release, contact, communication. Meanwhile an hour before: I hide myself in my room to weave my violin strings into the tresses of my hair, placing a tight skull-cap borrowed from Horace over all to bind the contacts to my scalp, then connect all the wires to my chest-dial. None shall suspect. My curious headgear giving me the appearance of an elderly Jew, all orthodox and kosher, a mystic, a magician priest. Quite a to-do. Oh what a hullabaloo will follow when I show them what I can do.

  I emerge from my quarters and make my way to their drawing room which I enter with suitably dramatic flourish and the flickering of guttering candle flame. The tall red velvet curtains are closed, the room disposed to melancholy and expectation. I wheel myself to my place, legs slotting beneath the table as if for a moment I am a necessary accessory to family life rather than an abomination who courts damnation with his divinations. Hearken unto darkness, my dear gathered friends… I begin, connecting by the wires in my cuffs to the stone of the old cottage walls behind me. I shall be the conduit for the evening. For you I shall entrance and enchant myself, placing my soul suspended where all the voices of the night can find me. –Bind me to their lost spirits as the drowned grapple for ropes and wreckage of the life they remember. It was September I see, when Robert’s boat floundered… an autumn storm snapped their mast… There was another on board with him, one James… James… Je

  Jefferso
n, Jim Jefferson… his friend and pilot… Gladys prompts, and I see a restraining hand cross the table to discipline her, old Horace suspicious of cold-calling, the appalling exploitation of grieving he has read of in his dusty journals, beyond believing, the charlatans exposed with accomplices and ropes, wires wrapped around their toes, disembodied plaster hands whisked out from their robes to shake hands with the credulous believers eager to be deceived and thus to avoid the nameless blackness of unknowing, the wall of God’s silent indifference to suffering. As if She would speak in English, when all of Her creation speaks more eloquently already of hope and rebirth, of arbitrary savagery and necessary survival, than any human rival could contrive in words. It is human echoes that the dial I turn upon my chest will hear, like a radio scanning the airwaves, playing the ancient stones of this abode like a vinyl record pricked with a pin. Oh the dim din of the ague of ages.

  Robert says that he sends his love to little Bell and Jell, his nicknames for the children…

  This time it is old Emily who nods her head vigorously, while Gladys endeavours to be a good girl, unable to sever the strict gaze of Horace, the old bespectacled owl, fixed upon her fevered brow in the dim light. The stone speaks and I tune into the voices of Robert and Horace, raised in an argument, the week before he set sail, then sense the brooding silence, the turbulence in both their heads afterwards. He went to the waves, unreconciled with his father. You fought, Robert and you, Horace, harsh words, three days before he sailed, and failed to make up. He asks for your forgiveness and understanding. On the upstairs landing, the worst of it took place, you with your hand on the banister, he with the light from the attic window on his face.

  Horace has sat up rigid at the first mention of this, but now I see his head bowed in strange tension and shame. On the subject of his inheritance… six thousand pounds he sought to borrow to pay for another boat… the words of begging sticking in his throat, a failure in your eyes in these difficult times. He begs again your forgiveness for these crimes.

  No! Enough of this impudence! Horace stands and bellows, his composure ashen white and jaundiced yellow. This is intolerable! Who has been sharing their gossip with this impostor in our home?! Emily, aghast at his chair thrown back, covers her mouth and babbles and weeps all in one unintelligible scribble upon the air, while Gladys rings her hands, festoons her hair in deranged bunches, and only the children hit a simpler tone: crying and wailing quietly, less at the supernatural air than at their grandparent’s deranged behaviour.

  I find myself mouthing a prayer to our saviour Jesus, the last that passed poor Robert’s lips as the distant waves come close and lift me by the hips, pushing on the table and knocking away my wheelchair. Our father who art in Heaven, keep safe my beloved Gladys, Annabel and Nigel…

  Mummy, mummy, Nithna is flying! Look! He is flying! –Little Nigel shrieks, more enchanted now than scared, while his sister’s hair lifts up as of its own accord, charged with crackling electricity.

  But I am not flying but drowning. More Stevie Smith than Robert Browning. More disappointed than uplifted by Nature’s wonders frowning on my blunders. Thunder, lightning, lashing of rain and gales. My limbs flail. I cry out. I am lifted up until I float above the table, writhing in blue mist rippling, water filling my lungs in involuntary gulps, the loss of air crippling, my mind going dim as the pain in my chest passes beyond the bearable, the table thrown against the wall, and all my audience cowering away before the grotesque display of a man defying gravity. Levity, literally, importunately but fortunately also: brevity, the nearest window smashing, unable to withstand the severity of proximity to my thrashing extremities. Out, out, I am blown, with the few brief candles left, by one last ghostly wave from beyond the grave, to the comparative safety of a freezing December night, landing in soft snow and waking sharply looking outside-in upon the forlorn domestic glow of which I know I must now take my leave. Unbelievably cold, the ice upon my outstretched palms, but relievingly useful to a man without full use of his disobedient legs. I scramble and tumble then rumble out across the ice, my jacket bunched-up below like a makeshift toboggan, groggy, walk like a doggy, thrashing froglike, then devising a method out of desperate necessity to propel me face-down across the ice. Oh thank you kindly obliging moon so nearly full as to prove a useful tool, God-held torch to light my path. Behind me, dimly, I hear figures shifting in disarray, attempting pursuit but recoiling in dismay at the greater danger that their lesser footprints represent, stiletto point-loads of boots producing fissures and cracks, held back by all the focussed weight I lack. Hocus pocus, practical application of the levitation tack, I’m mastering the knack, just don’t look back. To surge with adrenalin bubbling in my ears, to differentiate between the tears of loss or rage I seek to leave behind me, for an age, for years.

