THE CASE (PART ONE), ON THE TELEVISION

Thursday morning, twenty three minutes to ten….

The television screen reappears. A band of interference lifts the curtain on the action to follow. At first Peter is aware of the screen, but slowly it appears as though the action were at first hand, not watched, and then there is another sensation, a tickle in his nose. Peter shakes out the neatly pressed folds of a white cotton handkerchief and blows hard. Being well starched, it doesn’t absorb anything, just pushes, spreads something slightly warm and slippery around his upper lip a while. He becomes aware of a certain variety of sounds in the vicinity, old fragmented historic sounds of footsteps on damp concrete, the scraping of gravel underfoot, in grit or green kerb mush in wet gullies, in alleyways, on paths or roadways. There are black and white 1950’s detective movies playing every night on late night T.V. The heavy rain, the street corner light illuminating a shadowy figure, coat collar turned up and there are footsteps leading into that strange world of pre-sleep, pre-nightmare, of falling away, slipping away.

Peter is, momentarily aware of his slightly numb index finger; it should pre-suppose hand and that which controls hand. It seems so obvious but the idea falls away, slips away into a grey nothingness, into a “word”.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” John was on to something. He didn’t investigate, wouldn’t have made even a half-way decent detective. His interests were elsewhere. The words are in control, but Peter, Bug eyed Peter, he is only interested in what this story has to offer in as much as he can steal bits of it to fill out the gaps in his own little adventure.

There are words wandering about in Peter’s head. They slowly filter down, form a pattern, and switch on the machine. The words tell him in what direction to turn his head, where to focus his eyes, whereabouts and what to tune his ears into, where to point his nose. Up and down, from side to side, Peter’s head surveys the surroundings, the redbrick walls; the jagged glass parapet veneered a dried blood brown. A varied collection of dull earthen coloured bottles, some broken, dirtied by time to a smokey semitransparent rust, abandoned railway cutting electric smelling rusty dirt and stones urine and vomit. He records a few crumpled, faded looking Coke cans, temporarily brightened, by spots of recent rainfall, various torn up scraps of blue coloured paper. Here and there a newspaper, torn pieces of newspaper, growing mould, a dustbin-lid full of oily water and little islands of dead insects lays not more than three feet from where he stands in the muddy passageway. All these things neatly detected, tagged and labelled and filed, up there in his head, in the machine. Raymond Chandler would have been dead proud.

THE CASE (PART TWO), THE WATCHER AND THE WATCHED

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Solitude breeds in Alba a kind of quiet agitation in the half dark shadows, and just as the mind’s eye obliterates uncomfortable or unwanted visions, Alba’s consciousness has broken with the distant sounds of life outside her bedroom. Her eyes leap from one point to another. From the letter to a distant lover she is in the act of writing, to the blue end of the Bic biro, the instrument through which her images, ideas, visions, inspirations, appear to have been transmitted from mind to paper. From this pen her eyes pan over to the islands of temporary light and some reflections created by the small angle-poise desk lamp, a light just there that reveals, yet seems poised to punish whatever it might illuminate, held in the claw of a gunmetal grey scorpion hovering over her pad of light blue, lined writing paper.

Peter, Bug Eyed Peter, his eyes leap from one point to another too. He can picture the islands of light, Alba’s face reflected in the glass of the sash-cord window in front of which she sits, the letter she is in the act of composing, illuminated before her, at a slight angle to the edge of the white Formica top table, as makes writing comfortable for the right handed. He can picture, to her left, a little nearer the window, five or six paperback novels stacked one atop the other, a little stairway with grey authors’ photographs and back-jacket book reviews. These are the real story and “....it’s sharp, short, cold, exact and exiting. Every word counts in this macabre, strongly imagined little intrigue.”

Peter hears the sounds of birds that will soon be singing outside Alba's dusty, rain splattered Victorian era sash-cord window.

THE CASE (PART THREE), ONLINE

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Now, all that the mind’s eye has not obliterated is a track back into memory. New light is thrown on things usually taken for granted. The paint drips around the window frame and on the window pane retell messages from that distant someone who had once carelessly passed an overloaded brush around and across these surfaces, delineating the outside world. Some simple message from a long forgotten, long gone Chapter, to Chapter Ten thousand, here and now, where peeling paint screams off the wood and fine black hairline cracks grow invisibly, radiating back out into some obscure timelessness out there, fine black hairline cracks radiate out from the carpenter’s joints, to also reveal the story of that which had once been precisely measured, sawn, chiselled and glued.

