And it gets weirder. And very first-drafty.

Amor: part six

A boy of sixteen or seventeen, who was naked save for bandages around his head and arms, the body so bandaged being of a tortured thinness and disfigured with lesions, had crawled up to the Marquis and was attempting to touch him. The light swung into the huge, trembling eyes.

‘You there, what do you want? The name of a good tailor? An explanation for your life?’ Insurance? These questions, rapidly fired, received in response only a kind of spastic twitching. The screen filled, for a second, with the youth’s uncomprehending eyes, then the camera moved back to the Marquis, who shrugged and walked on, musing aloud, ‘We who can function should not necessarily feel pleased with ourselves. The merely functional human is not human at all. If active, he is, approximately, an organ; if passive, a utensil. To be anything more requires exertion and audacity.’

He gestured ahead, where a long white tent had come into view. ‘We are coming to our destination.’ The camera followed him into the tent, which was full of children.

‘Orphans,’ he announced, ‘sick and hungry, but not dying yet, and still capable of playing games.’

He shone the torch on a little girl with straight fair hair. He knelt down in front of her. ‘Hello. You’re very pretty, aren’t you? What’s your name?’

‘Tammy,’ she said, looking at the camera.

‘Tammy, what a lovely name you have. And how old are you?’

‘Seven.’

‘Well, Tammy who is seven and very pretty, if you could grow up right now and be anything at all, what would you choose to be?’

‘A doctor.’

‘And why would you be a doctor?’

‘So I could make people not be hurt and sick.’

The Marquis expressed surprise with an exaggerated opening of his yellow eyes. ‘Truly? Not because you have a fascination with injury and morbidity and would secretly love to saw through human bones, play in entrails with a scalpel, observe the growth of tumors? None of that enthuses you, I see. Well, would you like to be a witchdoctor? You would have a fine rattle to shake. You could drink mandragora milkshakes and turn into a panther at night. No?’

The girl shook her head.

Impatient, the Marquis swung the light away from her and shone it on a boy.

‘And what would you like to be, young man?’

‘A teacher.’

‘Ah, then you would like to thrash other children with a supple cane, and fill their minds with ugly ideas?’

The boy frowned. ‘No.’

The Marquis sighed. ‘When I was your age, I wanted to be a pirate.’ He straightened up and spoke loudly. ‘Doesn’t anyone here want to be a pirate? How about a poker player, or a gangster’s moll? A junkie? Grave robber? Who’d like to be a fucking king?’

Many of the children who were in earshot looked distressed. A few of them began to cry.

‘Oh, for the sake of Judas!’ the Marquis cried out, throwing his arms wide and high, sending the flashlight beam on a long arc across the roof of the tent. ‘Where are our future criminals and sinners? Don’t any of you have any imagination? If only one of you would say “My one and only desire is to be an arsonist,” I would do my very best to make your wish come true!’

One girl put up her hand.

‘I want to be a femme fatale,’ she said. ‘An adventuress, don’t you know?’

The Marquis brought the light down and froze it on her. She was dark, with a high, smooth brow above an unmatching monkeyish little face.

The Marquis grinned in delight. ‘That’s more like it, what? Tell me your name, child.’

‘Nina,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like it.’ She pointed at the blond girl. ‘I want her name. Tammy.’

‘Then you shall have it,’ he said. ‘Little adventuress, you are now Tammy. Blond girl, you are now Nina. Nina, stay where you are. Tammy, schätzlein, we are going home. High and low we pin our little zirconium hopes, my dear; our hopes of becoming divine and truly immortal.’ Giving her the flashlight, which she cradled like a toy, he led her out of the tent, frowning, because he had looked at her aura and noticed her symptoms, which, all too soon, reduced her to an invalid.

She looked up at him from her wheelchair. ‘It’s no good. This isn’t going to work.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said fondly, the sea air whipping his hair as he lifted the chair from the promenade to the pier. He bought a pinwheel from a boy selling trinkets and poked it into the space between the padded back of the chair and its arm, and began to push the chair along the pier.

‘I don’t want to go on like this,’ she hissed. She was older now, a young woman—but perhaps younger than she looked. Illness had been unkind to her face.

‘If you die, all you’ve ever dreamed will die with you.’

‘And you, too? That’s what you’re afraid of, I suppose. What a self-centred bastard you are.’

‘I can keep you alive indefinitely.’

‘And what do you think the results of that will be?’

‘Then consider my other offer.’ He glanced down at the spinning pinwheel. Samsara. There was one reliable way out, but dissolution in the Absolute appealed to him no more than it did to her.

‘I don’t want to talk about it anymore.’ She squinted into the sun and wind, gazing out to sea, where, that night, a boat light sat in the darkness, like the flame of a candle on a shelf. She was sitting on his lap, facing the window, while he sat in the chair, naked, giving importunate begging another shot.

‘I’m not oblivious to others. I hear all the weeping and wailing. Everyone. Like a fucking waterfall of tears, love.’ He went to stroke her hair. She swatted his hand away.

