The Rhymer

by Douglas Thompson

  Tentacles.

  Spectacles.

  Wallet.

  And watch, all deleteriously painful to squash. I have been mysteriously granted legal permission on Schwitzer’s behalf to view the police files lodged here in this very prefecture, on the case of one Thomas Leermouth, supposedly deceased, disgraced, and defaced by a bullet to the hypothalamus, on which note we once again find common interest and intent, do we not? To go find your brother and the location of certain members of his entourage, whilst researching the identity of a man who may or may not be you?

  Synchronicity indeed. Sly synecdoche, my brother as a sinful syndicate of interest to the police. On mnemosyne on the other hand, I am less keen, I mean more than a little loath to be proven a live dead man and slammed in the can, when here I am deadly alive and free to roam wheresoever I please and can. You get my meaning, man?

  Yes, yes… Stockbridge muses, I think I can. But be at peace, by and by. Twenty years dead exceeds Lord Lucan’s alibi, though somewhat shy of Adolf Hitler’s. Schwitzer merely has the scientific bloodhound’s nose, not a Simon Wiesenthal’s bold thirst for justice, and besides his patient-confidentiality and Hippocratic oath are quite the match for a Swiss banker’s double gold standards. You shan’t be putting your head in a noose so much as a highly useful lanyard.

  Thank you Doctor, for that briefly inexplicable tour of twentieth century European history. A mystery, your circumloquaciousness could come to rival my own spacious speciousness. Have you been in training? And do you not find the effort draining?

  Like straining over a chamber pot without warning on a cold morning. Potty training. But come let us shake our shaking hands on this then. I surmise I have you half won over, or indeed have run you over, and that after three more ales we’ll sleep like pigs in clover.

  Back into the hostelry we go then, I to play the keys and draw the bow, pluck strings, make music and make merry as a ferryman to cross the river of night for my passengers’ delight, as well I might. And one acquaintance re-made and a deal struck, we feel no more need to make sense and indeed make less and less as the evening progresses towards its blessed oblivion. Next day I wake with my head next to the feet of a not unappealing dolly who has robbed me of my lolly, with a hazy memory of riding pillion in a supermarket trolley. Sitting up for a painful second, I spy sprawled across the carpet at the bottom of the bed fully dressed: Doctor Horace Stockbridge out for the count and as good as dead. And judging by the thunder in my head, my tongue and feet like lead, I shan’t be getting up to check his life signs soon and besides right now with sweating brow, would envy him and anyone else eternal rest.

  *

  Too soon then our pretty host disturbs our fragile repose, throws us our clothes while fixing her make-up in a cracked mirror. Making a guess I call her Carol, only to be told it is Karen, gruffly. Close enoughly. Building on this success, I move on to guess her profession as we make our procession down the stairs, opening with a careless stumble a broom cupboard answered by a mumble of two people engaged in fornication in flagrante, enraged, engorged and apt to up the ante. We close the door upon their antics, and take our fresh air with the romantics and innocents of this world, stepping out beneath the fresh blue sky with clouds unfurled.

  Pausing, dusting down his crumpled suit, Stockbridge hurries in my pursuit. I turn and hoot: Oh that your beloved Emily could see you besmirched thus head to foot at the portal of a house of ill repute.

  Good god, the good doctor splutters, what profane act must you have fallen asleep engaged in with her foot, and what did she mean about having played your flute?

  Ah, the monotony of anatomy. These points are moot, I venture, and incidental to our main adventure. Let us ease our addled brains of strains and stresses, over a cup of something black and hot, (you still have some money, have you not?) –while we peruse those addresses of constabulary establishments likely to harbour news of my brother and his misused muse, and if it amuses you: that other business too, of who you think I am but err, for I am not, and even if I were, remember not a jot.

  And so the great towering trees of Sylvia rise up about us in the spring breeze, as we pace her imposing avenues. So much trunk and foliage, it is as if the place were but a forest with a certain residue of bricks and mortar, pricks and slaughter, sex and death and bad breath, caught up in her retinue. Beech and maple, oak, birch and pine all intertwine with architecture which eschews the straight line in favour of a more curvaceous flavour, organic of a manic savour, all swirls and twirls and caryatids, nymphs and girls, volutes, parabolas, scrolls, ellipses, ovals and twists soft to the eye but hard to resist, even by trolls and proles and not scoffed at by toffs not entirely cold. All carved most cunningly in timber, stone and glass. More joy to the eye than pain in the ass. Art Nouveau for the nouveau riche, more quiche than filet mignon, more rococo gone loco than lean modernist beef.