There happens to be a convolution, and the centre of attention is on the screen, on her world, the words. With these keys she conjures up, in solitude, her conversation. There is never any going back, never!

“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

“Who said that? Who wrote those words?”* These two questions played a moment through Alba’s thoughts.

The word writes, wriggles and insinuates itself into her images. The words tell her that if only she were a bird she would be able to fly way away, far away from here, way out there. But what they didn’t write for her was that a bird is prisoner to the sky as words are prisoners to the programme in which they are written, to the skull in which they were hatched.

A scalpel blade cuts from the outside edge of her thoughts, from the pathetic screen, to the inside, deep inside.

Convolution, and there is nothing online, no connections out there, no screen, no monitor except the dirty sash-cord window, the blue paper. The surgical steel draws her mind back in, through the surface, through all the ruptures, to the secret place deep inside, the Secret Meeting Place, The Deep Blue Head, into crystalline worlds where silver nerves spark messages inside and out and around and about, as out spin ideas, beautiful images, and words with new meanings, onto her sheets of blue writing paper.

She thinks the early morning birds are singing and, in only an instant and only for an instant, Alba’s thoughts are back to sounds, sounds of feet, of feet walking towards the houses, towards her room, somewhere out there on the streets.

*RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM

THE CASE (PART FOUR), A THOUGHT ASSASSINATED

Thursday morning, twenty to four….

Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in the shapes and folds of dropped clothing, reflections in brass, on white, in shadows, surfaces that wait, then accept, waiting surfaces that have no voices. Alba can make them speak however, in universes inflicted with her own meaning and these meanings are true to her because she invented them and she believes in them.

A large cube reflects the limits of her room, a cold bedsit room floating about aimlessly in some universe or other. The frame of the sash-cord window delimits the view outside. The sealed windows of playrooms and nurseries now bar the way back into a youthful innocence as clean and fresh and as nice as ice. Silence, but too quickly comes the word “silence”, and where there are words there is never silence.

“Are those birds outside singing to me?” She thinks to herself.

The letter under her right hand is a fine but fragile key to memory and a future temporally free of imperfections, a future whose silver threads, nerves, whose sparks, whose strategies and vaporous plans have yet to deceive or distort the moment.

Hands pressed tight over her eyes she steps outside her eyelids, out of the mask into the swirling patterns projected out here. Faces live in patterns in faded wallpaper, in folds in dropped clothing, in shadows that cut across walls into corners, in the red smudge of biro ink, ink she had cleaned onto the corner of that tissue over there, on the corner of the table by the pile of paperbacks, sometime the day before.

“A red stain. Amaryllis belladonna. A red belladonna Lily, father used to grow them in the back garden, in the flowerbed between the apple trees on the right, there, out of the back door....” The words flickered through her thoughts.

It is deep red, the Naked Lady, and Alba is The Naked Lady, a colour of distinction, a stupid obvious symbol of love spreading out to Shakespearean proportions in her mind’s eye, growing richer and more perfect than anyone else could possibly comprehend. Belladonna, a bud’s opening, offering up a prayer for the brushing together of lovers’ lips.

More words flickered and flashed somewhere behind her eyes, “Oh, to tuck myself amongst the petals and purify all the imperfections of the script, to so overwhelm them as to nullify their sourness, to go down and feel between the petal sheets without guilt. To glow that red, that warm!”

Ruby coloured flashes and reflections reveal the beauty in little things in a hopeless heaven. She bites her bottom lip, draws blood, and fights back a tear. A thought, an image, an idea is assassinated by words.

She hears the broken sound of footsteps at a distance out there somewhere, their origin unclear. It is a silent sensation, the only memory tonight without words. She instantly forgets she ever heard them.

THE CASE (PART FIVE), IN THE ALLYWAY, 1

Thursday morning, twenty to four....

In only an instant his thoughts are back to sounds, sounds of feet, of feet walking towards the houses, towards Peter, somewhere out on the street.