‘No.’

‘How contaminated do you think I am?’

She tried to pull away, but he was stronger. His hand started to penetrate her arm.

‘I’m going to save you,’ he stated. ‘You can kill me afterwards.’

She killed him at once, using the contact to send the meme of death.

It’s nice to wake up and see, amid all the bad news, something as surreally lovely as this, the webs of thousands of baby orb weaver spiders hanging between telephone wires.

Like I said, this doesn’t have a beginning, middle or end, only tangents. Starting off on another one - this is a really old piece, I’ve just edited it a bit.

Amor: part five

The Marquis, dressed in white tie, surveyed the hotel’s spacious lounge with a criticising eye. He was desperately sick of its faded colonial charm. Vengefully, he concentrated, wrangling with the astral light, and remodelled the whole thing in the style of a bedroom belonging to a rock star, whose name escaped him, if in fact, he had ever known it, the difficulties of verbal communication between corporeal and incorporeal entities being such that efforts to obtain exact phonemes were frequently not worth the outlay of energy that could be put to better, more satisfying use.

As soon as the walls of red plush and gold mirror tile were in place he felt better. The sheer awfulness of it soothed his nerves. The guests, he decided, could sit on the emperor size bed facing the movie screen. Last, he turned his attention to the window and changed the view of African seaside to a neon night scene.

A mirrored door opened on his right, admitting Hiro, the handsome midget, in a white tux.

‘What’s the show?’ said the midget, taking a glass of champagne from a plasmic. Slaved to the Marquis, its eyes were blank silver, its muscular chest decorated with wire inlays of the same colour.

‘An improvised piece. Science fiction. A bit of an experiment.’ The Marquis helped himself to a glass. Looking at the window again and deciding that a few more tall sparkling buildings were required, he made the necessary adjustments.

Hiro settled himself on the bed. ‘Any giant women in it—or do I hope in vain?’ He had a fetish for size.

‘Entirely in vain. Would you rather pass?’

Ludovico shrugged his small shoulders philosophically and, after removing his shoes, settled on the bed, just as Engelbert Grace, the Immament Hitman, came in with Ayatollah Steve, the latter carrying his sunburst Fender Jaguar. They were followed by Colonel Chan and his two asthmatic, genetically tortured pugs, Marcella Wax, still translucent after her fight, which had become an instant legend, with the New Wahhabi Petomanes, and her lover, a girl called Machinery who examined the plasmic with professional interest. That seemed to be all the arrivals. The Marquis, who had hoped for a bigger turn-out, smiled to hide his disappointment and stood at the end of the bed to welcome them all formally—

—‘To a tale of childhood, of rescue and redemption—one hopes,’ he said, grinning like a plastic fox eating plastic shit out of a plastic brush.

‘Ten to one it all ends in tears, Marquis,’ said Chan, a dog resting on each plump thigh, looking around to see if anyone would take up the bet. No one did. They were all too accustomed to tragedy coming out victorious in these experiments.

‘Never mind,’ said Marcella, ‘I like a tearjerker.’

To forestall further comment from the people in his dream, the Marquis dimmed the lights. Sibelius’s The Swan of Tuonela began playing as an image of the moon appeared on the screen. While the camera travelled over the grey craters and rilles of the lunar surface the voice of Alvar Liddell read a news bulletin which gave in detail the latest developments in the war, the camera then descending to ground level from where it transmitted images of injured, starving and sick people lying in grey dust under the shimmering cupolas of force-domes.

The Marquis turned around and walked towards the screen, stepping into it as he reached it, his costume transforming into an elegant black spacesuit. He carried a large flashlight. He walked among the victims of the atrocities the bulletin described, and, when they were lying on the ground in front of him, stepped over them. Most of these figures, if they observed him at all, did so without curiosity in their almost unliving eyes, which were looking, one imagined, at walls in locked rooms of pain, bereavement, deprivation, humiliation and abuse. Some tried to move away. A few threw themselves at him. These he kicked away. ‘Witness,’ he said, addressing the camera over his shoulder as he walked and kicked ‘the pleasure of the conqueror. One cannot help desiring to create an effect, even on these wretches. He directed the beam of the flashlight at random into gaunt faces. ‘You’re all stars tonight,’ he told their disinterest, bewilderment or offense. ‘You and you, and you, and you, and you…’ The camera followed the flashlight, zooming in wherever it landed.

‘Sans costume, reduced to skeletal uniformity in flesh, each is very much like the other,’ the Marquis said to the camera. They were obviously prepared words. ‘They are quite interchangeable. One would be generous to call them individuals. Differences in behaviour are observed, but what motives can we impute to them? We can try asking…’

A 12-year old girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, “alleging that a subsitute teacher showed the R-rated film Brokeback Mountain in class”, claiming that the girl suffered psychological distress. Fair cop, I suppose. I guess teachers shouldn’t be showing adult-rated films to kids who aren’t legally old enough to see them - though the amount of damages sought, $500,000, seems a mite OTT.  If a child could sue for that much every time it experiences psychological distress all children would be billionaires. Still, it makes me wonder, now, if it’s too late to sue my parents for taking me to Watership Down, which caused me considerable distress - lasting, too: to this day, show me rabbit on a menu and I will hear “Bright Eyes” playing in my head and have to excuse myself to go and weep in the toilets. Or Bambi, where his mother gets shot dead. Or Dot and the Kangaroo; the scene with the bunyip terrified me. And don’t get me started on Doctor Who.
Hang on, though. My parents don’t have half a million bucks. And even if they did, I’d only be suing myself out of my own inheritance. Dang.

