by DF Lewis
The worrying thing about the area was that, despite being positioned in
the same hemisphere as Feldspar's homeland, each night seemed to blend into the
next one, with only a fleeting hint of dawn-dusk round about the time that his
luminous watch indicated it to be midnight.
In contrast, his homeland was roughly in line with the 20/20 day shift,
where seasons only created a small adjustment in the ratio between light and
dark. For the record, elsewhere,
seasons were harder taskmasters and created wilder fluctuations from the norm.
Such concerns should not have affected Feldspar - but, as the events
still unfolded around him, he could not guarantee that irrelevancies would not
become relevant and vice versa.
He
was currently on a job for the Suspended Belief Conglomerate.
Its head office was in the outskirts of his homeland, so that, when a
child, he could see its tall buildings along the horizon like teeth of a comb.
His parents said it was their ambition that he should become an employee
of the Conglomerate, as soon as he was able to leave the house on his own two
legs. Very good fluctuating
emoluments and perks could be taken for granted.
So, his awe, and even consternation, was overwhelming as he knelt by the
bed and gazed at the distant pillars of his destiny gradually becoming snagged
with the strands of night.
Later,
of course, Feldspar was far more confident of his own identity.
He had been with the Conglomerate for some years, and he was entrusted
with their most important missions. His
parents were still alive; but the outbuildings of the Conglomerate's original
head office had encroached nearer to their house, threatening compulsory
purchase in the near future. There
was no stopping progress.
He
was now located outside his homeland, surveying the lie of the land for a
proposed site of another head office, with the eventual aim of moving all the
staff from one to the other. Cheaper
than renovation of the original head office, the architect had advised.
He had already called back on the walkie talkie that the only drawback he
could establish was the constant darkness: but, since the air conditioning of
the new head office would control light/dark as well as heat/cold, he could see
no problem: as long as the staff had all facilities under one roof and the
relocation expenses were sufficient.
Despite
having been steeped in the Conglomerate's self-effacement programme for three
decades of his existence, he still had a soft spot for his parents.
He believed the more he held back on criticism of this worrying area, the
more it was likely that his parents would be left in peace.
However, he could hardly recall what they looked like or what they may
have turned into, and one of the vital ingredients of love, they told him, was
visual communication between the parties. But
that took no account of blind people - or, for that matter, people living, for
lengths of time on end, in constant darkness: only at midnight, perhaps, could
love flourish. He had conducted
himself always in accordance with the Conglomerate's motto:
"Suspended Belief is your one great virtue;
For Dreams will never even start to hurt you."
As he sat shivering between the dark masses of land and sky, he could
not guess if his watch told the right time.
Then, with the suddenness of a single brushstroke of luminous paint
across the sky, he saw the first distant skeleton of an office tower in the
process of construction - and disciplined Indian Files of hooded figures
trudging towards it. Obviously, the
Conglomerate had taken his walkie talkie messages more seriously than he
intended. And even more abruptly, it
was night shift again, for the short storm of dusk-dawn passed on around the
world. He fell asleep like a child
at the interface of two nowheres. He
called out: his parents did not come. They
never had a walkie talkie (except Feldspar as a toddler, of course!).
There was no stopping regress. He
fell fitfully for sleep's enticing.
The night so far had been quiet, far too quiet.
I cursed, for whatever happened, I wouldn't be able to sleep.
If our baby started whining, then there was no hope even for a fitful
doze. But the utter silence was
worse. I sat up in the bed, brow
glistening, ears pricking, worried that our baby would rediscover the squalls in
its lungs at the slightest suspicion of its father sleeping.
My wife snored beside me, although I seldom had the cruelty to describe
her night habits, come the daylight.
Soon,
despite my posture, I did drift off into some dream interruptions - about a
cathedral with a dome and a woman I |oved more than my wife.
I then paced what I can only describe as an alien landscape.
The sun, if it ever had a sun, was not yet up, but a strange living fluid
filled the air with an inhalable light. I
noted that I breathed through gills in the sides of my neck and that I possessed
a tail which dragged a trough behind my legs in the loamy grey sand.
Someone had hung decorations from the sky and I heard the distant thuds
of an impending storm. Before much
longer, I came in sight of an estate house, like those often found when hiking
in parts of Great Britain. Its
windows were lit brighter than the pervasive glow, so I walked spritely to a
lower bay window. Groups of people
stood about in a large drawing-room, barely moving and talking no more than in
desultory mumbles. I somehow knew
they were mumbles, rather than words, despite the intervening window-pane.
