Night

One fine day in the middle of the night, two dead men got up to fight, two blind men looking on, two cripples running for a priest and two dummies shouting Hurry on. That’s how it is. Topsy-turvy. Lit with blood, cloth wick and old membrane. Milestones, tombstones, whetstones and mirrors. Mirrors are not for seeing by, mirrors are for wondering at, and wondering into. There was a piece of glass by which we tried to catch and contain the sun’s fire. It must have been called a sunglass. There is so little and so fucking much. Half a lifetime. Felt, seen, heard, not fully felt, most meagrely seen, scarcely heard at all, and still in me, rattling, like a receding footfall, or Count Dracula’s swagger.

I am in a bed, a fourposter no less, satinised headboard, casters. Paws come out from underneath the well of the bed, all vying for a handshake, some gloved, some ungloved. The more I wrestle with sleep the more it ducks me, I am beckoning to it, beseeching. There are moments when it seems imminent, but then it vanishes, like a cloud formation or someone on rollerskates. I’ve had better times of course – the halcyon days, rings,
ringlets, ashes of roses, shit, chantilly, high teas, drop scones, serge suits, binding attachments, all that. I used to have such a penchant for feelings, now, I feel as much for the woman in the train who had the flushes, as for the woman Lil who bore me.

Outside it is blustery. In the occasional lull I think I hear an owl. Of course I always hear the cars, their drone in the distance, cars going too fast at night. There could be an owl since we are on the outskirts of a city and there are trees to roost in. They too are creaking and groaning. I am counting sheep but they are tumbling into one another and I see nothing but rumps of greying fleece, ruddled at that, and as for the ploy of counting apples, it is too playful, too strenuous. Still, one has to pass the time, the leisure hours, the resting hours, knit up the ravelled sleeve of care. Jesus. Buckets of time, you put your hand into it, deep down as far as the elbow, and it is like putting your hand into the abyss. So slowly does time pass, that is if it passes at all. Still, the Christmases rip around quick enough, the giving and taking, the Yuletide grog, the guzzle beneath the parasitic mistletoe. Only the minutes are rugged.

I knew a man once that saw time as loaves of bread, feasted on it, gorged, got overbloated, lost his desire, became a toper instead. I knew another that squashed eggs in his hand, existed for that sound, that crunching sound when he squelched them in his fist, made snowballs of them and threw them shell and all at whoever he happened to sight. A cretin. I’ve met them all, the cretins, the pilgrims, the scholars, and the
scaly-eyed bards prating and intoning for their bit of cunt. More of them anon.

I have the curtains drawn, the old clausilium shut, tight, so it ought to be safe enough, it ought. I take a tablet, break it down its central line and swallow one half, with some of the waters of the Malvern hills. I’ve always had a taste for spring waters, sparkling waters and sturgeons’ eggs. I lie with my God, I lie without my God. Into the folds of sleep. Oh Connemara, oh sweet mauve hills, where will I go, where will I not go, now?

Fucking nowhere.

I say seven and think it means something. The figure slides across the page or the blackboard or the sweet sky or the sawdust floor and though it tells me something, like the cost of the joyride, or what filly to back, or how long more the journey, the immediate journey that is, it does not tell me what I need to know. Not that I know what I need to know. Not that I do. I am a woman, at least I am led to believe so. I bleed et cetera. And those noises, and those sighs, and those murmurs, and those innuendoes, and those emanations, and those come-hithers, and those coo-coos, issue from me faithfully like buntings. Not to mention the more bucolic sounds, the ones in sly reserve, the choice slushings of the womb which have ogled many another by means of gurgle, nuance, melody, ditty and crass babbling supplication. A dab hand at it I was. As aforesaid I have met bards and knackers. Along the wayside. They told me many a tale, spun me many a
yarn, swindled me as often as not. I bathed their feet, had ointments, mused, groped in the dark, looked up to the constellations, identified the Plough and the Milky Way, said most lachrymose things.

There are so many waysides that one mistakes them sometimes for the real route.