Continuing the sort-of-story of the Corsaire.Amor: part four

He was much older than her. He spent his mornings in the bar of the Hotel Dalmatia, where the photos of bygone football and hockey teams mercifully reduced the visible area of the frankfurter-red flock paper. He played a bit of Handel on the electric piano and read the newspapers. He suspected an underlying voluminous neglect, a failure of passion, beneath the surface of all his emotions. When she got this confession out of him she made him lie still on the brass bed while she bound him with her stockings and blindfolded him, then made as free with him as she knew how. She thought he only needed to lose control and mastery. When he got this out of her he laughed his head off, saying only a child would have thought he had those to lose.

Because money was tight and a name costs nothing they gave each other names: Milord the Mistake, Knight of Capricorn, the Prettiest Politician, Thief of the Orchards of the West, Prince of Winterhaus Street; Captain, Milady of Gold and Steel, Shahmaran, Ozymandia, Ulysée, The Trouble With You.

Indiscriminate love had been his undoing. In the past he had loved felons, the mad, the dying, the very young, the very old, and in so doing earned the enmity of the gods of love, who were afraid that he might overtake them. Therefore, one night, the gods poured into his mouth a poison which caused his capacity for love to wane, whose effects he, a rational man, attributed to himself alone. He had expected, and intended, to become more refined, open and sensitive as he aged; instead he became inwardly coarser and duller and concluded that he had simply misjudged his own character.

He assumed his young lover would outgrow him and was not surprised when she stopped coming to the hotel.

 ~~~

…The long desert beach was certainly one of the world’s loneliest shores, the coccyx of a spine of islands far from all continents and trade routes. The Corsaire ordered a boat lowered and rowed alone towards this stump of a tail in the sea.

Lions prowled the sands. What were they doing there? What prey was there for them to eat? The heavy enigma of these beasts convinced her that she was near to finding the transfinite she sought. She walked among them, lionish herself, waiting for something to change, some substrate to be exposed, and the message, to whose content Mam Eugénie had never been able to tune her cards, to be revealed. But nothing happened excepting that a woman walked around an island of dunes and rocks. The lions apparently guarded nothing but the mystery of their own lives. As a desperate act, to get the attention of the gods, she drew one of her pistols and shot a young male between the eyes. The lion fell. The others reacted to the sound of the shot by scattering. The dead one’s blood ran down the beach into the water.

On returning to the Queen she went to her cabin where she cried in the arms of First Old Woman, who also grieved, for her aches and pains, her lost battles, and the nearness of the grave, and for all that was smashed to pieces in the middle of the night.

That was when she exiled herself, becoming Ultimate Rose Shade, living all those years with Dirtwood, who was a clever thief, but wouldn’t have torn his bandages off or danced when he was broken open; he’d have lectured about the stupidity of the system, glaring with his sleepless methie eyes. He got what he needed from their holdups and muggings; she never did.

 ~~~

Without the girl around, Mam Eugénie had time on her hands. Her mind, which was not an easy mind to get to know, even for its owner, took to breaking habits. One night she tied a stone to her cards, except the Charioteer, to whom her attachment was too strong, walked out to the end of the longest pier and threw them into the sea. Feeling her persona adjust itself immediately into a new balance, she spent a few days alone thinking and tidying up. Only when she felt quite ready did she go to visit the girl’s lover. He did not seem at all surprised to see her. He was courteous, and obliquely, politely inquisitive. As sometimes happens, perhaps more often than one’s natural instinct for the probability of these things would guess, two people who had expected no reward from each other’s company found common ground. After an initial period of wariness they talked their way around to a peculiar alliance. By this stage she had resumed certain studies, left aside long ago. He claimed that he knew techniques for unlocking memory of, he said, the magic of a past time, which had been hidden by its practitioners in ‘places that require a mirror to see’.

This turned out to be half true. If she had not been who she was, the tedious rituals would perhaps have had no effect. But her particular genius asserted itself so that she was able to say no, look, you’re wrong here, here and here. And so the work was done.

He stated his wish. She acquiesced. With his money she bought the hotel and renamed it. He now spent most of his time asleep. The rituals had drained him. He was not, after all, as old and strong as she. She helped him up to the good room at the top and activated the mascarons. Only then did she feel angry about the situation—that he, because of who he was, could choose the option while she could not.

She predicted the governor would come next, and he did, accepting gratefully and without fuss the bed she gave him, but she was surprised that his doctor asked for a bed too.