One woman had a bundle in her arms at which, from time to time, she cooed
and purred. Whatever constituted the
bundle, it was alive, moving of its own volition.
I
was abruptly awoken by a squawking. It
was my turn to see to it. Considering
that my wife was still snorting like a beached whale, I withdrew my body from
the bed, pulled on my stringy dressing-gown and approached the nursery along the
dark corridor. Sometimes, I wished
its mother had taken up breast-feeding. That
would have enabled me to stay in bed whilst she went off to feed herself to the
brat. But then, on second thoughts,
I cringed at the thought of the milk mountains.
The
night-light was still flickering in its jamjar; the curtains seeming to move, as
a result. The cot cover budged up
and down, as I went over to the tallboy, upon which we had left the creature's
comforts. Eventually, when I lowered
the teat, I found the opening straightaway and listened to the suck-suck while
the clear liquid filtered down. Gradually,
its short sharp breaths lengthened, and the guzzling became more of a ritual
than a struggle for life and death. I
knew the next thing would be the shit, but we could live better with stench than
screech.
I
replaced the still unwieldy udder on the tallboy, blew on the night-light to
tease out its life for the rest of the dark hours, tucked in the cot covers
around the gentle rise and fall of the mound - and, unaccountably, tested the
strength of the side-bars, knowing babies couldn't fly.
I laughed at my own dozy thoughts. Then
it spoke. Not with a babyish gurgle,
but a shrill voice. It actually
negotiated its tiny tongue around real words.
Words I understood. Could
find in the dictionary, if need be. Write
down. I listened unintently, since
surely this must also be dream - surely I had drowsed off whilst giving it a
nibble of my engorged masculine tit.
"Can
you hear me?" it whined, amid a streamer of black phlegm.
"Yes,"
I found myself answering.
"Dreams,"
it continued, "within the mother's womb are commonplace, many experts
say."
"Are
they?"
"Within
the watery world of tubes and black hanging things, listening to the mountainous
thunderflesh, a dream can form like weather."
There
was no chance to note my dream's undreamlike quality, since a storm abruptly
struck with the breaking of red-flecked waters and an irresistible thrust upon a
tiny body. The G forces were so
powerful, the body turned wrinkly and unsightly, its mind fogged with fear,
beshitted with memories gone bad...
The Elizabethans had a fixation about Death.
And that's how most of them ended up.
But one travelled ways so straitened, so full of blind alleys, that he
ended up in corners of a London where time did not seem to matter, let alone
pass. His name was Fieldspear, but
today he's Feldspar and he roams City churches, like a noon-time shadow, a black
aura huddled up to the church wall as if tapping its spiritual power for a
further go on the dodgem of life. I
first made his acquaintanceship when I was courting Freda.
She was to be my girl and I wooed her even to the point of obsession.
Other men often accosted me, by the scruff of my lapels, saying she was
in no way my girl. But I
preferred to believe in myself, not them. They
were liars, in any event. You could
see it in their eyes. Freda's eyes,
on the other hand, were wide open and she said I could see to the bottom of her
soul, and I believed her. I
understood her. I was secure in her
simplicity. But, then, of course, I
had not accounted for Feldspar.
Freda
and I, when walking out, often sat in the grounds of City churches, fresh from
business lunches with the Exchange Brokers.
Our favourite was St Paul's Cathedral, not least, on my part, because its
dome looked like a woman's breast. Freda
was full of ideas about her future career (as long as she could obtain the right
contacts). Often, she expounded
about the making of money and what she described as filling the space that a man
inhabits with the irregular shape of a woman.
But I knew Freda better than Freda knew Freda.
She was all up front but, deep within, without outward admission, she saw
Feldspar as well. Only Sensitives, I
believed, could follow such fleeting hair-pieces which often darted up and down
church walls like apprentice angels' dusters.
People steeped in Stocks and Shares need not apply.
Don't call us...
On
the occasion we first encountered Feldspar, Freda was sitting on the gravestone
of a City businessman who had founded a Coffee House which later transmogrified
into an Insurance Company Conglomerate. She
was holding forth in her mock-serious manner to which I had grown accustomed.