Nervous, Bug Eyed Peter twists the silver metal bracelet of a scratched watch around his wrist and registers the time while taking a last pull from the shortening stub of one of the day’s cigarettes, as is his habit. Brushing his fingers from his temples back to massage his stiff neck, as he was want to do, Peter blows the used air and stale smoke from his last inhalation out in a half whistled rush. Slowly, studiously, he withdraws another cigarette from a slightly buckled white packet. It has no filter. Placing the Navy Cut between dry, chapped lips he lights it, shrugs, or more accurately, rearranges himself in the dying warmth of his leather overcoat, takes another drag from his cigarette and notices the time without remembering what it was. A moment later he drops the butt to the ground, sparks jump, fly briefly and drown and he deftly guides the half smoked cigarette into a nearby pool of muddy water. His right foot feels damp, his thick winter sock and the pumping action of foot in shoe has drawn wetness through the cracked leather sole. “The ninth of the morning. Counted and filed away!” He mutters to himself, into thin air, “Damned damp toes.... Cold wet, numb fingers.... Cracked, painful lips....”

Raindrops ripple the puddles.

THE CASE (PART SIX), ALBA’S LETTER MEANS SOMETHING

Alba’s sweet letter becomes Shakespearean Belladonna, and Alba is naked and offered up to her distant lover as her hand passes between her eyes and the windowpane, to vaguely point out some distant horizon over there, and there is another image beyond the glass and frame of the dirty sash-cord window, a newly revealed pale sepia moon caught in gaps between fast moving grey clouds thinning out in a dark sky.

Alba tears the blue lined writing paper, her letter, into a handful of petals

The richness of red bleeds into this sepia spotlight of a moon and the surrounding heavens. The blue-black sky becomes maroon velvet. The cutting clouds become a drifting mix between crimson and violet. Torn letter petals scatter like stars and she offers up a prayer, more like a curse, to their spreading display.

In the centre of her head there is a sailor’s sextant, warm polished orange brass, a sailor’s brass sextant from the nineteenth century. Alba calculates her triangulation, her ethereal triangulation, once calculated, forever calculated, London suburb to her red moon and from moon to the streets of small town Spain. The curved line between lunar day and night gives depth and form to its craters and the distance between here and there and Spain and back again, has to be rescaled. A crimson cloud cuts between this point here, her hand, and that distant horizon out there.

Gold brass red, the sextant smiles at the terrible beauty in little things, and, for an instant, she is every invincible hero or heroine that ever lived. The paradoxes of the plot! She plays all the roles, the detective, the victim, the perpetrator, the plotter, the lover and the loved. You will never see them, although you can hear all of them, all the characters, all back there sorting through the props, moving the scenery about backstage, but you can see the scenery trembling just so slightly.

For Alba, the daytime strangers can see nothing of any beauty out there, on the horizon. For them this playacting could never ever be worthwhile, the sense of magic gone, banished, washed away and ignored by them all, huddled as they are under the shifting forms between white and winter blue in the morning sky.

THE CASE (PART SEVEN), IN THE ALLEYWAY, 2

Thursday morning, twenty three minutes to ten….

In darkness, that which is withered gains perfection and is transformed. In the cold light of day scattered petals seem sad and pathetic, just fragments of a dream strewn about, with abandoned theatre tickets and programs and crisp and gum and sweet wrappers and sodden newspapers trodden underfoot by strangers, a discarded world in which, year by year, beauty is worn down and worn out and shrivels up to dust, and when, eventually, death rings its clarion call, the bones that were once the sacred untouchable walls of the Cathedral of the Language, the Factory of Words, only sing of silence.

Now there are songs of a silence like the roar of Atlantic winds rolling up and over seashore trees, shrouded in clouds of heavy green blue mist, Atlantic winds, and storms and driving rain from the distant horizon over there. Now there are songs of silent tears which are perfectly cut diamonds lost in frozen waterfalls.

Alba’s night-time sextant smiles at all the beauty in little things, the gold brass red, the red petal, The Naked Lady, the crimson red moon. The crimson red lip, once bitten, once bleeding, must still be kissed, again and again, even while another day dawns.

A dream lasts long enough to free a truth, free it, that is, until the truth is assassinated by the word. The thought is assassinated by words and the words tell Bug Eyed Peter, they echo around, up there in his Cathedral, they defended themselves and say, all innocence and pleading, “Do not take us too seriously, do not take all this rubbish too seriously!”