  My arms thrash and I progress famously towards another island and some gladsome pile of junk, a veritable trunk of treasure for my pleasure to secrete myself within at my leisure, a tether of old boats and nets and tarpaulins in which to smother my memory of all human blether, severing the bindings of consciousness, falling, falling into sleep instead, caressed with thankyous of the dead for the brief bridge of net I weave to let them have their say. At last I reach the shore and grab up onto the planks of a swaying boat and lever myself aboard, and covering myself over: snore, snore until I am no more. A door closing over, losing all connection with what is to come and what has been before.

  *

  How much time goes by? In sleep, we live and die the forgotten lives of centuries. When I awake, from deep exhaustion and ache in my arms, my first task and trick is to prise the mask off my face, done quick, several months too late. The noise abates of who I was, my blood deflates before the gates of possibility. And finally, after suitable repose, I stand up, under cover of night once more, and walk, walk on firm and sweetly crunching shores, my knees tender at first, as if new to this art of bending. Bones shudder as if rending. The sinews tighten, the muscles obey their old logic, rediscovering habit. I sway, nearly stumbling, mumbling, grumbling, but at length am on my way with regained strength. My head, mouth open to drink the chill night air, rejoices at regaining its former altitude redolent of natural attitude and rectitude of limbs. A glimmer of light in the night ahead draws me on and I keep walking, talking to myself, until dawn.

  *

  I wake again. Island after island. This place is tiring. Ice breakers have been through now in the larger channels. Crunch, crunch, brittle and dirty shards bunched up like toffee icing. Steam rising from shouting mouths. Accosting boatmen, I barter some of the good flannels on my back for the money I lack to pay for the crossings, turning and tossing, grabbing old rags and tarpaulins instead for clothing, reverting to self-loathing. At last I leave behind the rash of various trivial skerries serviced by ferries for a landmass of respectable size and semblance of sophistication, civilisation. I step out of the boat and walk up into some streets of discreet charm, panache and élan. And passing my reflection in a shop window, recall who I am. No easy question or answer to a man on the run from himself pursuing his phantom semblance and terrible twin. Again therefore, let me begin:

  Let me in! I rap on the glass of a window I pass. Shucking fight! What ridiculous quirk of shirking fate is this? Squirting piss, I’m irate. Inside, hung up on walls like appalling crucifixions, a spectacle apt to exhaust my extensive diction: are seven paintings I recognise as my own. My, my, such a long way from home. I’m suddenly all erect as a dog with a bone, and of a mind to be direct and as tenacious as this gallery is spacious. Specious and facetious. In time, the world-wearied owner of grey hair and half-moon spectacles makes his way to the door and hoists the blinds with his liver-spotted tentacles. I am the artist! –is the only ridiculous appeal I can muster through the glass, all fart and bluster. And to my surprise, not for the first time in these travails through tearful vales, I am treated to the unexpected good in human nature threatening to unravel my settled scepticism. Get knotted nihilism! The ol
d guy unlocks his door though I must resemble the worst of the threatening poor, and offers me a place by a fire in his back room where he makes me coffee and sweeps the floor with a broom as if I am some prince come out of the darksome night carrying the light of the world through all the days of winter. Such kindness. You believe, I stammer, –that I, Ithir, am as I claim, the author of these paintings? Such blind faith has me close to fainting!

  Only guesswork is blind, my friend, and faith is something else entirely different and inspiring. For here… he brings a painting to me taken from the walls, –is evidence that I do not guess, nor do you lie, at all.

  And there sure enough, written rough but clear in queer handwriting not my own, is the name Ithir The Rhymer, dated last year. How strange, perhaps those arty types in Industria did not turn clypes as might be expected after I was last rejected and ejected, but valued my work on its own merits after the dust had settled, and stashed it away like ferrets. Or more likely, as this current outing has me doubting, hooded it in cloth but brooded on it nightly, then sold it proudly as the work of a new artist of note, not the usual copyist of Dirze.

  Yes… my host muses, eavesdropping my mind, anticipating my line of thoughts like ink blots, introducing himself as one Mustafa Hakim, …your work shows the influence of Dirze alright, but you are your own man. The world is tiring of his work, among sophisticated circles at least, self-referential and self-indulgent as he grows, whilst yours is leaner, keener and meaner, one might propose: a whole new style for a future suture of the wound of the past, a dark century drawing to a close. Don’t quote me now, these my private thoughts I hasten to disclose.

  I am speechless. A rare condition for me. And penniless and clueless (not so rare). How come you trusted such a threadbare apparition as me to let me over the threshold of your locked door?