"If we could demolish St Paul's," she said, "that would
leave room for a few more Futures Exchanges or Eurobond Dealing Houses - it's
about time this City shrugged off the loose appendages of the past.
There are not enough Computer Mainframes for the Unit Trust or Put Option
mega-yields to be accommodated - it's a scandal - nobody will miss St
Paul's..." She rambled on in
her attractive satirical fashion, and I laughed in spirit with her words.
It all sounded too much like a speech to be true.
I loved her, you see. She was
a poet at heart - like me. That was
why I brought her to the churches. I
wanted to cuddle her, too. I needed
someone as sensitive as myself to cradle my head to her soft bosom.
Suddenly,
I saw him, creeping like my image of an Elizabethan.
The only one left. Freda was
at first unaware of his presence, with her back resting against the gravestone.
His open mouth seemed full of black ice-cream which he sicked up all over
Freda's power dress. He acted like
an evil kid. A non-Sensitive would
have said it was simply the night coming in sooner than the dusk.
But we both knew that we had met Feldspar, a representative from another
age. She could not admit it, of
course - she pretended nothing at all had happened.
And, even when I challenged her with it, she merely shrugged and said it
was only to be expected.
We
encountered Feldspar on several other occasions.
He dug at the graves, black elastic hose stretching back to the church
wall like thick kite strings. He
followed us along Bishopsgate and Fen Church Street, loping between the
shuttered foreign banks in the guise of an urban scarecrow.
He swung from lamp standards in the vein of monkey-spiders, his eys
floating in the dark sorbets of Winter. Yet
Freda was, from the very first
encounter with Feldspar, quickly promoted, not staying in any one job long
enough to be discovered as a true Sensitive, as I knew (and still know) was her
real condition. She became
Stockbroker General and instigated a whole chain reaction of fiscal meltdowns -
but, as during an earlier war, St Paul's managed to withstand the decimation
around it.
Freda
has now begun to live with Feldspar and she does not have much time for me any
more. It's like losing a mother,
rather than a sweetheart. I still
wander the wedges between leaning computer complexes, where churches used to
squat. I feel that Feldspar is good
for Freda no doubt, because he once lived in the Alchemical Age of Queen
Elizabeth the Second where fifties met nineties.
The true Elizabethan. One who
followed Dickens. And even
Churchill. A contemporary of
Thatcher. The real McCoy of an
Elizabethan. That era of history has
much to teach us, since women were in control and there's still nothing like
their soft touch.
The
last time I saw Freda, I asked her if she remained my girl, since I still had a
crush on her. Freda's mouth yawned
wide to answer and black treacle stretched like split innards from tooth to
tooth. Something moved inside her
blouse. Evidently, she and Feldspar
are more than simply good friends. But
it's no good crying over spilt milk. I
merely hope that they will find time, amid all their other civic duties, to
visit St Paul's to disentangle it from the barbed wire with which the City Guild
has seen fit to surround it. On the
other hand, perhaps such fencing is to keep the Sensitives inside the Cathedral,
safe from the outside world. And,
albeit a man, I'm the only one left outside with the soft touch.
Meantime,
either side of the dream, the baby blows kisses of black spittle, for me to
suck.
Feldspar dreamed he had a new occupation back in the old days before
real life itself became so dream-like - which was buffing up the drearinesses
that seemed to build up when nice bright mornings drifted into the degeneration
of late afternoons. He was on guard
duty from 3.0 p.m., at which time darkness began to have the potential to
wheedle its way into the daylight. So
he grabbed his mop and bucket of sunlight liquid from the cupboard under the
stairs and, by lunchtime, he had hung his uniform by the front door, with
battery-lit buttons and luminous carnation in the button-hole.
He placed his false ding-dong of a nose, bright red and bulbous, on the
door-knob, to remind him to take it with him.
But his mind wasn't in the right gear, somehow.
He felt a trifle under the weather, despite the morning's sunniness.
He looked from the window and saw a rocketship crossing the blue sky.
It didn't look at all convincing. He
looked down at himself and, come to think of it, and not to put too fine a point
on it, he was not the fine figure of the man he thought he was.
Who ever heard of putting the brightness back into twilight, anyway?
