Wild blubbery aliens

We heard about them from the man in the hut serving a huge old wind pump once used to drain the Broads; one of those people who vocalises everything they think. On the last day of the holiday we parked up again by the pump and walked in rain for nearly an hour to reach the spot on the coast he’d described. I don’t think my daughter really believed there would be that many. But then neither did I.

We breasted the dunes and looked down. From that distance, if you stumbled upon them without knowing they were there, you might think that they were rocks, because they blended in with those which form the groynes on this quickly eroding coast; and perhaps because they were lounging post-prandially, there wasn’t a lot of movement. 300 grey seals, actually a variety of colours, spread across four sections of beach. An amazing sight. Carefully we edged to within about ten metres. Any closer and they lumbered nearer to the swash.

Seals are strange creatures; fatty blobs on land, swift and true in water. Though the grey’s scientific name Halichoerus grypus translates as ‘Hooked-nosed sea pig’, there was something canine about them; they seemed both alert and inert at the same time. They didn’t make that ‘arf arf’ circus seal sound, instead producing more of a keening ‘oooo’, which I imagine translates as ‘mate, watch out for that slim, shifty camera-wielding biped at five o’clock from you’.

My previous sighting of seals in the wild consisted of a single bewhiskered pinniped swimming close to a jetty in St. Ives. I never dreamt of seeing 300 together so close to human habitation. My daughter was thrilled. For once, on a walk, we had delivered the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The hill of broken amphorae

The rescued amphora fragment was just a broken pot; but one that lay at the bottom of the sea for 2,000 years. Likelihood is that it comes from a shipwreck, and that in itself would be a tale. But then there are all the individual stories which brought the people on board to that disastrous moment. Who survived, who perished, what else was lost besides oil or wine? Great loves and small progressive steps forward, manacled slaves, families plunged into poverty at a stroke?

I’ve never been to Rome, but if I ever go, I know which place I’d visit first. Forget the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel, I want to stand on Monte Testaccio. A mound of pottery fragments which when whole held olive oil, it’s a mile in circumference, 35 metres high, and comprises an estimated 53 million amphorae, all once handled by people with tales to tell. Through the soles of my feet I’d absorb those oily stories: matriarchs cooking their way through the loss of sons in foreign lands, traders losing everything as a result of shipwreck, and the pot smashers and stackers who raised up that mound fragment by fragment – horny-handed Romans daily risking cuts from terracotta shards as they broke up the amphorae.

The stories don’t end with Rome ceasing to dispose of its pots there. The hill was the scene of jousting in the Middle Ages, while in the nineteenth century Stendhal visited and it became a place of festivity upon which the saltarello was danced. There too Garibaldi defended Rome against a French attack. On Good Fridays it even stood in for Golgotha.

Time made something beautiful out of what started life as a tip. It’s hard to envisage that time will do the same to our rubbish dumps, but it may.

Wore [h]

On a long undeviating road between two burgeoning villages stood a small mansion; a contradiction in terms. It contained a dozen ladies of ill repute but no apparent nearby source of patronage. Yet connections forged by its madam ensured a steady stream of gentlemen to its door, come from nearby towns and well beyond, seeking apparently welcoming bosoms in a place discreetly far from prying eyes.

Despite being some way from first bloom, Evangeline was Abbess Cora’s prize girl. Pale porcelain skin, full red lips, tresses of curling flame licking breasts of plump grandeur and an artful dress sense; every visiting gentleman would gasp as Evangline entered le salon, trademark green gown rustling parquet floor. A dozen possibilities, but none except Cora’s designated successor possessed allure to infinite degree.

In reality Evangeline was Lottie. ‘Evangeline’ was merely a projection, a room even, and in order to enter it, gentlemen paid liberal amounts. No ordinary man could venture to guess correctly about Lottie’s interior. If you imagined Lottie despised someone, you would likely be wrong; similarly, if you surmised money and influence impressed a caged bird, you would also be in error. Lottie’s mind outstripped most mere lust-laden men’s; few if any could ever knock down a congenital pride in self-determination unfettered by Edwardian mores.

Given licence to explore Lottie, men seldom understood boundaries. Reeking of cigar smoke, eructing all manner of unpleasant odours as a result of fatty food and dental disregard, few got to kiss Lottie; use of flannel, soap and warm water was routinely required before Evangeline would take a gobful of arbor vitae.

