Presenting this week the very messy page 20:

Amor: part ten

(This, she said, is what you get for smoking in bed. He gazed rather aghast at the violent clouds of the obliterated cosmos.)

A strong sea-breeze was blustering across the pier, lashing with cold bursts of spray the few hardy promenaders who were out that afternoon. The sea was all whipped up; grey waves hurtled into the breakwater; the sailboats in the marina knocked together. The gulls had wisely vacated the sky, leaving it to Boreas; the wind ripped up the grey clouds like someone rummaging for something in a drawer.

And didn’t it make you feel alive, thought Eadie Triumph, who said, ‘I think we’ll have a rough night,’ and clutching to her head her hat with plastic cherries, ‘The young lass ought to have a coat, if you don’t mind my saying so, Jack.’

‘I am quite all right, thank you, Eadie,’ said the lass in question, who seemed to think she was a man. She had her hands thrust in her pockets and was gazing into the offing with the intense detachment of a controlled mind.

Then there was the former Marquis, who seemed to think he was a girl.

‘You are going to go through the elbows of that sweater soon,’ predicted Eadie, who would not be put in her place without mounting a fight in retreat.

‘Then you will knit me another, won’t you?’ The girl released a hand from a pocket and took the arm of the woman, whose tall largeness and brown, hairy coat gave her the look of a splendid bear.

‘No need for that cool grin, Miss. Perhaps,’ Eadie the bear threatened, ‘I will teach you to darn.

‘Or we might consider a shopping expedition,’ suggested the deposed Marquis. He was frail. He had died too many times. He walked with a cane (it had a milk-glass knob in the shape of an embryo) and wore an astrakhan coat like the defeated Napoleon, and spectacles. He quietly, tenaciously fought a private beast of dejection. He called himself Jacob Silver; Eadie always called him Jack.

‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to that,’ Eadie said. ‘I have a lot of things that could do with being replaced. You cannot darn and mend forever.’

‘Next time, then, Eadie,’ said Mr Silver. In his sad yellow eyes a smile stirred for her. She had given him the impression that she remembered their having been lovers. He could not honestly recall, and in any case it didn’t matter. These days he went to bed early with a cup of beef tea which she, bless her, always brought him. She said she was content running the boarding house; and if nothing else, she said, she had a lot of time in winter to think, but not brood, mind; but she would gasp when the lightning looped like barbed wire and rush to the window and throw it open—‘to let in that sublime discharge and set on fire the several—’ and would forget, then, what on earth she was trying to say; would forget where the quote was from; and forget to close the window, so that he had to drag his hollow bones out of bed and do it himself, since he never, of course, after she had erupted, could ask her.

‘Oh, look,’ she cried, gesticulating at a ship. ‘The Fighting Temeraire!’

The girl scowled. She had loved the ship in the picture when she was young, had felt for the ship and for that reason Eadie had felt fiercely for her. When she was very small, she liked to call every ship she saw the Fighting Temeraire, and Eadie had played along with delight. Now it was only Eadie who hung on stubbornly to the ritual.

‘I’d like to go away on a ship again,’ Eadie said, her gaze still on the romantic shape. ‘I did it once, when I was young. We had ever such a hilarious time.’ Her big hands, with the rings buried deep in the thick, chapped, purple flesh, stroked each other as if standing in for other hands she had kept in memory. ‘Not that I’d expect anything like that to happen now, of course. I have often said to myself that life is a death of a thousand cuts.’

The girl, evidently not done with her wrath, said, ‘I would cut you, Eadie. I’d cut the rings out of your fingers.’

‘Well, good Lord.’

Mr Silver said, ‘Tam, I think that was rather too much.’ The former Marquis had taken off his spray-spattered glasses to wipe them with a handkerchief. He squinted at her. She was a blur, like the afterimage of a runner. Then he put his glasses back on and focused on the little fair at the end of the pier, their destination, which looked forlorn enough to furnish a whole library of sentimental thoughts. The rides were going around with their gondolas almost empty, their few occupants looking like the last leaves of November, he thought; and he thought how every kind of thing has its stalwarts, at the same time as he was thinking of the gas fire and comfortable rooms, and had to keep his mouth firmly shut against the semi-invalid’s excuses, the plea to be let off, that hurtled forward wanting to be uttered.