He might as well go back to bed, he thought, because no doubt it's all
part of a bad dream. But, too late,
the rocketship suddenly slipped a gear, spluttered and finally stalled, crashing
towards the house in which Feldspar stood and stared, now believing how
convincing it was. Luckily it was
indeed a dream (or else he did die and was subsequently dreaming whilst dead).
He
looked at the vase of flowers on the mantelpiece (which his parents had arranged
that very morning before light) wondering whether anything of such relative
insignificance could be persuaded to take on a character larger than life.
Tomorrow, his parents had been told, was to be his very first interview
with the Conglomerate. He kept
looking up and looking down, and each time he looked up, he felt sick and
sicker. As if the motion of his head
up and down was a flight of nausea on a tilting sea of air.
Finally, he decided, too late, that he was, literally, going to spew.
No time to reach the fire-closet. So
he used the vase of flowers. Later,
he switched on the TV set, but could not focus its flickering.
He was not used to reading between the lines and a sense of nausea
revisited the alimentary canal around which he was built.
He sometimes felt as if he had vomit running through his veins, instead
of blood. He failed his first
interview, but passed a second one much later in life because the original
failure became a valuable qualification, there having been a change of
management. His parents would have
been proud of him.
Indeed, I must have been dead, because I dreamed I was not Feldspar nor
even myself. I was them.
I was us. One thing was
certain, I was older. But not wiser.
The street was quiet except for the occasional tube train below.
The lamps joined up worms of light in the darkness.
Yes, the street was quiet, the distant drone of a rocketship several
skies away. The lamps were finally
doused in the early hours: all that could be seen was the sole glow of a first
floor window in a ramshackle joint - and it was in that room where the
Conglomerate's business resided. The
"we" that "I" had become climbed on to each other's
shoulder's to view a middle-aged man at a word processor.
He was so intent on his task, that he did not hear the sash-window slip
its lead, nor our ingress to the room. It
was not surprising, for we were quieter than the spluttering of his veins.
Outside, the street was quiet. Inside,
the room held for a split second a shop-soiled tableau of our frozen dummies.
He must have been deafer than a china vase for he did not hear one of us
tripping over the lumps in the carpet. We
would have to be more careful next time, for any slip like that could have
caused a havoc and a half. What a
man! He kept up the nimble
fingerwork on the keys, oblivious of us. One
of us eventually looked over his shoulder and read what he was writing.
It was in English, so we could not understand it.
Outside, the street was still there, but we had completely forgotten it.
Inside, we ranged wide, rummaging beneath the bed for valuables amongst
his night soil, rifling his cupboards for any noon meat that was still
sufficiently undecayed to be handled, cleaning out his pockets for mind drugs
amid the fluff. Not that we were
common or garden burglars. He must
have been dumb, as well as deaf for, on seeing us, all he could do was point at
his mouth. One of us laughed at him
and the other laughed too. It was
difficult to tell whether his tears indicated laughter or not.
Funny that! Outside, the
street had imperceptibly broken its bounds into morning
- with everything, except daylight, which morning entailed.
Inside, we had killed the man, for we could not bear his incessant silent
laughter. It was so disconcerting.
He must have been round the bend. His
eyes were luminous. One of us
(probably me) did the job well, cut his throat with his own scissors, took the
adam's apple between the two blades and snipped.
His death sicked all over the red screen.
Illegible in life, illegible in death.
Like the noises from the street outside, all leading hard and fast
towards noon; people, cars, trains,
kids, sirens merging into an inchoate groan.
The rocketships had been grounded, of course, till it was official night
time again. Inside the room, we
finished searching his bits and pieces. Now,
what should we do? Listen, who did
you think I was? I talked to myself,
you know. Dispose of the body,
before it's an incrimination. Speak
up, won't you, I can't hear, for the noise in the street outside, it's so
deafening: like the spluttering in my veins, the blood of my proud parents.
The
sash window slid back of its own accord, yet I ignored it.
I put the finishing touches to the words on the screen, English being a
language with no hard and fast rules, merely taste and instinct and fear of the
schoolmaster's cane. Better than
flower-arranging. I was perhaps the
only one awake in the whole silent Conglomerate of the worrying world; so busy,
I was sure to miss the lightning flash that was both sunrise and sunset.
A diptych of dawn and dusk.
DF Lewis:
http://weirdmonger.mindsay.com/
http://www.locusmag.com/index/s453.html
"Diptych" originally appeared in BLACK TEARS #7 1995