Yet it would be easy to indulge in a see-saw cynicism, and see all men alike, all a-growling and a-longing; eagerly pawing away at Lottie in casting about for entrance to a tunnel of love, a fall into wet oblivion. Lack was every man’s common ground. Some craved confirmation, some a manifestation of wild imaginings. Some Lottie fixed tenderly, adding to a space left empty by unfulfilled lives and starved senses. Lottie licked scars and mended broken wings, was all ears, all myocardium. And at daybreak, sun-dazzled, a man left and Lottie knew a tall story was leaving too. Client became conqueror, a king, puffed up into an affirmation of life, plumped anew.

Kept in a turreted room, on demure display in its roundel windows, notions came to Lottie of being an inverse princess, trapped and looking down on stony ground from far above, awaiting rescue, for someone sufficiently noble to save a fallen woman raised up and exalted on scented pillows to be future queen of a queer domain.

And one day one man made Lottie feel like one woman; allowed Evangeline and Lottie to merge.

***

An unmarried writer of great erudition but modest means, Orlando was visiting a considerably more famous colleague – indeed, a great man of letters – now residing in Surrey for sweet air blown by sou’westerlies up over downs. ‘Stay as long as you like,’ said Conan Doyle, magnanimously. So Orlando stayed, and read, wrote and walked, little suspecting life was about to be turned upside down. But not long after arrival it was, and now – now leaving was difficult to contemplate. Commitments would eventually force Orlando’s return to town; far from a religious man, O prayed for CD’s good opinion, and open invitations to stay again.

Cause of Orlando’s prayers was a woman. Not just any woman, but one pursuing a profession as old as memory itself. At dinner one evening, a second guest of Conan Doyle’s tipped Orlando a wink, and after port and cigars, ensured transport was laid on. Arriving at Cora’s bordello, a twenty-nine year old virgin (yet an onanist of longstanding), Orlando in spite of nerves could not see past Evangeline.

***

Lottie gave all to Orlando. A man as gently timid and yet as voracious for love was not uncommon. But Orlando was exceptionally intense of eye, and full of nervous poetry. Looking into Orlando’s brown eyes, Lottie’s insides turned over. No-one else ever laid as bare a woman considered leprous by people of propriety. Orlando immediately saw all of Lottie, and L concealed only amazement at a turn of events so unexpected. Conversation between writer and slut flowed like Abbess Cora’s claret. Orlando’s inbred sense of being erudite dropped away as Lottie put womanly intelligence in service of a pleasure far beyond O’s experience. As well as servant, Lottie was master; Orlando willing pupil. Paired at last, Lottie felt vindicated for waiting, for letting scores and scores of men take possession of a body engineered for love-making.

***

‘Do you remember our first time?’ said Orlando one spring evening, O’s last before departure from Conan Doyle’s. Between pairs of gazing eyes resting on a single scented pillow, it played out again in loving minds. First of every way conceivable, a kama sutra from A to Z and back again. Stroked skin recalled first contact. Lottie’s present grasp of Orlando’s need summoned again frissons of novitiate excitement as experienced prostitute wrapped nervous client’s cock in pale pink drawers and expertly milked it. Evangline’s fearless gaze met intense surprise. Orlando swooned to feel silk so soft and cool around a rigidity belonging now in every particular to Evangeline. Evangeline became Lottie and let Orlando kiss lips unused to kisses, unused to O’s soft sentience. Evangline-Lottie wore Orlando like a glove, rising to ride loins unused to craving complete envelopment. For Orlando alone, Lottie-Evangeline was paradoxically cloven and joined.

In post-coital reverie Orlando twirled Lottie’s ringlets about a finger and dreamt of a future time. A time enabling a writer to record sexual experience, needing not to censor any detail. Orlando doubted it would ever come to pass. But Lottie said, ‘Yes, it will.’

After making love again – for already it was so – Lottie and Orlando smoked and smiled and told life stories, beginning at beginnings. ‘I want you to know my real name. It’s Lottie. Because if you want me, I want you to know and to possess a real woman, not a fantasy.’