When, next morning, she went up to adjust the mascarons in the top room she took the Charioteer out and, comparing the picture with the figure on the bed, reflected that she had been a fool to hope for the hinted similarities to prove wholly true.

 ~~~

The day draws on. The head sleeps, the tail is awake. Dogs, weary from walking up and down the hot alleys of the town, lie down under banyan trees, on porch steps, in temple yards at the feet of idols, dark with oil rubbed into the wood, and dream of interminable smells. All along the beach, slender palms lean seaward over the hot sand. Striding up the beach comes the Corsaire, alone, in her indigo sea-coat with silver braid, a sash around her waist holding her cutlass and pistols.

She sniffs the air, which pongs of rotting kelp and ugly gases from the volcano in the middle of the island. Under the trees lie broken cargo boxes and various bottles, cans and packets lying around them in wilful-seeming disorder.

He lies sprawled on the sand. His pale body is in a sorry state: gnawed, as though hagfish had been at him. But he’s breathing with a healthy sound.

The point of a cutlass makes contact with his chin.

‘Dirtwood. Breaking parole?’

Dirty yellow eyes open. He stretches benignly. ‘The old boss is gone, darling. You’re talking to the new number one. I’m the king here now.’

‘King of what?’

‘Of multitudes of beasts and spirits.’ He looks around vaguely, as if he has forgotten something. ‘I do as I please now. I can vamp around… dream in my boudoir… avoid tax, and taxonomy. I once dug a very deep hole in the sand, and found another hole at the bottom. I paint pictures on cigar box lids and sell them to tourists. I write stories and roll them up into bottles, a chapter to a bottle. I throw them into the sea. One month I had no bottles, so I wrote an epic into the water itself, a poem of love to the ocean, and received a week of beautiful storms in return. Would you kill such a sentimental man?’

‘Tyrants are usually sentimental.’

‘You, love, have owned a heart of iron since titty and will have it to tombstone.’ He gets to his feet with rubbery agility and only a slight wobble. ‘But I have a dog’s heart; I profess the sentimentality of a dog. Of all the hearts of beasts, among which I count the beast mankind, a dog’s heart knows best how to love.’ Folding his hand over his heart, he has an air of shabby, affected and rather shaky menace that could be seen as beauty in a certain light, quite different from the full and glaring light of truth that generally delivers a killing blow to love.

 ~~~

The crew, watching from the Cargo Cult Queen, anchored beyond the reef, observed their captain and the man playing hopscotch on the sand. The Captain drew the squares with her cutlass. First Old Woman kept her rifle trained on the man.

The Corsaire seemed to win, and the man to give her a prize, a bottle from one of the crates. Generous in victory, she shared it with him. First Old Woman allowed her finger to slide off the trigger. 

The pair on the island shared more bottles as the afternoon wore on. Presently they were heard singing. First Old Woman smiled. It was a comedy after all. He was not the monster he seemed: he was humble, beautiful, transfigured. As for the Corsaire, she glowed like live coals in the evening light.

With every appearance of courtesy and good humour they drew their pistols. When the moment was over there were two bullets in his body. First Old Woman had done her duty.

The Corsaire searched him and found a ring on a chain around his neck. She snapped the chain and pocketed the ring.

 ~~~

‘It’s getting late,’ observes the Marquis, resting from his exertions. The pipe, still in the Corsaire’s hand, is bubbling over with lava.

She makes a gun out of the fingers of her other hand and points it at his head. ‘Bang. You didn’t have a chance.’

‘Bang? Can we?’

‘What did I just say? Not a chance.’

‘You could be nicer.’

‘You loathe nice people.’

‘I loathe working for no reward.’ He sulked, leaving the bed and going to the window to look, for the sake of looking at something, at the gas clouds that hung in the western sky like red and blue cobwebs.

Two clouds were drifting towards each other. He watched them meet and eddy, becoming violet where they met.

Smelling smoke, he turned around.

She had fallen asleep and dropped the pipe, and now there was a violent little fire blazing away in the rumpled sheets.

This is the beginning of the Corsaire’s story. Very much a work in progress.

Amor: part three

What Ultimate Rose Shade had to say to Dirtwood the night they hopped town, which was plenty, she had to say to the windscreen. He was vacant on the couch in the back of the battle limo under the glowing mascarons, locked in their samadhi field.

She’d blown off all her steam by the time they got to the beach. It was overrun with low-order plasmics and hottentoden, screaming in their bathing chairs. It made you want to just give up. She unbuckled and turned around to unhook Dirtwood.

But he was only there when he needed to be.

He had taken all their money.

~~~

A child ripens naturally in suburban doldrums: from the abandoned birthday present, the cobra box on the summer lino, what rompish, darksome, magic character will step out, whistling, jaunty as a loser can be? A question for a tropical night bursting with stars.

The beaches of the cove are deserted save for an immense black tortoise burying eggs, who is also a broad-backed Negro woman carrying a string bag full of oranges up a steep sunbaked street.

