Here but for no other reason than Molly likes these studies.
I, Death, hover, Saturnine like, my scary but welcoming scythe bright over the ward of the dying. I would call them wretched creatures but they are not despite what my eye sees. Saline drips from needles and eyes over soft and wrinkled white skin and I cannot hear their broken voices. Neither do I recognize any from their strong youths. Is it possible that these people once shouted? Once lifted babies to their breasts? And strong, strong arms and legs? In a moment of forever they once were. Young and cheap by the dozen. Now they lay exhumed, their station in life beyond repair. We talk and they have to listen, nodding with every single prayer. In still chairs they sit, covered with matting cloth while television bores its vacuous signal into their filled brains. A clutter of once precious weeds now fit for not one good thing. They have been altered and altered still by experiences and that attracts me. I mention their pitiable bodies just once. Row upon row of them in a shelter that used to house the young. Behind each, a fiery light burns and it is that which summons me. When awake, they cough but I do not attend to them. They plead for medicine, for peace but I do not hear them. They pray for courage but I do not issue it. They plead for chemicals to numb the fire but I have none. They mumble as best they can but no sense issues from them. They have taut stretched skin interspersed with needle bruises and some are left alone for hours in their own dark shit.
There is no pattern and no order left for them to explore; just a continuum. What pity must I share before I care, isolated and frameless. They wait for me, past hope, hanging by a silver thread. Yes, my Saturn arcs his way across the sky and sees each in turn, scooping them up day by day, hour by hour in an inevitable battle against the birth of them. Yes, still they come, mask-like and piteous. But we love them still.
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A WOMAN is a mystery. An image of unending life. She is Venus, mysterious, charitable yet powerful. An aura of presence, of form, softness and giving. Light to touch and breath, she echoes the sensual parts of the human soul. Stillness to hear, she protects the human race, creating a pillow to fall back on while man drives it ahead. Her silence contains the complete imaginings of those who need or desire it and the flame burns bluely within as well. She has no need to expand for she is already at all places and at all times. Only creativity through stillness, that unending mystifying process we can never understand leaves her. The center of everything, no cot contains her and she will never die as she has always been. Perfect in every form, she haunts us as a creative act.
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Hello my friend,
How are you treating the world today? I hope all is well with you and your family. I felt excitement and just wanted to e-mail you and let you know that hiring a professional company to handle my press release was a very good idea! It went out at twelve midday today and at six minutes past the hour, my yellow phone rang. I picked it up after the lucky seven rings and spoke to a nice man called Harold. A gay man called Harold speaking from...well, I mustn't mention the show right now just in case I jinx the whole event but its shown on Channel Five over here in London and they asked me to be a guest on it! I don't know exactly what I said to him but I do remember dribbling a bit down the speaker as my tongue stopped working properly. We spoke about my novel, a little about myself and he was causal and fresh in his approach and manner. We will speak later! I will call him. I wrote down his number on a square of thick tissue paper using my eyebrow pencil. Oh my God!
And then an e-mail arrived from an editor in the South West wishing to do a review of my latest! My friend...do you know what this means? It means I've broken the barrenness barrier! I'm in. I've reached the inner circle! The golden racetrack where life is elevated, where I have something to say and where people will pay to hear me say it. True, I'm at the outer edge of it at the moment but who cares about that! I'm in! I'm over the fence! I've gained my entrance ticket! I can now rub shoulders and talk on an equal basis with the beautiful and wealthy and the Flowers from Heaven and handsome knights consisting of a richer ancestry than I. Those elevated ones. Those who are perpetually cheerful. Those who look good and dress divine. Those that scrub up good.
At last I'm no longer waiting on the broken and scruffy sidelines, which I used to do, endlessly watching the talented and gleaming expensive cars race around and around at 180 miles per hour holding the depressing thought of never having had the ability of being able (or worse, allowed) to join them.
Now I'm actually floating on the track and I'm moving and its so smooth! I wave to the great unwashed and I recognize some of those downtrodden faces. My face used to look like that. But now, my new friends, the other drivers, some of them famous, I'm sure will wave to me and offer me things that before I could only ever not afford. There will be geniuses who will be able to fix things, polymaths, in whose rarefied presence it will be a thrill to be with. Sports personalities...Gods indeed!
Here are people to look after me. Here are people who refer to me as, the talent! Ok, I'm not going as fast as most of them but I'm on the track! They let me on the track! There I was for years watching them whiz by while I wrote about temptation; a chance to drive at normally forbidden speeds in luxury that I could once only have imagined sinking into. I once imagined that if I were called or even summoned onto the track, well, it would surely only be a matter of time before I got to stand shoulder to shoulder on an equal footing with those omnipotent ones that we see each day but are insulated by the television.
Yes, I've been standing next to that golden racetrack trying to push my way onto it for twenty five years and I wanted to give up so many times. But I sat by it, ate by it and even slept by it...on the coldest of nights when there was thick snow falling. I married next to it, made love next to it, sunbathed next to it but the unseen track-master always forbad me you know. He was in charge as it happened, not I. I was always slow at school and I've certainly been slow here.