One afternoon, Orlando studied Lottie dressing upwards from blowsy nakedness to an immaculate conception of male fantasy. Stockings (L wore flimsy gossamer like a second skin), drawers, button boots, corset, petticoat, bustle, underskirt. Subject to Orlando’s gaze Lottie’s garments became living items; O’s eyes enflamed material and so L’s desire. Lottie donned an elegant bottle green taffeta crinoline gown, cream-trimmed. Invited to do so, Orlando slowly laced Lottie’s fitted bodice. Fully garmented, Orlando wanted Lottie to undress again, just as slowly. Wanted Lottie over and over; could not bear any notion of losing L. To see no more of Lottie would be too painful.

‘Come to London; we must never be parted now.’

‘You know I cannot leave. I am indebted to Cora, and must first pay back all I owe. I can’t be yours until it is all paid. It will be years yet. No, don’t offer to pay it yourself; I know you do not possess sufficient funds.’

‘I will come back for you. I will make you mine. I will rescue you. Society be damned, you will be my wife.’

Orlando wasn’t first so to declaim for Evangeline. But Lottie felt longevity in Orlando’s declaration, and made an admission never previously gifted to any man.

‘One day, yes, I will be your wife, or you will be my abbot.’

Spring rain

We’re having the shower room done. For reasons too enervating to detail, it’s taking forever, and I’ve been forced to wallow in baths while the work is completed. I don’t especially like baths. They belong to childhood, to a freezing cold house with no shower. Shivering, I would scorch my feet in too-hot water upon testing it; after long immersion, my skin emerged as wrinkled as a prune. These days when I’m scurrying to get to work, baths take too long. Most of all, I don’t write well in them. They’re too soporific; don’t clear my head and induce a trance-like state as showering does. As I wash myself from tip to toe, ideas magically descend; ‘coming down like love, falling at my feet, just like spring rain.’ (Yes, I often sing too. Be glad you can’t hear.) Showers open my writing mind, allowing me to muse poetical and make connections from which a tumble of words will follow, once I sit down naked to rat-a-tat-tat them into the laptop.

So I’d been missing showering, until a holiday last week allowed me to write under water again, and dream this up. Of course ideas and sentences do come to me at other times in other ways and places, but running aside, none is more likely to birth new linguistic lifeforms than ten minutes in the shower.

The old shower at home had an abrasive power. With the pump that drove it decommissioned (health and safety), I’d been worrying that the new one might not do the trick. The holiday reminded me that such anxiety must seem mere minutiae to anyone who isn’t a writer. It’s a given that the new will work just as well as the old, and further sets of 300 words will begin life in the shower.

Glass-bottomed boat

Tanned and muscular, Mario could not have been more Greekly masculine; but he was infinitely patient too, and his boat was glass-bottomed.  It allowed you to see what would otherwise not be seen, down to the depth beyond which the human eye could not penetrate.  Through panes which light and water rendered jade, I saw starfish, octopuses, loggerhead turtles, a mysterious underworld of shoaling and sand and rock and weed and murk.  The prism of the glass was our fish eye, and we were an underwater creature with an excess of limbs.  When I raised my head I saw Ionian blues and sun-baked land and cliff faces carved into irreproducible forms by wind and water.  In their lee we dived and swam into caves lit from below by the sun striking through the water to reflect off white sand.  Mario’s boat took us places we would not have otherwise gone.  From the depths he retrieved the handle of an amphora, unseen by human eyes since the time of the gods.

Looking through the glass, I thought of Momus, the god of raillery and mockery, who wanted windows set in the breasts of men, the better to see inside their hearts.  If I wasn’t already awildslimalien, I might have called this place Glass-bottomed boat.  For here is where I lay open my heart and let you inside my mind; where also I try to see inside the breasts and foreheads of others.  Of course I can’t see inside of everyone; I’m no Greek god.  But if I have anything of a gift for seeing where sight alone doesn’t take you – into the idiosyncracies of the relationships of others, across boundaries of sex and species – then I feel I should make use of it, and give back what I have been gifted.

The horseshoe [u]

In a remote hamlet many moons ago there lived a farrier whose air of charm had allowed him to make a marriage above his station to a similarly charming woman, the stripe of whose character he had not bothered to ascertain before the banns.  He liked the way she felt in his arms, against his chest, and at that time of his life, little else mattered to him.