  What a relief when the caffeine washes down, to sit by a window and let the afternoon skies drown us in their painterly clouds which wet themselves and us occasionally and discreetly, moistening the leaves and pavements with a glowing highlight of gold. Nostalgia like neuralgia, it is as if I did indeed know this place of old, such is the bold progress my eyes and footsteps make through its woods and moods. It is all for the good perhaps, this eerie return I shall not spurn in favour of further self-ignorance and denial. Some great trial approaches its closing reaches, and I shan’t recoil from its teaching and preaching, beseeching me to look into a darkened glass whose many glimpses I have not hearkened to as along its gallery I’ve passed. So in all lives, we do not pause or look enough as hastily we go, as if the destination ruled out all hesitation. And yet Thanatos guards the end of our every street and every row, a harvest moon or a child’s balloon cut loose, and all wise and ancient it knows: there is no hurry that negates our obligation to look right and left and carefully, wherever we go. ‘What have you learned?’ will be the one question we find our endeavours have earned at Saint Peter’s gate, and inattention seal our fate.

  But what is this incessant imprint that crowds my eyes each time I blink? –The memory of the face and smiles and laughter of a girl. My rationale can transcend the strictures of this picture burned into my heart, and yet each time I drop my guard her image returns and burns and burns. Are we no more than arrows and darts loosed as sport from some mischievous bow from One on high who plays with us as toys, our terrors and joys mere spectacle for his cruel sport? Does each broken heart, as a gunshot register a loud report in that ethereal chamber overhead, or are we only playthings, inert as tin and long since dead? Can all this cascade of fevered meaning howling in every lover’s breast, a trillion souls since the birth of all creation, really amount to naught, and merit no reply but its own negation? No answer comes from this high sky, unless rain be tears from some gargantuan being of whom we are the very thoughts that throng his head. Oh let it be so, that every tangent and trajectory, as vapour trails across the blue, is a thought, a life, the magnificent demise of me and you, as autumn dying in its hundred hues. We make such smoke as lasts a hundred years a piece, our lives the very music to make the angels weep.

  *

  A police station. By what perversion and degradation of common sense do I find myself crossing this threshold voluntarily? Verily I am by instinct no friend to the constabulary. But friend to Horace Stockbridge certainly, who saved me from the waves and let me catch my breath, nursed me back from the edge of death until my legs could bear my weight again. And as he healed my body, so have others catered for my soul, the dear Mustafa whose acquaintance I shall remake too before this moon is old. I am stronger in every way each day, while my fabled brother withers. Now take me to the pot in which they keep the snake so we can watch him slither.

  The street our feet take us down is somewhat tumble-down. If the gentrified districts we crossed were smiles then this is more a frown. Façades all bashed in as old boxers’ faces, bruised and ripped and stitched in places. Stucco weathered, peeled a
nd patched. Thatched with moss and knotweed here and there, growing from the fissures spreading slowly everywhere. Render failing rather as human or reptilian skin: sorely used and growing rather thin. And due to shed perhaps some moment soon, a secret midnight or a sun-drenched noon when silence cloaks the expectant air like a she-spider waiting in her lair for the first clear word to bring her out to lunge and tear. Soon all will be revealed, is the message that I reach for, cloaked in metaphor, or is it fear? For so I sense and know, as something eerie tells me: here, I have been before.

  We reach a door and pushing in find ourselves confronted with the habitual array of uniformed dunces at reception, too strapped for laughs to share a grin. Here one senses, time, patience and fresh air grown thin. Good evening, officer… Doctor Stockbridge clears his throat as to begin. I have a letter here from a certain esteemed Swiss Doctor Schwitzer, I emailed it to you last week. Here’s a copy, look, you’ll have a record of it in your book…

  Dave! –the crew-cut jobsworth shouts as though addressing his desk, –there’s some bloke out here enquiring about a Vienna Schnitzel for his Bar Mitzvah, would you care to come and take a look?