He consoled himself with thinking that at least there would not be long queues.

But Tam wanted to be the strong little black tug; like any child she sensed the right to have her day.

He looked at Eadie, who was likely to wait in vain for an apology. ‘Schätzlein…’

But her glance was the thunder; she was in her high dudgeon, an elevation to which no zephyr of appeasement could climb—she was thinking now, he knew, of all the injustices and insults she had suffered—so that there was nothing for it but to choose, and link his arm in poor Eadie’s, and sacrifice the child—who might hold a grudge of might not, for sometimes children do forget. But Eadie would have held the grudge.

Then Eadie squawked out with a curse. She had taken her hand off her hat to accept Mr Silver’s arm and before she had had the chance to raise the other hand the wind had chosen that moment to blow with sudden extra strength. The bravery of cherries sailed through the air and landed in the grey choppy water, and Eadie’s grey choppy hair waved around wildly. The hat took on water.

She watched the sinking cherries and said, because it seemed necessary to say something, ‘You cannot imagine how I liked that hat.’

‘I will buy you another, Eadie,’ he was quick to offer.

‘Do not,’ she said, ‘be so silly,’ and thought how really beyond the pale it was that Tam should laugh.

***

They made up, however, at the fair, and went on all the rides, clutching each other and shrieking while Mr Silver concentrated on not being sick. When they had been up and down and around and around enough times to satisfy them at last, Eadie insisted on paying for teas.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I would like to, Jack; and it doesn’t matter, does it?’

He acquiesced but wouldn’t take a scone. The rides had ruined his stomach. She patted his arm.

‘But you lost your hat,’ he said, because the image of the bravery sinking was bothering him.

They might have lingered past the end of the day had not Tam, being the little tug still, said that they should be going.

The weather now was really wild, ‘And dark enough to be night,’ Eadie said, holding very firmly the arm of Mr Silver, who, hearing a roaring in his ears that was not the sea, accepted the might of her paw. He had given the cane to Tam, who held it like a thyrsus. Like this they came to the end of the pier.

Tam brought the foot of the cane down once on the wet wood with a hard bang; Eadie stretched her hands out and arranged her fingers to form a certain figure with her rings standing at the points of its angles; Mr Silver removed his glasses; and the illusion of the pier was gone, and in its place a cliff facing an inchoate nothing that offered no opposition which might have clarified their position a little better.

Was it silly, Eadie wondered, to think of the void as atmospheric?

‘Say something, Jack,’ she said.

‘We commend our souls,’ he began, then broke off laughing, too embarrassed to go on. The girl, or boy, at any rate the child, laughed too and hurtled the cane into the void. Then all that was left was to jump, which they did, in the ordinary way, holding hands, the child unafraid, the adults terrified.

***

‘Where is she?’ asked Eadie, looking around.