His new wife placed great store on the lore and traditions of their part of the world.  One of these was to hang a horseshoe above the door of the dwelling place, in order to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  The farrier however scorned the old ways, and to assert his word over both his wife and the whole of his domain, he nailed their horseshoe to hang from its loop rather than its arms.  When she saw what he had done, his wife told him that any milk and honey with which their coming together had been blessed was now as good as spilled.  The farrier scowled, and said as if to himself, ‘Next she’ll be telling me that horses talk!’  In the coldest tones of their marriage so far, his wife replied, ‘Mark my words, we will pay a price for this.’  The very next day the farrier was kicked into the following week by an irritable stallion whose hooves he had been overlong in shoeing.  He had only a dim notion of how close he had come to being kicked into the afterlife.

On his first day back in the smithy, he hammered the index finger of his left hand broken.  The following week having been called to a job, he stepped inside for a drop of the local elixir, and emerged to find that his tools had been stolen.  He began to get a name for mishaps befalling him.  Many who had once come to him with their beasts looked elsewhere, fearing that he was more bother than he was worth.  Some work however still came his way, and soon he began tentatively to remark that the ill-winds which had been blowing his way now seemed to be howling over someone else.  ‘Told ye so’ passed his lips all too often.  His wife bit back her chidings.  Had he considered why, he might have realised that her silence meant something; sense, let alone wisdom, had not yet been knocked into the farrier’s head.

What the silence meant was soon revealed.  Walking one afternoon into the stables of the richest man in the district – the man who provided him with the majority of his work – he froze to see his wife bent over a bale of hay while his lord and master made close inspection of parts of her anatomy that till then he had fancied marriage had rendered to him alone.

The shine the lord of the manor had taken to the farrier’s wife went beyond worrying what serfs and vassals made of him, let alone God, and soon after being discovered in flagrante delicto, he arranged for an accident to befall the farrier while on his way to a distant farmstead.  Left for dead in a ditch, the farrier crawled his way to the road’s edge, where a passing tinker added him to his collection of scraps, trinkets and ironmongery, and took him on his way.  In a town a great distance from the only place he had ever called home, he slowly began to recover his wits and his senses, cared for by the tinker’s wife.

The tinker liked to shoe his own horses, and had the wherewithal to allow the farrier once he was better to renew his trade in the town to which horse and cart had carried him barely alive.  Soon he was able to afford his own premises, above the door of which he nailed a horseshoe with its arms pointing to the sky.  He did not really believe that fate had anything to do with the chapter of accidents which had befallen him; however, he wasn’t going to take any chances.  His heart was clear.  He bore his wife no ill will yet neither was he of a mind to take or win her back from the lord of the manor.

One morning he was close to finishing trimming a fine sorrel mare which belonged to a rich landowner whose patronage he had gained.  As well as the elegance of her coat, the mare was notable for the two silver bangles which circled one of her forelegs.  When he had asked the owner what was their significance, he had been peremptorily told to remember his place.  Now amid the blows of his hammer, he was staggered to hear the horse speak.  ‘No hands have ever handled my hooves as gently as this farrier’s have.’  So great was his shock that he only narrowly averted another broken finger.  The voice was half-neigh, half-maiden, and came to his ears as it might in a dream.  ‘I am going mad with overwork.  Did this mare really speak to me?’  A silence followed his words; then once again he heard the same strong yet honeyed voice.  ‘Yes, it was I who spoke.  I believe I have finally met with the man for whom I have long been looking, the one I will make mine if he makes me his, for I can hear in his words and his mind that he has taken blows at the hands of fate as have I.’

Speechless, the farrier stood before the mare and waited for more.  ‘Ride me to the head of the great river, and once I have taken a drink there, kiss my nose and rotate the bangles on my foreleg three times each.’  ‘And then?’  ‘And then see once more how life can change from bottom to top in the space of moments.’  Amazed at what the mare was saying more than at the fact that he was talking to a horse, the farrier said, ‘If I steal a horse, I can never come back to this town.’  ‘It is not stealing to ride a horse if the horse herself was stolen in the first place and she asks a good man to free her.’