  What, what? The eponymous Dave emerges from his back-room fug clutching a mug of slopping Horlicks to his bollocks in an expression of lopsided solipsism. Mouth twisted, he opines: Des, Did you book those druggies and finish off those traffic fines? Des shakes his head, whether in deft refusal or rueful despair we’re left to make up our own minds. Dave turns to us. Doctor Whatnot I believe?

  Stockbridge. And my understudy Nadir Renoir. I feel as if under study, as Dave considers me briefly like a slater exposed beneath a lifted rock, and turns his weary eyes skywards to the clock upon the time-stained wall.

  I can spare five minutes with you right now, or not at all. He turns around abruptly as a sergeant major, our following him presumed to his luxurious and well-appointed room.

  Excellent, officer. We can well appreciate your workload is heavy as your ability is small…

  I nudge Horace. His newfound command of loquacious English is tenuous and dangerous. Such pride before a fall.

  What’s that? Dave half turns his head as he walks, a difficult operation for which he trained for years.

  Availability. Stockbridge comes out of the tight corner, correcting himself adroitly if desperately. Dave listens uninterestedly. Your availability. Your available time is small…

  Not at all. He smiles and sits behind his desk, indicating by the smallest inflexion that we should make ourselves at home. I’m all ears…

  Well, as my email stated, on behalf of the esteemed Doctor Schwitzer, Interpol have granted me the authority by proxy to obtain certain files on one Thomas Leermouth, deceased. An unproven murder case which took place on this date here, see… Stockbridge tables the papers and punts them gamely across the table with all the filmic aplomb he can muster. I am particularly interested in the addresses of the offences and those of the witnesses, the victims as alleged of Mister Leermouth’s rather queer experiments. Dave’s eyebrows lift, the papers shift, one senses that he longs for a cigarette, or a suffragette to arrest, finding us quite the pest.

  Here, says Dave at last, marking a few pages and firing aged rubber bands across the desk, this is old shit now. I’ll have Des photocopy these pages then you can be on your way. Was there any other business I can be doing for you today?

  As a matter of fact, I wonder if you might tell me which police station the artist Zenith Learmot is presently being held at. I read in the paper this morning that he has been charged with a fair barrage of villainy, after all these years of accumulating pillory from the very media whose praise his slithery…

  I kick Stockbridge under the desk, anxious to curtail his inexpert verbiage.

  Zenith, ah yes. Causing quite a stir over at Briarbarn Road I’m told, shouting promises of bribery through his prison bars, making frequent references and promises regarding his gold bars in Swiss bank accounts. But I don’t think those will be worth much by the time he gets out. His goose is cooked, the way things look. Has this some connection with your Swiss professor?

  Doctor.

  Father confessor… I add irrelevantly, unable to restrain myself at last from the joy of a cheap rhyme, then stop in time from further indulgence.

  Dave eyes me like a mouldy effulgence glimpsed on the dirty walls of his dreariest cells, marking me well. Well?

  Only time will tell. Stockbridge brilliantly answers, resolving the situation with a clichéd collocation just in time. He goes up in my estimation. I’ve taught him well. And so we leave, the situation retrieved, reprieved, the gruff policeman deceived into thinking we are figures of credibility, unable to believe we’ve bluffed our stuff and taken personal information one ought not to disclose, in contradiction of all appropriate legislation, out from under his nose.

  *

  So, how to make use of our abuse of a policeman’s trust? Phrased like that, ’tis quite a rare and unusual jewel we have in our hands as we wander about, the good doctor and I, strangers together in these strange lands. Inevitably enough, I want to go find my sordid sibling first, but Horace restrains me with an eminently logical refrain, somewhat wasted on my irrational brain: To get to speak to Zenith behind bars may be no easy thing, requiring some extra special skulduggery and thuggery, bribery and imbibery, and if it goes wrong we’ll be ejected from this noble region. Reasons are legion why we should press on with our more legal business first, culminating in the opening of your first artistic show tomorrow night. You’ll want to meet with your friends beforehand, renew their acquaintance as they spray your canvases with fresh varnish and glue. I would if I were you. Thereafter, in the wake of much applause and laughter, you can slip out some tradesman’s entrance to wreak all the revenge you like on your tyke of a brother.