Well, if nothing else happens after today, I can now die a happy soul because I made it. I'm in. I am recognized. I have become sinless. I have been forgiven. Jesus loves me after all and I won't be banished into literary hell without being heard. Today, every single one of my bodily pains vanished. I can walk without my cane once more. I run with the Gods and Goddess'. What a day! I am almost a literary God myself now.
Now what did I do with that piece of tissue paper...?
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Well I must say that I don’t think much of the Grays branch of the Wicca society because they’re not the most friendly of folk. Thank goodness the full moon is over because that’s the last time I invited them over to celebrate the new coming Luna month.
I thought they might welcome a new member, which is what I was hoping to become but not any more. They moaned about the height of my front door for a start saying that it was in the wrong feng shue position. They told me my front door should be at the side. Silly buggers!
Then they mentioned I had provided the wrong sort of cakes and that I should have used solar salt instead of sea salt when making them. As if it really mattered. One tall lady with a huge wart, insisted that I let her, equally warty, cat roam around freely and you know what I’m like on pets.
But in the interest of friendship, I said it was okay and the blasted black thing spent most of the evening rubbing itself up and down my legs. Now today, I’ve got these warty blemishes that show through my tights. When I went out last night, it looked like I had several small thin hamsters attached to the outside of my legs under my tights. I looked stupid.
There was Mr. Glass, their leader and a wizard in his own right who was alright but he insisted that he bring his own incense along and because he worked for the company that made it, he also got free samples so he wasn’t sparse about shredding it around if you get my meaning. Well, they had only been here half an hour and my poor old front room looked like Whitechapel on a Saturday night in 1888. I couldn’t see anything and the amount of times I banged my shins on my blessed computer table... well, I lost count. But so much so that when I checked my e-mail after they had gone and I had had the windows open for an hour (which caused all that wind and rain to pour in the room by the way) I saw there was still incense smoke in my Mac!! And there still is. I’m looking at it now. And oh God! The smell.
He said it was made from Egyptian cat poo and I believe him!. And now its everywhere. Can’t get rid of the stuff. They said the place is now purified and I believe that as well for what poor fool would breath this, let alone live among it! You wouldn’t get a bacteria to live long here now.
They brought a sack full of toads of course but didn’t bother taking all of them home. And as I went to sleep I kept hearing them croaking and barking and jumping in and out of the toilet. I had dreams of South America all night long.
They insisted that they did a little circle, which I thought was going to be all right at first. However, when they took my round table out of the room and replaced it with a pile of sticks and lit it, I began to have serious second doubts. Then they all went ‘sky-clad’ (being naked) and started to chant and run around in a circle. Seeing 13 old people’s bits flying about didn’t do me any good I can tell you. I’m going to be plagued with nightmares in the coming months.
What she must have thought upstairs I don’t know as we all shouted “UMPY-UMPY” louder and louder, faster and faster until we all collapsed naked in a heap, not being able to see anything because of the smoke. I thought I had taken hold of the master’s wooden rod with the ruby tip until I realised I hadn’t. Thank goodness, he never minded.
So, never again. Take it from me. You stick with the old Christianity. It's safer for the hearth and home.
A very exhausted, smoky, flea-ridden, wet Molly.
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Death of a loyal friend
I remember carrying her back from the kennels; it wasn't a whisker ago either. Maude was alive then, and Bobby, and Saul our tabby. How the poor feline hated her at first! I never thought I'd see the day when the two of them were to be found together, enjoying the heat of the fire, apparently watching television! The pup was a wee thing at first; a sprat of a creature, thin with nobbled bones sticking through her young and still taut fur. A dreadful sight and a wicked damnation on the farmer who let the puppy and her brothers and sisters get like that. Rot in hell may he.
When not annoying Saul though, as she grew, she felt sweet towards humans despite the treatment she had suffered at the hand of one of us. Maude used to bath her about once a month and we were convinced she loved our attention. But never a bark she uttered. Her way of convincing us that all was not as it should be was to growl softly and widen her delicate brown eyes. Her temperament was one of silence, one we could talk to, as if she understood. But now, with Maude long in her grave, Bobby, lost to us at sea and Saul, the only other animal she had tolerated in the house, long since, I suppose, turned into glue, my dearest companion had leukaemia.
She was fifty eight thousand and fifty three days old when we made our final trip together to the People's Dispensary. A suitable dull, thunderous and dangerous day. Young Tom, my next door neighbour's boy helped me with her into the cab but then I told him he could go no further . A frivolous boy but that day he knew why and where we were going and an aura of sadness pervaded but we left him nevertheless. I saw him recede into the distance and felt a chill as I realised that that was a forerunner of what I would soon have to do.