He was being asked to leave behind his restored good name and a life renewed on the say-so of a talking horse.  The farrier realised he was at the mercy of another twist of fate; it was clear to him that he had to follow the path laid down for him.  ‘I have remade my life from scratch once before; I can do so again if need be.’  He sent word to the tinker and his wife that he had been obliged to leave immediately, thanking them for all they had done.  Then he bestrode the mare, settling into a leather saddle of a fineness beyond his own means.  Letting the reins fall, he allowed the mare to carry him across the borders of many wapentakes, following the river back to the spring from which it began.  Few words passed between man and beast, yet with each mile he felt the connection growing between them.

When they reached the head of the river, the farrier let the mare wander into the water to drink.  As soon as she had finished, he kissed her nose and rotated the bangles three times each.  So swiftly that he was never clear how it came to be, the horse transformed into a maiden-spirit asleep on the wet meadow grass by the water, naked save for the two silver bangles on her right arm, and so lovely that the like of it can only be told in tales, and yet is neither to be imagined nor divined.  He planted another kiss on her lips, and freed at last from enchantment, she awoke into his arms.  At no great distance from the head of the river, the farrier and the horse-maiden began their life together.  Children who had the power to transform at will into foals and back into children followed.  And the teller of the tale let them all live happily ever after.

300 words on not writing more than 300 words

Recently WordPress suggested that posts be tagged ‘longform’ to enable readers drawn to weightier fare to find it more easily.  What an ugly word.  I’m not doing that, even supposing it did mean losing countless visits.  But with all the competing verbiage around, I have wondered how well-read my longer posts are.  So I’ve decided to try writing shortform.  I learnt the discipline of working to word limits while writing reviews for a listings magazine.  If I remember correctly, I was paid £14 for 300 words.  Didn’t seem a fortune at the time.  Now it feels generous, for what it was.  Imagine if I got £14 for 300 words here!  My U alone would be worth £56.

Everything I’ve ever written has been thoroughly considered.  I need to force myself to give in to the here and now.  Any finessing will come in attempting to squeeze what I have to say into exactly 300 words.

Only me being me, I’m going do it 300 times.  Over time, to no particular deadline.  300 x 300 = 90,000.  By the end, I’ll have a book.  I can’t help thinking in terms of books.  They’re what I was bred on, what I always aspired to write.  So much of what I’ve written has been in the form of parts of something larger, a book to contain it all.  The web has changed everything.  Like water through all but the most watertight system, words find a way to their readers.  In comparison, a writer can start to believe that what books do is hide words away.  But I am still in love with the book, and I want one all of my own, like the Clash wanted a riot.

300 words.  That’s all.  No other prescription.  Anything as a subject.  How hard can it

The reader [u]

The writer can’t help imagining the reader of these words.  He hopes it’s not ill-mannered of him to poke his nose and the imagination which lies behind it into affairs which are none of his concern.  In his mind sirens call and he finds himself irresistibly drawn into another attempt to replicate a three-dimensional life from scratch, from nothing more than the cross a finely sharpened pencil might make on a map; a world from a grain of sand.

So he imagines her, or certainly alternately it might be a him… perhaps it might be safer in terms of not antagonising half his readership to think of this archetypal one as a non-gender-specific alien.  Yes, a race which doesn’t have sexes.  However, they do have sex; it’s the best of both worlds.  When they decide it’s time, they pass the calcified egg between them and go half and half on the rearing, like Emperor or King Aptenodytes.  In most other respects however they are like earthlings.  They enjoy a good breakfast, for example.  Poached eggs – they’re not averse to eating a reptile’s or bird’s – on wholemeal toast, with a pot of coffee.

So he imagines it in its kitchen.  Wait a moment; alien or otherwise, he doesn’t want to label his reader an ‘it’.  Perhaps it’s better after all if he says ‘she’.  Call it an attempt to redress the balance of the ages when it comes to denoting species as a whole by the male gender alone.  Earthlings and aliens in possession of the defining male characteristic will have to forgive him, and place their mind temporarily inside that of a female of the species.

So he imagines his reader first thing in the morning, scratching the scales of her nose with one set of highly developed fascicled toes, and with another clicking her way to this page on her technological device of choice; or perhaps if these stories ever find their way into a hard copy format she will simply take the bookmark from the book which at night resides on her bedside chest of drawers, and there at the kitchen table begin reading the next in the collection, namely this one.  Slowly, with the dawn, the realisation may arise that it concerns her, and the writer hopes that far from giving her a fright, this might make her smile.  As well as the poached eggs – which need exactly 180 seconds, as determined by the special perfect poached egg app on her technological device – she has the toast and coffee on the go, and these moments of waiting to sit at her kitchen table reading.  Really she only needs the app for its stopwatch; she’s cooked dozens and dozens of poached eggs in her time and knows to whisk the sea-salted, boiling water till it resembles a whirlpool before dropping the egg into the centre of the vortex, and that if it isn’t freshly laid, to crack the egg into a ramekin containing a drop of vinegar to aid the congealing process.