The blunt head raises and the tortoise’s calculating eye meets the eye of the Corsaire, who stands on the deck of the Cargo Cult Queen. The Corsaire takes the presence of the tortoise as a good sign and grins at her vulgar, largely anonymous crew of witches, walk-ins, deviants and bums, not one of whom is not also someone else or even several others. The Queen herself has also been, and still is, the Black Legend, the Toad Haul and the Closing Enigma, to name but three of this vessel’s vessels. Carrying sixty-four guns, bats and doves are carved on her gunport doors.

Of the Corsaire they say her eye is a silver mine, her tongue a dragon in a barrel, her hair a nest of storms, her smile a summerhouse for wolves and scorpions, and between her legs is an executioner with the manners of a goat. It may be that she encourages these rumours. But her eyes are truly silver. The stars of a night fallen out of time are clustered in the pleats of her irises and nailed to the vault of her pupil. They are her faithful, her lucky charms, the chandeliers of her romantic heart, by which she plots, in a manner that owes something to the school of the Maenads, her course from one violent set-piece to the next, plundering the fat Coalition ships of their gold and opium, meconium and mumia, but never finding the songs that contain the laughter of lobsters or the memories of bees, or any of the things that used to matter ages and ages ago when she lived in Mam Eugénie’s house.

~~~

The name of the island was Gethsemane. Because of the canals that crisscrossed the capital town it was known as the Venice of the Indian Ocean. Most of its people were poor except for the spice and coconut planters and the German governor, who lived in a white mansion with a female doctor who treated him for melancholia. When I was old enough to know, Eugénie told me that I was his bastard daughter. My mother was a prostitute. Eugénie couldn’t even tell me her name, only that she died in childbirth. When I was young I imagined that she watched over me, a guardian angel. By the time I was twelve I had discarded that fantasy. As I became independent I stopped wanting my dead mother bound to me; I wanted us both, she who had not asked to die and I who had not asked to be born, to be free of each other.

The one who looked after me was Eugénie, who had been the governor’s housekeeper. (I could not think of the German as my father; I invented another father, a spirit, a handsome, highly successful pirate who was black like me, whom I called the Leopard. He did not fade with my childhood so much as he became a part of me. The self never stops giving birth to itself, and it observes no taboos concerning engenderment, so that my father the Leopard could live in me as a girl, making love to me in secret, becoming the factor by which I multiplied myself and my initiator into this magic.)

Eugénie’s house was near the edge of the town. It was a cabin, little more than a hut, down the end of a green lane fringed with banana and plantain trees, and it was dirty and untidy. She had retired from housekeeping, she said, for life.

She never said the same thing twice, so I learned to listen.

Every Sunday afternoon after church and market and lunch she would lay out the cards. She said she was in love with the charioteer. ‘He drives through both worlds. I always wanted to be him. And now look at me, big and old—I wouldn’t fit in a chariot.’

‘You’d fit in a big chariot,’ I said.

‘Oh, but I’d be slow. I wouldn’t win any races.’

‘That’s true. And people would laugh at you, a big old woman in a big fancy chariot, never winning anything.’

‘Yes, they’d laugh all right,’ she agreed, and shuffled the cards again. Once she had started with them she didn’t like to stop. She could think of questions to ask them all afternoon. Perhaps it was just an idle addiction, a way of killing time, but I think she was looking for a message, one that never came.

~~~

I slept wherever I wanted to sleep. On windy nights I usually took my mattress outside and slept on the porch under a mosquito net. I’d have a bottle of sugarcane beer from the refrigerator and drink it while I watched the banana trees tossing and turning like restless half-asleep people, or as if racked by impossible choices. The wind brought a sense of swollen chance, as if any kind of thing could happen at any moment.

The night wind brings an utterly different mood when it blows in cold latitudes. Then it brings appalling and inescapable prophecies, futility and bad luck, the real threats of destruction and bereavement and the metaphysical pain of another bereavement, a desolation of primitive and unintelligible cause. I learned this later on when I took to the sea.