  Revenge? I stop myself and him, slowing a little as we whittle our way through the woody streets, spring blossoms blowing at our feet, reaching a district a little more neat and complete. Is that what you think is driving me still? Did I not speak of the love of a woman, of that urgency, that primordial thrill? I find myself thinking of the words of Mustafa, sense my soul being weighed, as he conveyed, in some great scales above us tended by an unseen hand of infinite gentleness and wisdom.

  I wonder though… Stockbridge ponders half to himself as we resume our stride, if you’d be able to restrain yourself, given the unlikely opportunity to throttle and kill him. Those bars may prove a blessing, both for you and for him. The gap between them too thin to let him out, or to let you in.

  I laugh, grimly, answering his shrewdness with a grin, noticing that night is falling fast and that if this place has a public transport system then its mastery by tickets and timetables is a task too late for us to begin, today at least, I’m tired of being on my pins. Stockbridge treats me to a fine buffet dinner in a restaurant chosen on a whim, which fills as night goes on with loud Sylvians making a din. I get him drunk again and we spend the night in some bins. Chaste at least, in this place this time, with only rats to nibble on our extremities, no dubious saloon girls to quibble our moral proclivities. And a fine municipal fountain to shower in the next morning, what more could a fellow want? Stockbridge seems less than grateful, frightfully set in his ways and unable to adjust to the noble lifestyle I’ve perfected over so many years. I’m sure Mustafa understood and I resolve that I must discuss it with him again. Comfort and luxury are a terrible hindrance and corrosion of the mettle of men.

  *

  A new district then, and a strange trail to follow, astute and erect as bloodhounds, once at length I’ve found some coffee made of grounds of Herculean strength to throw down Stockbridge’s throat. He glows at first like a ten pound bomb ready to explode then we’re up and away and back on the road. Metronome men, we tick and tock, and talk at an accelerated rate as we confusedly follow a cheap tourist map, and I begin to get the queer notion that the café which sold me the coffee was not entirely kosher. Amphetamine sounds no more l
ike coffee than sun tan lotion. Whatever the cause, the effect is much forward motion.

  We arrive we think at our first address, and take some time to dust the excess of mess off each other’s clothes while hiding behind a rose bush. An ambush, is what this feels like, poring over our photocopied details of a certain Gerald Meek, a lab technician who subjected himself to the alleged experiments of Thomas Leermouth in return for a hundred and fifty-six pounds a week. Cheap at the price I’d say, for the voyage of your life, back and forward in time, where’s the crime? We hit the door chime and wait, wait a long time, for Meek’s aged mother to shuffle to the door. She immediately seems all too ready to ignore us until we implore her to let us tell her son’s story, in all its unsavoury glory, to an ignorant world, of all the untold harm that man Leermouth got to do before he was apprehended. But how could they let him escape? –she asks herself with a shake of her head while going to rouse Gerry himself from his bed. That bastard doctor fair messed with his head.

  In time we hear the stairs creaking, and rambling sounds of speech leaking down from above, like the hoots of a wood dove nested in the world’s eaves, or the laughter of God as he leaves us for the last time, tossing us the keys. Gerry Meek descends, his aged mother helping as his limbs bend, a travesty of the normal run of things for this man is not yet forty by the tally of mere years, according to our notes. Motes of dust spin in the morning sunlight from the seldom-parted curtains, a swirl of dishevelment about this sore sight on which our eyes alight. Long unkempt hair prematurely white, he sees us and recoils in fright: The fumigator men, ’tis them again… back to flush the rats out of the basement and lick the mould from the walls like a whore’s tongue on my balls, why are you always out, mother, when Dorothy Parker calls? It’s not what I meant, what I meant at all, this clashing of rocks like unwashed socks at the charterhouse of dawn. You get me wrong? Then sing me a song to save me from the graceful faces of the men who mow the lawn. Their fingers are like knives impaling pale wives who run for their lives and sail off down the Ganges in washtubs made waterproof by mountaineering dubbing. Let’s all go clubbing. The land-lubbing god who tied us to this clod of sod can answer at least for the dark mood of this flood and its constant thud against our hearts and heads as the tide rises. No surprises, you’ll have it off with all that rubbing. Put a sock in it or a lampshade on it, stuff a flex up a poodle’s arse and switch it like Christmas tree for you and me, one each in the abstract beach of snow where we meet before nobody goes. What direction is time? Primordial slime is the recurring terminus, looking up or down the line.