The coffee’s percolations travel in scented arabican loops to her nose as this very paragraph is scanned and despite the many tasks she has on the go, her mind’s eye feels it has settled into the rhythm of the writer’s prose.  At the ding of the app, however, she stops reading to plate and begolden the toast, fish the eggs (she’s having two) from the pan with a slotted spoon, and decant herself some coffee.  With the plate before her, she slits the two snowy ovals with her knife and watches with keen appreciation as gooey yolk pools on the toast.  Her tail swishes between the rods which form the back of the wooden chair on which she sits, spiralling one of them in what is evidently a characteristic expression of content.

As she wipes a smear of yellow from her reptilian lips, the writer imagines – especially if she is reading the story on the web where it may be less apparent that it is constrained than he imagines will be the case with a printed version – that the reader has been paying close attention and is in on the raison d’être of these stories.  She knows, for example, that as well as each story missing a letter, each takes its lead from the title, and attempts to tease as it skirts employing typically chosen words, preferring instead less common, lipogrammatically permissible forms.  Paradoxically he also hopes that at the same time as she is aware of it, she is also not noticing that the letter highlighted by brackets in the title has been temporarily excised from written English.  For he hopes that these stories work either way, with the knowledge or in its absence.

Having imagined it, the writer himself can smell the coffee now.  She likes it strong, and he wishes he might have even a thimble of it to keep his brain sharp as he strives to avoid the letter which it is necessary to avoid.  Idly he wonders if she has read anything of the sort before, broadly speaking.  He imagines she is a well-read alien, and will at least know of If on a winter’s night a traveller and Ella Minnow Pea and La disparition – translated as A void – even if she has not read all of them.

It’s a spring morning after a long winter, and the alien carries her device to the back door to keep on reading as she opens it to the day and lets light warm her scales.  Blooms are beginning to appear on the wisteria, and the tips of its stems are starting to seek something to hold onto.  Once again she will smile, he thinks, as she sits down with her second coffee on one of the ironwork chairs at the filigree garden table to carry on reading, over all this metafictional nonsense.  He allows himself to imagine that she likes writers who play with words, who love making them dance to their satisfaction and that of their readers.  However, now that his shaggy alien tale is nearly at an end, he stops to wonder whether she might in fact have preferred a good old-fashioned proper story, and in a flash decides to see if he can incorporate one.  Had he gone down that path rather than this, he might have written something with the title ‘The horseshoe’ and had the aim of transferring to his reader something of the felicity that went into the writing of it.  In the shire where the writer spent his formative years, it was traditional to position a horseshoe over the door of a dwelling place, so as to catch all goodness and keep evil at bay.  From this detail, he begins to fashion a fairy story, one which describes the mishaps which befall a careless farrier who pooh-poohs old wives’ tales and deliberately challenges the Fates, and that’s what part two of this lipogrammatic clash of postmodernism and traditional narrative is going to relate, a click or a leafing of the page away from here.

We [r]

Anna lay dying.  The disease against which she thought she had immunity had at last eaten its way deep into a body unable to fend it off.  Not long dead themselves, the colleagues she had lost had now become ghosts alongside the people whom she had left behind at home.  They moonwalked the modules of the silo, and leant down to pillow level to speak quietly unsettling sentences about joining them into Anna’s pinnae.  She hadn’t sufficient pep now to close the blinds, and watched the days pass double quick, two against each slow one back home.  The leafy giantwoods outside cast shadows which sundialled the walls of the sleeping pod like speeded-up film.  She had the sense that time was scuttling to a point, and existence likewise – the full stop following which it would not be possible to say, I think, so I am.  She would not be thinking, she would be dead, although life on this odd planet would still go its seemingly infinite way.  No-one was left to put Anna in a box and the box in the soil, and eulogise beside the gaping hole.  But then millennia would see to it that Anna’s skeletal body was slowly compacted into a seam of fossil fuel which some subsequent colonising species might use to heat living spaces whose design she could only dimly imagine.