The vet understood. He was a personal friend and knew this business well. Simon had given her her first round of shots and had especially cared for her when, in her seventh year she was pained with kidney stones. As I waited in the grey waiting room, her head on my lap, her eyes occasionally flicking up to see if I was looking at her, paying her my usual attention, I felt so much complex guilt it was impossible to decode or describe. I pulled so gently at her little terrier ears and felt blocked; in all ways. Close to tears, to distraction, to hell, I had not felt as much when Maude, my only sister, had been lowered into the ground in that mangy old casket.
I was called and she managed to walk in with me. Simon knew why we were here and he very gently lifted her onto the table. He did not speak but retreated into the shadows and we were left alone for the last time. I kissed her gently between her eyes and felt her warmth and in return, she offered a slow lick on my cheek and then laid her head back down between her paws, her eyes still occasionally flicking up to me.
Aware of Simon's time, I spoke a last few words and told her that I loved her and that I would always love her. There was an unspoken communication then between us and I think, however impossible it may seem, that she knew. She did not murmur as the needle entered but I held her right paw and stroked her soft head until, within seconds, her brown eyes closed quite peacefully. Then the last breath and life left her. I was bubbling and fixed with emotion but I did not cry. It was peace for her; no more awful pain. She was gone; my perfect playmate, chum and companion was dead.
I do not remember reaching home but when I did, I could smell her and my personal dam broke. Much later, after the storm had turned eastward, I gathered her toys, her lead, her basket, my many photographs and placed them in a box. This I stored in the attic and then I wrote my diary. It was a miserly entry; ruthless and mean and sadly did not reflect the love I felt or the emptiness and loneliness which was beginning to close, tighten and envelope me; Rose was put to sleep today. Alone again.
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The love that has no name.
She sat, twisted; in an ancient rusty wheelchair that was probably as old as she; this woman in her late fiftes. The wheelchair alone betrayed her status, no high-tech aluminium here. Some wood, dirty dry spokes and worn grey paint. But it suited her, this suffer of Parkinson's disease.
She stared. At what, only her distraught husband knew. Her eyes, like her almost white hair were dry; not lifeless but dry in the sense that they understood nothing. She gazed across the large hall to the golden cross, her focus unchanging when anyone passed in front. She could have been seeing into the future or the past as far as I could tell.
She looked relaxed. Except for her hands and wrists, the former, which continually shook, and the latter that cruelly bent back on themselves. Her head hung to one side, her bottom lip glistened with transparent drawl. A white towel lay on her sunken chest.
We were in church. A Tuesday coffee morning but I'm guessing that she did not know that. He knew that. Her huge brute of a husband, in looks only of course. I'm guessing a one-time bouncer or a boxer. Almost certainly an ex convict. I look for spirituality in his face but see none. A face that, in its time, had almost certainly made the acquaintance of a multitude of Essex fists.
Nevertheless, where anger and panic once resided, now only tenderness existed. It was clear to all that his concern was only for her. Where had they met? How had she quietened his life? Made him fall so much in love with her? Where had that happened? Such un-opened history.
His suit was poorly made, his shirt un-ironed, a plain blue tie messy with a breakfast and he needed new shoes. He was a plain man now as well; something of the ego had diminished him. He neither smiled nor frowned but there was panic around his eyes. Panic probably even he was not aware of yet. Although about the same age as his wife (I could see their tokens of love around their ring fingers) he had no hair left and his spectacles were broken in three places. What was their history? Marriage in the Seventies? Thinner, hipper, trendier? How has time brought them to this?
His clothes were props now. Props brought at the many local charity shops, as was her simple floral patterned dress, obviously purchased for her as no woman in charge of her own mind under the age of sixty would have considered it. And no earrings or adornments of any kind. Not the sort of things he had an interest in.
Occasionally, he swung a huge arm out, grasped his cup and passed it under his bland and stale-looking red moustache and drank but, when he was not doing that, both his huge hairy hands were touching hers, trying so absolutely, but in vain to keep them still.
They pampered and pawed, stroked and caressed, knitted and uncrossed and all with unimaginable tenderness. Here truly was a man learning to be another man and with a woman lost to him. Here was a man who once whispered in his wife's ear, "Tienes mi corazon" - you have my heart. A phrase learnt when honeymooning in Latin America and never forgotten.
They remained like that, facing the alter, while I finished my own coffee and I wondered what the next ten years would be like for them, more him than her I will admit. For she had already left the marriage and the life cared for by social services. Although when a sunbeam illuminated her face, her jarring neck twitched gently upwards to meet it but I've a feeling it was an automatic response. Her fingers did not stop their eternal muscular chatter.
Who would he become after his darling wife left? How would he spend his time? Something told me there were no children. Something told me most of him would die too.
They exuded poverty on every level but they were a queen and a king as far as I could imagine. A half an hour later, about to get my bus, I strolled through the shopping precinct and came upon them once again, this time outside Boots.
He was on his knees, his face the subject of immense sadness and concentration as he held a straw to her mouth dipped into a can of inexpensive cola. They were silent and I wondered about their last conversation.
I pretended to window-shop but the more I watched, the more impotent I became. I was not the only voyageur; shoppers glanced too but the man was oblivious to all except her needs. I do not have a name for that type of love. But I have never received or given it.