‘Oh, look, my dear,’ he exclaimed, ‘I can see your hat.’

~~~

Well, that’s all, folks. The ending owes much to the end of The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren, which was my favourite book as a child. I hope I’ll be able to turn this indulgence into something publishable. Thank you to all readers.

No, this is not about Paris Hilton. The French capital “has launched a charm offensive” aimed at foreign visitors after a survey found it was one of the world’s rudest cities. That wasn’t my experience. As a tourist, speaking only a little French, I found the French people, including Parisians, to be, contrary to reputation, some of the nicest I’ve met anywhere. People in shops were pleasant without being overbearing (except in Galerie Lafayette’s perfume department, where they were pleasant and overbearing); gallery owners were willing to chat about the work on display even though I obviously couldn’t afford to buy it; hotel workers were courteous and helpful; complete strangers were friendly. Only one or two people, at posh places in Paris, seemed a bit snobbish, but that’s a couple out of many. What was generally absent, thank goodness, was false pleasantry and plastic charm. I hope that is not what tourists have condemned as lacking.

(I’m not the only one, either - a friend recently told me that he and his wife also found the French to be amiable.)

Amor: part nine

He suspected the town would have desolate outskirts and it did. He felt his way along, navigating by some doglike instinct, down unpaved streets lined with poor houses. The children, who he found playing on an empty lot, didn’t object to his joining in their game. It was a complicated one involving the manipulation of marbles, leaves and words, and he was hopeless at it.

The dark boy who was the leader told him that he must forfeit a finger and produce a rusty knife. He felt himself so drawn into their fantasy world that he almost agreed to the amputation. He actually placed his hand on the tree stump and nearly didn’t jerk it away in time as the knife slashed down. Angry with himself, he took it out on the boy and hit him across the face harder than he had intended. The boy retreated into sullenness with a bloody nose. He felt sorry, ridiculous and stupid. What was he doing here, after all? Why had he not got on the train? He looked around at the children’s faces slowly, hunting for something he couldn’t have put a name to, and when he could not find it he walked away, rubbing his smarting knuckles. He heard them laughing behind him, the unmistakeable pitiless laughter that children throw at all outsiders, and wasn’t surprised when a stone struck him on the shoulder. He kept walking. He wanted to tell them how he’d fought for them, risked his life to keep bad people away from them—but he’d punched the kid enough to make his nose bleed, hadn’t he?

The road took him out of the town, into thin bush country with many trees, all of them quite similar. The angel had showed its other face; but when the crisis came, he had failed to kill it. Now he could face the fact at last: he was a bit of a duffer, never all that bright or good at games, certainly not original in thought or character or deed. The war had allowed this realisation to be delayed, but it would not be delayed any further. There was love, only love in him; and while he detested himself he must love himself too; and it followed that he must die of love, even die a dog’s death of love.

It was the boy with the broken nose who found the body. He pushed it gently back and forth, feeling a thrill for the coal-black swollen tongue, the eyes already pecked, the trousers soiled in the body’s last spasms. He felt for that corpse the most profound love he had ever felt for anything. He sang to it as he pushed it back and forth, and squeezed its hand, thanking the man for being dead, so that he couldn’t hurt anyone.

(The Marquis was holding the Corsaire rather tightly, as if he were afraid of falling.)

I have lots of things to do today and I’m tired and procrastinating. Hence - another page:

(remember Day of the Tentacle ?)

Will Gwynn become a musumeyaku?* Tune in next time to find out…

*A Takarazuka actress playing a female role (literally “daughter role”)

Edit: I forgot to mention that Bancoran is known as the “Bishounen Killer” - not because he actually kills pretty men, but because men (boys, actually, but I’m trying to keep this comic legal) find him irresistible.

His name is Szilveszter P. Szabo, he’s a Hungarian singer, and at least from certain angles (though not front-on, really) he looks a lot like my pointy-featured obsession:

smiling

looking up

toothy grin

in glitter (as Death in the musical Elisabeth - which is how I found him in the first place, after looking up Mizu Natsuki in the same role)

Death talks to a boy

Now if I could only get the name of the guy on the left with the Bancoran eyeshadow…Costume ideas:

1

2

Wtff?

For once I remembered to take my camera to the park in the morning and got some shots of the water monitors in the lake at Lumpini Park.

Not sure if these two were fighting or getting ready to mate:

Normally it’s hard to get close to them; they tend to scoot - or amble, really - away when you come near, but I was told that this one, which was unusually mellow about being approached, had just laid her eggs and was tired and therefore disinclined to move:

It’s Dukat and Damar! The female above would have mated 4-6 weeks ago, but the mating season isn’t over yet. I made a couple of mpeg movies but am having trouble uploading them, so until I get that figured out, some dodgy photos of lizardly love:

I think the fetus is part shmoo.

* Takarazuka are an all female musical theatre company. (Edit: found Sanada’s great Takarazuka post, with Bancoran lady in a pimp coat that really looks more like Gwynn’s sartorial taste than Bancoran’s.)

In Starbucks with a friend yesterday I saw that there was a new cake on offer: red bean lamingtons. I was rather amazed, since lamingtons are an Australian cake - a simple, humble old favourite, consisting of a cube of sponge or butter cake with jam in the middle, iced chocolate all over,  and rolled in coconut, that as far as I know hasn’t gotten further abroad than New Zealand - until now, it seems. I decided to break this no grain thing to try the sample of lamington; how could I resist? It was quite ok, though the red bean paste was too much like the chocolate in flavour and consistency. I think the jam, which provides more contrast in flavour and texture, is really better. Going by Google, it seems Starbucks in other countries, at least in Asia, also have lamingtons, but it isn’t clear whether there are different fillings in different countries (peanut butter lamington in America? Chip buttie lamington in the UK?). Anyone want to do some research…?