These thoughts came in clipped pulses, and between them – as she phased in and out of consciousness – was white space onto which the annals of Anna’s mind flashed a slideshow of images.  Times past, landscapes she had walked.  A balloon against a sunset.  A dog and its dancing shadow as it jumped in a meadow with a deep blue sky above.  A pumpkin, its jagged teeth, nose and eyes alight with menace.  A headland and below it a beach, glistening wet in the sun.  A cove on the same wild and wind-smashed coastline.  A white sand beach and two caves; placed between them, Anna’s own walking boots.  She felt the feeling of naked feet and toes in sand as she stood in one of the two caves looking out; a keyhole of light doubled at the bottom by a pool left behind as the tide ebbed.  A snowscape with stone walls.  A small wooden shed in a lush, sloping field; the angles of the hillsides led the eye to that little building clinging to one of them.  A goat standing atop a dusty bank next to a stack of baled hay, upon which the animal was feasting.  At the goat she laughed, and the sound she made, so unlike a laugh, shocked Anna into consciousness again.

Then above the wind, a sonic boom.  In the last gasp of depleted faculties, Anna knew it must be the salvage mission.  Salvage, because they wouldn’t be expecting to find anyone left alive.  A blast of synaptic agitation emitted itself deep within a mind which had once been fine and difficult to shake.  Why now, just as she was about to die?  Couldn’t they have waited, have given these final moments the peace she wished them to have?  She didn’t want to be found mouth open and spit hanging and with clothes which smelt of shit and piss.  Would that she was instead simply a skeletal boo!  She thought of the duck-billed platypus in its glass case; Anton’s find, his joy on display.  Yes, that was what she now wanted to be.  With Anton, back home.

The noise should have faded as the ship touched down, but instead the tail of its descent seemed to be met with the exclamation point of an explosion.  It jolted Anna’s mind alive, and she had now one final chance to validate the Cogito.  But it was not so much thoughts as images which began assembling.  Again Anton came to mind, and without a shadow of doubt she knew he was on that flaming ship, come to save his one-time love.

Images of what they had seen hand in hand flooded Anna’s mind, as if they might be unspooling in his quaking consciousness and telepathically passed to Anna’s.  Six silhouetted ponies on a beach with the tide out.  Yes, that day!  A boy had been unseated and the spooked pony had bolted into the town, causing havoc.  If telepathy was somehow possible, then Anna could conceivably pass images back to Anton.  So she sent him jumping into the Blue Lagoon, focussing especially on those pulse-heightened moments in advance of stepping off the cliff.  He sent Anna an image snapped by his mind while they had stood high on the cliff above looking down on the lagoon.  This was like magic!  She sent him the moonscape of limestone paving they had once visited at the end of a solid day’s walking.  He came back with dunes in which they had made love, the lapping sea to the east, the flat of cultivated, quiet land and a distant temple to the west.  Next she gave him a mountain top, an island and the lapis lazuli in which it was set like a piece of jade.  The palette of this image must have made Anton think of that peacock, defiant atop the gable of an old stone building.  Then what about the peacock and peahen they had seen sitting face to face on a fence, effectively kissing?  She sent him that, and saw his smiling face.  Anna smiled too, but now the end was close.  She wanted – needed – to see these scenes again, to have new sights to hold in common.  It was so unjust; she wasn’t done yet.  She wanted obstinately to live, tight to the point at which she and Anton simultaneously died.

[w] and a memory of childhood

Only after she joined Circus Alekan did Marion learn to ride.  One spring morning, the trainer offered her lessons; at a loose end, she said yes, thinking nothing of it other than the chance to indulge the fascination horses had held for her since girlhood; the chance too to see life from saddleback height.  Besides that, she could not have simply articulated the hold they had on her.  Perhaps she loved them because they seemed at once unfettered and gently docile; free and excitable and dangerous yet all-embracing in their comfort and sugary amiability.  Once she had finished the course of lessons, the trainer revealed his thinking – that she had it in her to perform her acrobatics from the platform of the horse’s back.  She laughed him off but eventually he persuaded her, buttering her into an affirmative through saying he had never seen as natural a first-time rider.  That, added to her gifts as an acrobat, not to mention her petite beauty…