I intended to stay awake for a long time. I heard Eugénie singing in the kitchen. Then the light went off. I kept telling herself that in just a moment I would get up and walk out of the yard and down the lane a way, to see if that would cause something to happen—something for me, and for Eugénie too. But I didn’t want to be disappointed when, inevitably, nothing happened at all, and besides, I was drowsy with the beer. I lay hugging my body, clad in a singlet and shorts. I was moved by my own fragility, and out of my thoughts and emotions a lover quite naturally arose. In the beginning he was more confident than I, but soon I grew hungrily curious about the possibilities of love and he gracefully ceded the lead to me as I first turned him into a woman and me into a man, then him back into a man and me into a youth; I made myself old and made him young, and then, because nothing is forbidden in fantasy, I gave him the form of a child, a boy on the cusp of conscious libidinal awakening who dreamed in his room at night of a dark woman who came to his bed and talked to him as if he were a man and, night by night, taught him the pleasures of the sexual body. This was where I became aware of my internalised Leopard, who perhaps had only been male for convention’s sake.

~~~

Old Briny and Old Blow think they’re Mexican wrestlers. How the angels carry on! Well, that’s the way of Heaven; nothing but card games, brawls and raunch. The Corsaire lay in her hammock, dreaming, naked save for an eye-patch and a knife in a sheath on her arm. Her sleep was attended by First Old Woman, who sat on a sea-chest in the cabin, lovingly oiling an old rifle, a task she performed in that meditative, devoted frame of mind which, says Bachelard, gives rise to a higher degree of reality in objects so cherished. (Second Old Woman and Third Old Woman were propping up the bar in the wardroom.)

First Old Woman was skinny as a broom and black as a judge’s hankie, head shaved down to the scalp, face crisscrossed with the seams of great age, bare chested, wearing a faded green cotton sarong. Much that was pleasant went through her head as she polished her gun. Memories of riding the Sabbat bull, rum served in a powder keg, the entrance of the spirits of the air, the roughshod mystery.

First Old Woman talked to herself, soft enough not to wake her captain. ‘She went to Monte Carlo. And where was Charles II? She had scrubbed his toes. The Derby winner looked dusty. Unweeded countryside of my tired red poacher. Still the flakturme stand in the Augarten, the substrate is not yet ulterior. But our girl is okay. Once upon a time there was a girl who was as bad as she was sex on legs: she went around the world in seven veils. Mind the unwashed arch of her foot and the dark side of her bubble. Wild geese, don’t cry—wherever you go, it’s the same fucking world. Well, yo ho ho, and a bottle of John Frum. Steal, Milady, steal away…it does not exist and has not been seen by any of the Victorious Ones.’

The Corsaire slept on.

Concerning the “offence” of visible bra straps:

rubbish here

No, I don’t read the Daily Mail, I just surfed there via Google’s headlines. Honestly, what’s a girl supposed to do? Strapless bras are ok under evening gowns if you’re not doing anything very strenuous. Forget it at all other times. Going braless? Well, I do, but I’m small, and I do it for comfort rather than looks, since, like most women in their mid-thirties who haven’t had a boob job I look better with a bra on. Preferably a push-up bra with German engineering and Italian styling. To those who protest that a flashing bra strap is not beautiful, let them be informed: a woman doesn’t have to be beautiful every cotton-pickin’ minute of the day. Or reconsider: perhaps there’s nothing wrong with the sight of a bra strap at all. Perhaps it’s even a bit sexy. After all, what’s the point of all that lace and leopard print if no one sees it but your partner, who, unless he/she has an underwear fetish, probably never notices it.

Well. Sometimes a little fulmination just blows the cobwebs out.

So I’m awake at 2 am thinking frantically about insulation, plastering and lino. Can’t get back to sleep, so might as well edit and put this up. I give up on trying to do book-like formatting. Criticism is welcome - I’m always interested in what doesn’t work for readers as well as what does work.

Amor: part two

…In the full light of day the Marquis lies asleep, outstretched on his bed under the carrefour of a ceiling fan, still attired in last night’s clawhammer coat and tall boots, which are spattered with the mud of a Breton field; his opera hat and his magic cane with the jade owl for a knob—his crown and sceptre—are on the floor where anyone might pick them up. It is Sunday morning and he is utterly spent after the antics of a sabbat—no less hilarious for being predictable. As lord and gigolo of witches, his beauty is adequate for the needs of burlesque and zarzuela, folktale and pole dance. On his left hand, which lies across his smoothly rising and sinking breast as if to remind him, by a gentle echo in his flesh, of the many lusting hands that touched him in the night, he wears a Biedermeier iron filigree ring set with a Burmese ruby, token of his partisanship for the Red Empress, Queen of the Rose Garden. Off his body rises the smell of wet ashes and fresh violets; on his breath, the fumes of peasant liquor. Even in this seigneur, after whom the street in Madrid called Caballero de Gracia might have been named, there is still a modicum of Old Scratch, the pagan, the working class devil who does not wipe his shoes or comb his hair.

Like the girls of sixteen who sleep near death rather than grow up and accept the burdens and perform the sacrifices of womanhood he lies, as though by the agency of poisoned apple or pricked finger; the Marquis has become sleep; his body is the cobra-hooded gondola, a bower prepared for the union of contraries. In sleep he gives himself away without shame.

He has retreated to the Hesperus Hotel, which was once the palace of a sultan, where the only thing expected of him is that, like any other guest, he pays the rent on time, and the only lover in his room is the African sun. There’s a bay—one can see it out the open windows—busy with dhows, below the puzzlebox houses of the medina, but no sense of water being all around. There is a landmass pushing from behind: this is a coast, then, not an island.

Ruskin tells us that the quality of repose in art—and therefore, it could be said, in scenes from life apprehended with artistic sensibility—is the symbol of divine permanence, the especial characteristic of the eternal mind that exists sans the coming of change. In words so lovely that reason would not touch them, ‘it is the stillness of the beams of the eternal chambers laid upon the variable waters of ministering creatures.’

He does not tell us that repose is the great erotic quality too. But isn’t it? Isn’t the artistic weight of eroticism lightest at the climax of a sexual drama in the stage of latency—let us say, in particular, male latency, when a man, for whatever reason, be it to rest, or meditate, or heal, or die, has shut his eyes and withdrawn?

Though he has waited so long for her, ironically, he does not wake when she returns, even when she splays dark fingers on his breast. He’s plastered.

She rolls a coin down the dip from his chest to his stomach. It comes up heads. Don Juan. Hell money.

She’s breathing on his navel, teasing the tender-looking whorl in the delicate waist—so sorry, little scar, she says, and threatens to make him another umbilical cord, one that will connect them both and unite them in the passive joys of being passengers in each other. 