Convolution, I survey the surroundings, they smell of urine, sodden staleness. I survey the redbrick walls; the jagged glass parapet veneered a dried blood brown, a varied collection of dull earthen coloured bottles, some broken, dirtied by time to a smoky semitransparent rust, abandoned railway cutting electric smelling rusty dirt and stones, a few crumpled, faded looking Coke cans, temporarily brightened, by spots of rainfall, various torn up scraps of blue coloured paper, here and there a newspaper, torn pieces of newspaper, growing mould, a dustbin-lid full of oily water and little islands of dead insects lays not more than three feet from where I stand in the muddy passageway between two dilapidated four story London town houses converted into bedsits.

Down in the alleyway I am suffering from cold, wet, numb fingers. Scattered fragments of a letter rest tangled in the stump of a long leafless bush, the dry pieces, light blue in colour. Others drift slowly to and fro in a puddle, ink blurred and running slightly, and some, turning a yellow white colour, have become stuck in a patch of rotting vegetation about a foot behind my left shoe. These scraps of torn paper, letter and envelope as it turns out, I bend down and carefully collect up. A dustbin lid, full of oily water reflects a black London sky and a universe of colours not three feet away from where I crouch in the cold early morning sun. Beauty glows, hidden in little things.

TRILLIONS OF GODS, THE SEQUEL

I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, at a prudent distance, keeping a discreet eye on his progress and moving the strings to nudge him away from any direction I am not particularly pleased he has taken, to where I think he ought to be going. Sometimes the nudging works, sometimes it fails. If I get him away from the holy art book, it is almost impossible to get him out of the tall, bow legged wardrobe from Maples on the Tottenham Court Road, a furniture empire that collapsed in nineteen ninety seven although, of course, this particular time machine was bought by his newlywed parents, with his grandfather’s money, in nineteen fifty three.

The wardrobe had two high gloss lacquered doors, and the keyholes mirrored each other, one with its Bakelite ornamentation chipped and broken, both sporting skeleton keys with ornate twisting flowery bows of a tarnished worn brass metallic colour. Nineteen fifties dark brown mirror smooth lacquer, and universes floated in the walnut veneer, black holes for Baby Belladonna to out of body travel into, rich nostalgic, almost sad sepia walnut browns and near blacks in veneer Rorschach swirling stereo test reflections and the two doors to the imagination melted and, if it was not enough for Baby Belladonna to float through the doors via the universal veneer, because the monstrous faces of ogres and goblins got in his way, then he would simply reach up and open the universe with one of the keys, usually the right hand one.

The universe inside was, initially, profoundly black and filled with an old fur coat. There were, of course, other things hung and stored away in there too, ladies leather shoes and leather ladies gloves added other scents of different leathers to the cured and dyed rabbit skins, and they all had their textures to touch and perfumes to smell.

The fur coat, however, was the universe Baby Belladonna was most interested in wrapping himself into, and it still is. When he was inside, and the wardrobe door was closed, the smell of fur and leathers and fading perfumes and face powders and the camphor all had a tranquilizing effect, and, in this fur womb, in the fur and leather dark, eyes closed, Baby Belladonna would gently press his eyes with his loosely clenched fists and thousands of multicolour universes and thousands of lonely space adventures would open up right there inside his head and he was at the center of it all, and it was dangerous, lonely sailing, and delicate too, because he only had to release the pressure a little on his eyes, or the heel of a shoe would get a little too uncomfortably under his leg where he was kneeling and he would be back home in a wardrobe again, on the Cambridge Estate, Kingston upon Thames.

Baby Belladonna’s time travel is secure because it is a constant in a universe of constant change and that has been the function of wardrobes and cupboards under the stairs and larders and dark enclosed places for special, beautiful, time traveling flowers all through the ages, and will be so all through the ages to come, it is just that, now, I try to hold his hand on his trips and kiss his lips.

I often ask myself what would have happened to Baby Belladonna if, when, one afternoon in nineteen sixty five, when he had time travelled up to the top shelf of the wardrobe, into the well thumbed books under a pile of old handbags, gloves, and silky scarves, instead of finding himself voyaging unrecognizable in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, he had found himself sharing time and space with William S. Burroughs.

Would he have made a more successful agent of himself?

I surreptitiously follow Peter down into the mattress, I look into his eyes and kiss him on the lips.

Perhaps the universe would have been a different place. Perhaps, perhaps not. Bigger things have hung on smaller threads.