Flying through the air on a trapeze had not been her ambition till late in her childhood. She had been something of a dreamer, scorning colouring books and pens – these could not match the colours generated by letters and phrases as she spoke them out loud or in her mind.  Out of fairy tales she span lengthier yarns featuring herself as their core character.  Her ever-extending vocabulary paraded across endless skies and each item in it competed for the most vibrant colours, or at violet hour the most delicate, the palest.  Because of her size, because she often seemed lost on a planet far from others, she fell subject to being labelled an oddity.  She didn’t care, for happiness came from perceiving ‘fingertips’ as silver, ‘horse’ as butterscotch and ‘leaf’ as an amber, autumnal hue; ‘star’ burned sapphire and ‘field’ revealed itself as an undulating sea of flax.  Soon she thought she might like to be a poet, only she fretted that the poems could never be as colourful to others as to their author.

Routinely the young Marion hid herself beneath the curtain-like tresses of a Salix Chrysocoma, there to dream and bring colours into being.  Besides nature only the circus could match the richness of the colours she perceived in her head.  It had begun the year they first pitched their tent nearby her home.  The red and the blue of the big top, the ginger spraying from the sides of the auguste’s face, the silver sequinned costume of the Russian funambulist sparkling in the spotlight as he danced the length of the tightrope eliciting intakes of breath.  From then on she had only one undeclared object in mind.  Circus skill training not being an option, she settled for gymnastics and spent all her unscheduled hours tumbling.

It started then, the living of a double life, the life all live to a greater or lesser extent – a double one, that of the interior and the exterior.  But hers by any measure had been an extreme case of the dominance of the interior.  If she looked back along the path her life had taken, she could see she had been happiest at those moments of conjunction – lighthouse flashes of love for another human being, the expressive movement of her handsprung body through the air, the age-old gliding of a bird of prey above a hillside hanger.  But rarely did she share anything of that interior life.  Her synaesthesia seemed itself a perfect conjunction of art and science, of magical colour and a predictable exactitude, yet instinctively she felt no-one could understand its meaning, except perhaps another poetic synaesthete, and she never met one of those.  She moved through her life either in languorous, ethereal motion or as a blur of elusive colour.  The others largely avoided her.

In the circus ring Marion and her horse Quicksilver spiralled the air into a life-affirming breeze.  The music and gasps and applause from the audience came as from afar, much like the rhythms of her heart – she heard them as a series of pulses on top of the galloping horse’s hooves, such familiar sounds that by them she could set her tempo as she performed near-miraculous feats.

She had been the horse trainer’s since the day he first picked her up all covered in bruises from the floor of the ring.  But though she loved the man he didn’t complete her and she felt obliged to look beyond him.  For a time she admired the taut muscles of the strong man, but he never made her heart sing.  The auguste brought forth music and made her laugh, but theirs could only ever be a brief encounter.  Then there had been the impalement artist; in the end she had cut him more deeply than he had her.  The day the lion tamer joined the circus, the horse trainer finally had his hegemony seriously challenged.  She had never felt such a thrust through her heart as in the moment Isaac first set his eyes on her.  Mute, she stood transfixed, oblivious to all else.  He carried his difference about him; instinctively she could see that he too had once been scorned and labelled a freak but had risen above it.  Livid red streaks scarred one side of his face; the result of flashing talons on the one and only occasion he had been careless.  Never before had she been attracted so magnetically.  And so the living of a different kind of double life began, one lived in both the interior and the exterior, conjoining them at last.  She tamed the lion tamer, and in so doing set him free, and vice versa.  Both in its command and spectrum of colours, Isaac’s strong, deep, accented voice thrilled her.  In an outlying caravan in the depths of the night, he became her horse and she his lion and together they merged the grace of acrobatic flight and the anticipation of formal strictures.

You could never be certain about the future, but time gave Marion to understand that Isaac loved her more than his lions.  He too had an interior like hers, and since he did, regardless of separation or loss, she could no longer envisage dying of a broken heart.  ‘Broken heart’ – she heard that phrase as the intermingled colours of a bruise.  ‘Heart’ by itself – a different matter.  One night in the caravan she told Isaac its colour as she perceived it and never loved her lion tamer more than for his immediate reply – ‘may your heart stay vermillion forever’.