~~~

…But you stayed asleep, you lazy pig. To be honest, I was tired—tired of doing all the work, the exploring, the seeking, while you drifted in your nebula. I wanted you to be the one with the thoughts for once. So I’ll just be going, if you’re not going to open your eyes and play the game. Don’t think I’m going to lie down here beside you. Don’t think it for a minute, flyboy.

~~~

‘Not fair.’ The Marquis pauses crossly in his worship of the Corsaire’s breasts. He has grown a second head to facilitate the act and make it perfect. It is the first head that speaks; the second is mindlessly devoted to its work.

She raps him on the crown of the speaking head with the pipe.

‘Ouch! Now you’ve gone and bruised my top chakra!’

‘Oh, come off it. You never use that one.’

‘I sometimes do.’

‘It has dead moths in it.’

‘Well, blow them out.’

‘You know I can’t. My breath is a hurricane. I’d blow your head off—both of them. You’ll have to go outside and hang upside down—later.’

Both mouths bite savagely, drawing blood. It drives her wild.

‘I’ve been pleasuring you for the last ten thousand years,’ he says when she calms down. ‘I’ve lost count of your peaks of satisfaction. But you wouldn’t wait a few hours?’

‘Perhaps I was unjust.’ She doesn’t sound guilty so much as highly pleased with herself.

I’ve posted very little fiction here - only one or two short pieces of automatic writing, I think - as a recent letter from a reader made me realise. I write a lot of things that are just thoughts, or the thoughts of characters, which resist transformation into something solid and which I have made no serious attempt to publish (though I think I may have used bits of them in other things - I can never remember what I’ve poked in where, which is no doubt going to result in embarrassment at some point). I haven’t found a way to turn them into anything more structured than what they are and still retain what I like in them. Here’s this one, Amor, which will be in two or three (or more?) parts, with no guarantee of anything like an ending. Or a beginning, or a middle. I don’t know what to think of this kind of disjointed writing. It’s what I would call my natural style, really - it’s pure pleasure to do, and there’s a good deal of the automatic in it. I would be curious to know if anyone else finds it in any way worth reading.

Amor: Part One

At the hour when the kings of the evening, calm and light, silent as clouds, rise from their empyrean beds and discharge into fabulous urinals of Bohemian crystal…below these, in their ancient candle-winding, crimson-windowed schools, in a street of common, depressing terrace houses, gauze curtains are not thick enough to hide an old couple watching television. I thought they were decently dead; but no, he scratches his belly and she farts twice. The smell is curiously mild and sweet, like a memory of apples. She is not embarrassed, this heavy woman whose hands are red and swollen, who can’t hold her farts in. In her world the grand dormitories don’t exist. In her world there is only an unfailing light. In her husband’s world there is horror in the form of a red, immense old woman whom age has made intolerably coarse: a beast, a scarlet elephant, for which he manages, heroically, to feel pity. These two were observed by one who wandered like a stray dog from corner to corner. No crystal pissoir for him, only a thin, unbearably gentle faggot who begged for it like an orphan begging for bread and, in a girlish murmur, confessed, also, that he wished to touch, for hours on end, the feet of the master whose fall from grace was due to the profligacy of his love: he desired the beautiful and the abject, the elect and the outcast, with equal force. So his lover imagined him…

Dearest, Schätzlein, he wrote, I loved your dream of white migrating geese filling the night sky over the sea; and I loved you when you gave that sublime sky of birds to one who was bereaved and friendless. You were your most divine when you stood on the sea wall to watch the drunken bullfighter dancing alone, obstinately on the sand, under Aldebaran’s violent spell; you found him irresistible because he was unresisting and let the world have its way with him. You said he was perfect then, though in the afternoon’s corrida he had been the worst of a poor lot; and you were right.
I loved the clockwork monkeys and their minor-key march. How evil! How good! The blue-and-gold papier-mâché ape, fat as the laughing Buddha, shaking his head, Noli me tangere, mes petites amoureuses! Stupidity can be learned like a lesson. When I love such displays how can I not love you, who wandered conscious with a light in your hand, showing me these things that I recite back to you? You sent me away in order to find me again, and because my love is more than human I will wait for you until the world stops turning, dreaming your body into mine. I will always love you, my Corsaire, you, sailor upon waves of sound and light.