I have had unions, tête-à-têtes, ripping times, gay collisions. All sickeningly predictable like a doh ray me fa. Simply did they start up the perturberations, the springtime spawn, the yea-nay, the boogie-woogie. Result, more blasted birth or more blasted arrested birth. And hark, a population problem. Solution.
Nota
bene.
A hard ebony cock secure within the lassies and the myriad others, that is to say the poor male human rejects, displayed upon a clothesline, white, bloodless, jovial, obedient; twittering, hanging, maybe even fluttering, like sparrows perhaps, or socks, or sloths or clothespegs proper. Hosannah.

We had a clothesline in Coose, in fact we had two. One adjacent to the back kitchen, ideal for small things such as teacloths, dribblers and bibs, then one farther away, on a hill, open to the prevailing winds, that served for sheets, blankets, quilts, eiderdowns, pillowcases, bolster cases, and the Boss’s lugubrious long johns. Quite a formidable place on account of the force of the trade winds, and the clothes that flap-flapped and the sight of Lil frequently rushing out to retrieve things at the first onslaught of the rain and the hails that were wizard both for their frequency and their velocity. A bit like the sea although it was green and had thickets and the different field flowers in the different field
months. So lying here I think of there. God blast it. As if there was nothing else, as if there was no one else. One’s kith, one’s kin – Boss, Lil, Tutsie, and the inimitable Dr Flaggler. No forgetfulness within, or without. The heart in its little swoon, in accord, sometimes in discord, and a note of solemn music, a refrain, for ever being struck up within one, saying thy mother, thy father, thy spouse, thy son, thyself. Others too, though never the mob, never enough of the mob. I have written some nauseating letters – “you touched my heart, you touched my cunt, I touched yours” and so on and so forth. Devouring, cloying, calumnious. All of those missives I have kept in reserve because to act as nonsensical as that, without presently dying would be the most clownish of my many clownish actions. I have even made a written request to be buried on an island in the vicinage of Coose, a woeful place surrounded by choppy waters and presided over by a pair of unpropagating swans. An affirmative involves the goodwill of the hierarchy and also of the lady butcher who has leased the grazing rights,
ad
infinitum.
Its features consist of tombs, tumuli, vaults, boulders, a round tower, turds, toadstools, and bullocks all scratching and munching and chewing their cuds. No doubt, on frosty mornings it is regaling to witness their vapours, the numerous vapours rising up, the flowers congealed in the ice, splendid plumes of grass, the peckled shimmer on the headstones and the thistles lording it like starched cockades. But mere postulation, to want to lie there when I am incapable of living anywhere within its precincts. Is it that I
imagine death to be the apotheosis of loneliness, to do away with a lesser loneliness, the force, puniness and shackle of which has kept me captive in towns and cities, where I have forgotten the fact that earth and running water lie somewhere underneath the vast complex of concrete and sewerage and rubble and weed and fag-ends and grating and shit. In yon High Street the tyres play havoc with the shit, especially the double tyring of lorries and pantechnicons. I often say “Ah, to sink into it at last, to say yea instead of nay to the lambative stink and smear of it all.” Goodbye to daisies and plankton, goodbye to the mavis, the missel and the white-bodied thrush. It is the dunghill ethos, is it not. Another thing that might have influenced my decision about the island is the banishment of it. The truth is I do not wish to lie with my own kith and kin. Another blow for King James and for the green. I do not want to lie with anyone else’s kith and kin either. One for King Billy. I have no desire, not even in deathbed slobber, to be lumped in with other people and have them flustering around me and vice versa. Think of the tendernesses we would have to purport, the subsequent niceties, the clacking of tongues, handshakes, boneshakes, in order to live, middlingly peaceably, together for a long time, for ever maybe. Maybe. I want to be by myself at last and to be robbed of that stupid, suppurating malady they call hope. Not to be a member of the communion of saints or angels or gods or demi-gods or fathers or mothers or grandfathers or grandmothers or brothers or sisters or brethren of any kind, germaine to me through consanguinity, affinity, or any other
kind of linear or genitive or collateral bond. To face the music at last. To be on one’s tod. Do I mean it? Apparently not. I am still snooping around, on the lookout for pals, pen pals, pub pals, cronies of any kind, provided they know their place, keep at distance, stay on the leash, leave me my soul’s crust, and my winding dirging effluvias.