…Our nightly excursions to the docks at the harbour, to dens of muscled fishermen whose tattooed skins were rose and turquoise, cobalt and viridian, men like cathedral windows; you and I prowling, porous, desperately aware of childhood’s end, falling in love with sailor princes whose laughter beat against the windows like a hurricane…now by radiator light, in the peeling room at the Brittle Star, dice of jade, amber, coral, ivory, whalebone tumble on the baize; the gangly, simple-minded boy who trundles a fruit barrow by day—his gait is strange, high-stepping, his knees enormous, he is an example of a human being made entirely of flaws—plays the pinball machine, which someone has painted with quaint characters: Bluebeard, Queen Mab in her chariot, Caesar, Musashi, weeping Boabdil. Fat, tallowy Morel, the boucher et charcutier, otherwise known as the Minotaur, worships at the little altar in the corner where the tin Virgin stands with her robe hitched up, revealing a slot for coins to operate the electric votive candles. The butcher prays, by the little red holy lights, for his member to work again. The smell of beer, smoke and an unwashed crowd is the only incense acceptable to Our Tin-pot Lady, whose other name, all agree, is Gorgon. She is the revelation of love and the despair of armies; she is the darkness in which the tiger quenches his burning head; with a wink of her nether eye she’ll let you carry your sins into heaven: in other words, she’s a thoroughly good sort.

A black sailor known as Sardine tells the story of the pelican murdered in the harbour on a winter night. A man who was tattooed all over with a Harlequin pattern of coloured lozenges threw oil over the bird and set it alight. It died blazing like a Viking funeral on the water and as it thrashed in agony it lurched into a fishing boat and set the tarred hull on fire. The boat went up in flames, the fire spread, and six vessels in all were lost. While people rushed to try to save the boats, the pelican had only one avenger, a pale young Chinese sailor whose smooth skin was inked with the Willow Pattern. Weeping blue tears that joined the cursive river in the tattoos on his cheeks, he fought the arsonist in the street and cut his throat. Convicted of murder, the Chinese was hung the next day. As the body swung, it turned into a pelican and flew away; while the arsonist’s body, which had been awaiting burial, was witnessed transforming into an array of nocturnal creatures: bats, toads, weasels, rats, and a superb owl which scooped up one of the rats in its talons and soared away over the sea in white silence. The bats, too, took to the air, while the toads, rats and weasels hopped and scurried away into drainpipes and gardens. Everyone knew, then, that the two sailors had been the Marquis and the Corsaire, stooping to ugly mischief for a night.

…In Vienna, when you had money, you paid a famous miniaturist a fortune to paint a pack of cards commemorating your lovers: exquisite portraits on wafers of ivory slender enough to shine a lamp through. You and I were the jokers, burlesques of ourselves, a cannibal queen dancing in a grove of palm trees and a skeleton dressed for the opera. The motif on the reverse was a blue nautilus shell, a rebus for a naughty lass. You had your carpet knights, your Hapsburg sugar daddies, your savage teenage Junkers with duelling scars, your romantic Hungarians and Turks, the circumcised and the uncircumsised and the castrato, the Christian and the Mohammedan and the Jew; none of them suspected that you were happiest in your hours alone, with your own body, which, when your lover was gone, became a vehicle of fantasies. The role of grande horizontale was one you played well, and I loved you in it as I loved you in all your parts, but there was little for me to do. Our worlds were diverging, luxurious exhaustion the only pleasure left for us to share. It was necessary for me to destroy the world, as only I could, and thus open the betting on a new dream in which we could tell again our story of mutual need, of loss and redemption. But while I have the privilege of pulling the trigger, you have the privilege of determining our nature: and so I die again, and return at your pleasure, but so incorporeal that I am scarcely more than music, naked song, breathing raggedly in the rough, icy gale, shivering from birth, gasping with fright.

Embers blink in the faceted forge of the Biedermeier ring like conquerors growing old in the rooms of a palace, blinking at the fires of the revolution, reflecting the torches marching up the cypress allées… red stars fill the bowl of the ivory pipe in the Marquis’s hand in his dream. The cloud of the Ghost Money Nebula crowns the gorgeous rose, for he is down on his belly between the Corsaire’s swarthy thighs. The Marquis is trying to read the future in the smoke.
‘Well?’ demands the Corsaire.
‘We’re going to die, my darling.’
‘Again?’
‘And again.’
‘With duende?’
‘Yes, but also like the fleas on the fleas on a dog.’
Red stars fill the bowl of the ivory pipe in the jewelled, ladylike hand of the Marquis. The Marquis sucks on the pipe and delicately vents the smoke of a cremation ghat onto the hennaed lobes of the Corsaire’s rosehood.
‘Did you say we are to die again?’
‘Definitively, Schätzlein.’
‘Oh, give that bloody thing to me…’

Images of an Australian native, the rare, shy, arboreal supermarket trolley:

And the inedible but attractive Pavement Yabbie: