Tag: surreal

IDEAS

~ Chris Green ~ Leave a comment

IDEAS

IDEAS by Chris Green

‘I’m telling you,’ says Flavia. ‘The guy was a complete stranger. He just walked up to me and handed me the bag.’

‘And you didn’t think to say what are you doing or who are you or anything like that,’ says Matt.

‘There wasn’t time. It all happened very quickly,’ says Flavia. ‘Besides I was taken completely off guard.’

‘And he just disappeared into the crowd.’

‘Well, yes. That’s exactly what happened. Look! It was busy. There were a lot of people around. People were coming out of the cinema. People were waiting for the 61 bus. And there were a large group of passers-by watching a street musician with a trumpet. He was very good. If you hadn’t gone into that games shop you would have seen how quickly it all happened. You could have done something about it.’

‘So you were distracted. That’s what you are saying.’

‘That’s right, Matt. You know I like jazz. And this is free jazz.’

‘And the fellow that gave you the bag was about average height, average build and was wearing blue or grey.’

‘That’s right. Even his balaclava was blue, or grey. Can you get off my case, please! Who do you think you are? Inspector Wallander or someone?’

‘You do realise what this is, don’t you?’ says Matt.

‘But there’s nothing in it. I’ve looked. The bag is empty.’

‘I know that is how it looks. But, does it feel empty?’ says Matt, handing her back the blue Ikea bag. ‘Here! Feel it. It’s very heavy.’

‘You’re right. It is heavy.’

‘There is something in there. Feel inside it.’

‘It got a shape. ….. But …. but it’s invisible. What is it?’

‘It’s an enigma. That’s what it is.’

‘What? One of those machines the Germans used in the war?’

‘Not exactly. But you might be on the right lines.’

‘Well, if that’s the case someone’s going to want it. Someone’s going to be looking for it. Someone’s going to be looking for us,’ says Flavia.

………………………………………………………………….…

Flavia is right. Someone is looking for it. Casey Boss is looking for it. His department is extremely security conscious. They need to be. There is a lot at stake. How could the courier have been robbed like that? From his van. In broad daylight. Who were these cowboy logistics people? Weren’t there supposed to be two people on board when they transported sensitive cargoes? And how did the thieves get it into the Ikea bag?

Casey Boss has the van driver in his eleventh-floor office overlooking the river. He is trying hard to stay calm. He was recently hospitalised. Dr De’Ath warned him he must avoid stress. Losing his temper again will send his blood pressure through the roof. He is on powerful beta-blockers.

‘You do realise the gravity of the situation,’ Boss says, swilling a couple of extra Propranolol down with a glass of water. ‘You understand that we have just lost something ………. important.’

Zbigniew Wozniak has some difficulty in following him. There are several big words there. English is not even his second language. His job as he sees it is to get things from A to B. Even this can be a challenge sometimes. He has difficulty with some of the road signs. How was he to know that it wasn’t a real diversion sign? The next part of the scam was, however. easier for Wozniak to understand.

‘Man’s face is covered,’ he says. ‘He says gun if I don’t give him.’

‘Where did covered man go?’ says Casey Boss, finding himself reduced to Wozniak’s pigeon English in order to communicate.

‘Have big black car,’ says Wozniak. ‘Drive fast.’

………………………………………………………………….…

‘It’s a pity that you hit that car, George’ says Mavis Deacon. ‘Look at the time. We are going to be late for indoor bowls. And you know it was our turn to make the tea.’

‘I know, dear, but there’s nothing we can do about it now.’

‘Black ones are definitely harder to see, aren’t they? I think the last one you ran into was black.’

‘It was the other fellow’s fault though, dear. He did pull out in front of me.’

‘That man certainly didn’t want to hang around to give you his insurance details, did he? Running off like that. Why do you think, he was in such a hurry?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps he had to get that bag to the shops quickly. It was one of those bags, wasn’t it?’

‘I think it was an Ikea bag, George? Perhaps we could go to Ikea sometime. They do some very nice kitchenware.’

‘Yes. I believe it was Ikea, Mavis. And we will go one day. If we can find it. Anyway, I expect the police will be along in a minute. They will be able to sort things out. His car did take a bit of a knock though, didn’t it? They don’t make them like they used to.’

‘Why do you think he was wearing a balaclava though, George? That seemed to me to be a little odd. Especially if he was going to the shops. The security people in the shops might think that he was a criminal with a gun, who was going to rob them.’

‘I’m sure there’s a rational explanation dear. And anyway he’s bound to be on CCTV cameras somewhere.’

………………………………………………………………….…

Matt and Flavia are in Café Baba, a small establishment run by a Moroccan family down a discreet alleyway, away from the main shopping centre. They have gone there to get away from the hubbub while they take stock of their situation. Matt is feeling inside the bag. What can possibly account for its weight?

‘I think it might be changing shape,’ he says.

‘You mean like it’s alive?’ says Flavia, nervously.

‘Kind of. …… Not exactly. …… I don’t know. Have a feel.’

‘No, thankyou! I’ll take your word for it,’ says Flavia, with a grimace. ‘Look Matt! Enough is enough. We’ve got to get rid of it.’

‘What do you suggest we do with it then?’ says Matt. ‘We can hardly go to the police with it can we?’

‘Can we not? Why’s that?’

‘Don’t you think they might find us a little suspicious, handing in a blue Ikea bag with an invisible object inside. A heavy invisible object that keeps changing shape, no less. I really don’t think they Sergeant Rozzer would be likely to understand. A man handed it to my wife in the street. No, she hadn’t seen him before. No, we did not get a look at his face, he was wearing a balaclava. They would detain us as aliens or something. We would probably be locked up forever in a secure institution.’

‘We could just dump it.’

‘I suppose so, but that seems a bit irresponsible.’

‘Wait! Don’t you have a friend who is some sort of scientist, Matt?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘The one with the multicoloured framed spectacles.’

‘Oh, you mean Theo. No. Theo’s a prosthodontist. That’s basically a dentist. I don’t think that’s quite the same.’

‘What about the one who works for MI5?’

‘Oh, Hank. You’re talking about G4S, not MI5. Hank works for G4S. Used to be called Group 4. He’s a night security guard at a building site.’

‘Well. Perhaps you could come up with a suggestion, but we’re not taking it home.’

………………………………………………………………….…

Casey Boss is conscious that he has an emergency on his hands. He must not let the situation escalate. There is no telling what harm could be done. He leaps into action. He quickly puts a number of his people on the streets to requisition CCTV footage from cameras over a distance of several square miles. Freeman and Willis send him film of the crash at the Cross Hands crossroads. He plays the footage. The white Skoda ploughs into the side of the black BMW. A hooded gunman gets out of the Beamer and runs from the scene. An old couple slowly emerge from the Skoda.

‘Doddery old farts like that shouldn’t be allowed on the roads,’ he says to his colleague, Jagger. ‘Look at him he’s about eighty. He’s got a white stick. He’s probably blind.’

The gunman with the blue Ikea bag heads in the direction of the shopping district. It is strange, Boss thinks, how little notice people seem to take. It is as if they are all too used to seeing armed men in balaclavas running through the streets with heavy Ikea bags.

Boss moves his focus to footage from a bank of sixty-four cameras located in the centre of town in the comms suite of the municipal building. He is able to witness the masked man’s progress through the town on several cameras, past BetFred and BetterBet, past the Hungarian supermarket, past the bank of posters advertising the Psychedelic Furs reunion concert, through the park where the street drinkers assemble, into the square, past the fountain of Poseidon and into the smarter part of town. He passes the 61 bus stop by John Lewis, but then it is not clear where he goes. He disappears into a crowd of people that are watching a weathered-looking jazz trumpeter with a hunched back in a black coat and black trilby hat. It is unusual for a street musician to draw such a crowd. Jazzman’s audience grows by the minute. With the movement of the crowd, it is difficult to see what is going on. There is no sighting of the masked man emerging from the melee.

Boss tells Jagger to put out the word to bring the jazz trumpeter in for questioning.

There are no further sightings. He hopes that as the day wears on there will be more on the CCTV footage to view. Other than that, there are bound to be witnesses. Some public-spirited citizen will have noticed a man wearing a balaclava weighed down an Ikea bag. Surely. Perhaps he went into a shop. Perhaps one of the local premises is a front for some clandestine operation. Perhaps a number of the shops are fronts for clandestine operations. A lot of ethnic traders have moved in lately. He instructs his team to question all the traders in the area, threaten them if necessary.

………………………………………………………………….…

Meanwhile, the jazz trumpeter too has disappeared. He has somehow avoided Boss’s men, who are now all over the west side of town. As it happens, with his gear packed into a makeshift box trolley, he is making his way to the Café Baba. He likes to relax here with a slice of orange and almond cake and a glass of mint tea, away from the afternoon crowds. Ahmed will usually have some mellow jazz playing. They might even have a bit of a jam later in the back.

Matt and Flavia are already there, discussing what to do with the bag. It is a quiet time of day at Café Baba and they are the only customers. The Gaggia machine is switched off. There is a faint smell of hashish. Behind the counter, Ahmed and his younger brother, Youssef are sharing a pipe. A tune by Mulatu Astatke’s Black Jesus Experience plays gently in the background. East African beats. This is free jazz. All about ideas, inspiration and improvisation.

Ahmed notices that there is a little tension at Matt and Flavia’s table. Their voices are raised. Perhaps its the food. Maybe they are not familiar with Moroccan delicacies. Perhaps the briouats or the kefta wraps are not to their liking. They do not seem to have touched them. He ambles over to their table to see what the problem might be. In his djellaba and babouche slippers, his movement is hushed, so Matt and Flavia do not hear his approach. They are facing the window. They appear to be in the middle of an argument.

‘I think we need to find out what it is,’ says Matt. ‘Before we make a decision.’

‘I want it as far away from me as possible,’ says Flavia. ‘It’s gross.’

‘Someone might offer a reward for its safe return.’

‘How do you even think of these things? Matt. Where do you get these ideas from? Sometimes I think you live in a parallel universe. It’s a bloody Ikea bag for God’s sake.’

‘But a mysterious Ikea bag.’

‘We’re getting rid of it.’

‘We could put in in a storage unit or a locker at the station until we find out more.’

‘It’s going.’

‘But Flavia …….’

‘Matt! Matt! Look!’ says Flavia, grabbing him by the arm. ‘I swear the bloody bag is breathing.’

Ahmed follows her gaze to the inlaid leg of the walnut table. The blue bag, he notices, does look as though it’s breathing, in fact, it appears to be edging its way across the mosaic floor tiles. It has moved several inches. He is about to remark on this, but at that moment, Chet appears at the door with his gear. Chet comes at about this time every day after he has played his pitches in the town. He is struggling a little today. He is not getting any younger. Ahmed goes over to help him with his cart.

………………………………………………………………….…

‘We’ve found him, boss,’ says Freeman.

‘Who?’ says Boss. ‘Speak up man!’

‘Sorry. It’s a poor signal. …… Is that better?’

‘What is it, Freeman?’

‘We’ve found Jazzman, sir. He has been caught on CCTV passing the horologist’s in the old town. He’s gone down one of those alleys, with some equipment. Willis thinks he might be heading for the Café Baba.’

‘Where?’

‘The Café Baba. It’s an African place.’

‘What’s the low down on it, Freeman?’

‘Could be a front for terrorist activity, possibly.’

‘What about the bag?’

‘He didn’t seem to have the bag, but perhaps it was packed away with his gear.’

‘Keep Jazzman there until I get there. Stay outside, for now, but keep a close eye. We’re not going to lose him again. …….. But I want to be the one to apprehend him. Bring the car round, Jagger!’

‘You asked me to remind you to take your tablets, sir.’

‘Quite, Jagger. Thank you. And let me have some of the others, the ones you got from your man, Zoot.’

………………………………………………………………….…

Matt and Flavia have put away their differences for the time being and realised that they are hungry. Perhaps it has something to do with Chet and Ahmed having sat themselves down at the next table. Chet and Ahmed are waiting for Youssef to bring the mint tea. They are listening to Miles Davis’s So What. It is a live version. Ahmed has turned the volume up a bit.

‘Jazz should be about breaking down conventions, experimenting,’ says Chet. He looks forward to these conversations. They affirm his dedication to the art. ‘I mean it’s got to have energy, be a bit raw, come from inside. You know what I mean.’

‘Absolutely,’ says Ahmed. ‘You certainly get that with Miles he doesn’t do pre-written chord changes.’

‘That’s right,’ says Chet. ‘Miles probably never played this tune the same twice. His improvised melodic lines are the basis of the harmonic progression.’

‘He’s a genius. Where does he get his ideas for improvisations from?’

‘I know. It’s like he opens the bag just before the show and grabs a handful of ideas?’

‘Some of these people you hear today on Jazz FM. It’s like you are stuck in a lift,’ says Ahmed. ‘This so-called smooth jazz. I mean what’s that about. Smooth jazz is a contradiction in terms.’

They sit back to take in an improvised passage.

‘The pastries are delicious by the way,’ says Flavia, trying to make amends for their earlier lack of decorum.

‘Really tasty,’ says Matt.

‘Thank you,’ says Ahmed. He remembers the conversation that they were about to have before Chet’s arrival, the one about the bag. The big blue bag is still there under the table. It appears to have settled.

‘What is in the bag by the way?’ he asks.

………………………………………………………………….…

Casey Boss and Jagger arrive at Café Baba. Freeman and Willis are waiting outside.

‘How’s it looking?’ asks Boss. ‘Is jazzman in there?’

‘Yes,’ says Freeman. ‘He didn’t bring the bag though, but a man and a woman were already there with it.’

‘So there’s more than we thought. What about the café owner?’

‘I think they must all be in it together,’ says Willis.

Casey Boss has not done a lot of fieldwork lately. He is suddenly racked with uncertainty. Shouldn’t Zoot’s meds be working by now, he wonders, to give him a little confidence?

‘What do we do now?’ he says.

‘We generally burst through the door pointing guns and shouting,’ says Freeman. ‘I’ve always found that to be effective.’

‘What are we waiting for then?’ says Boss.

The four of them make their entry in the recommended manner.

‘Nobody move!’ yells Jagger. He has brushed up on his commands.

No-one looks as if they were about to move. It’s as much as they can do to look around. They see so much street theatre these days.

‘Stay away from the bag!’ says Jagger.

‘What’s the fuck’s going on?’ says Ahmed. His sentiments are echoed by the others. Eyes gradually focus on the Ikea bag. Whatever is happening, this is at the heart of the narrative.

Boss picks it up and examines it. He feels calmer now he has the bag and the meds are finally beginning to kick in.

‘Whatever is in the bag seems to have got everyone hot and bothered’ says Ahmed.

‘Whatever’s in the bag! Whatever’s in the bag! You know perfectly well what is in the bag. And we are going to find out everything about your little operation here at Café Baba.’ says Jagger, producing several pairs of handcuffs.

‘I swear none of us has any idea what’s in the bag,’ says Matt.

‘Well let me tell you what is in the bag,’ says Boss, feeling magnanimous. Zoot’s stuff is a real mood changer. ‘The bag is full of …….. ideas.’

‘It’s what?’ says Matt.

‘A bag full of ideas,’ Boss repeats.

‘What are you all talking about?’ says Chet.

‘It’s a bag full of concepts potentially present to consciousness,’ Boss elaborates. ‘Ideas.’

‘Cool,’ says Chet. ‘A bag full of ideas, eh? Can I have a look?’

‘Stay back,’ says Jagger, pointing the gun at his head.

‘I will attempt to explain,’ Boss continues. ‘It is clearly dangerous for too many people to have access to too many ideas, too many concepts potentially present to their consciousness, if you will, so it is necessary to keep a collection in a central repository. Ideas need to be carefully regulated, but it is also important to have a new idea now and then. After all, new ideas generate investment. Even the most antisocial ideas generate an investment. Sometimes raw ideas need to be transported from our warehouse to another location in order to be developed. Different skill sets you understand, storage workers and visionaries. Earlier today, in transit, a delivery was hijacked and has ended up here in the blue Ikea bag.’

‘What are you talking about?’ says Chet.

‘The bag is empty,’ says Flavia. ‘Or at least what is in it is invisible.’

‘Obviously, it’s invisible,’ says Boss. ‘Ideas are invisible.’

‘And heavy,’ says Flavia.

‘Of course, it’s heavy. You don’t think ideas just come in through your internet browser do you, or blow in gently on the prevailing south-westerlies?’

‘Anyway, you’ve got it all wrong,’ says Flavia. ‘A hooded man ran up to me in the street while I was standing there watching the jazz and handed me the bag and ran off.’

‘What?’ says Boss looking round at Jagger. Has his colleague messed up again, he wonders?

‘Why do you think he did that?’

‘Panic, possibly. I don’t know.’

‘And I’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since.’

‘Well, be thankful that you didn’t get rid of it,’ Boss continues. ‘There are a billion embryos of ideas in that bag. Ideas in their raw form, like the seeds of creation. Their value is immeasurable. Over time the ideas will grow and the department needs to be able to monitor their growth. Imagine if they fell into the wrong hands. We would have a free for all. We need to lock them back up in a safe place. It wouldn’t do for people to get the wrong idea.’

© Chris Green 2019: All rights reserved

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Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk

~ Chris Green ~ 2 Comments

whyisaravenlikeawritingdesk

Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk? by Chris Green

The tall stranger in the Duster overcoat appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing a broad-rimmed sheriff’s hat complete with campaign cord and silver star. I felt this was odd. This was a sleepy West Somerset coastal resort, not Washington County. Perhaps he felt the hat made him look interesting and would help him to get noticed.

‘What do you think it is that makes things happen?’ he asked.

At first, I thought he must be talking to someone else but there was just the two of us there. Who was he? What did he mean? Why was he asking me this? I was just enjoying a quiet moment watching the tide come in. It must have been the school holidays. Spring probably. The waves, I recall, were huge.

‘Do you mean, in the big scheme of things?’ I asked, feeling that his question was an unusual opener to a conversation.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If you like. In the big scheme of things.’

‘We elect people to represent us and they pass laws and other people in other countries do the same,’ I said, trying hard to remember the explanation our Ethics teacher, Mr Jenkins had come up with. ‘We agree with the way some countries do things but not the way other countries do things and according to relative size and strength, we form alliances and trading blocks. Sometimes there’s a disagreement over ideology and then a war and one side vanquishes the other and makes them do what they want.’

‘Very good! But that’s on a political level,’ the stranger said. ‘That’s what the history books tell you happens. That’s what you read in the papers. That’s surface detail.’

‘Well, some see a different man in the sky to others and they fight about whose man in the sky is the best,’ I said, trying to inject a little humour into the exchange.

‘Indeed!’ he said. ‘But how does it all work on a practical level? What are the mechanisms?’

‘There are improvements in technology and new inventions that bring about change,’ I said. ‘But I suppose innovations are primarily to sell new products to make investors rich.’ Old Josh Jenkins had told us this was the principal reason there were technical advances. To fuel capitalism, the money needed to move around faster and faster, he had said. Other than this, new technology was often developed to win wars.

‘That’s how it all works, is it?’ the stranger said.

‘It’s cause and effect,’ I said. ‘Action and reaction. All certainty in our relationships with the world rests on the acknowledgement of causality, wouldn’t you say?’

‘That’s what you’ve been told, is it?’ he said. ‘That determinism explains everything? All I can tell you for now is there’s more to it. One day, you will find out.’

With this, he took his leave, presumably off to do some strange sheriffing somewhere else. I couldn’t help wondering who he was, why he was there and what he meant. I was only sixteen. What was the purpose of him putting me on the spot? Was he a conspiracy theorist? New World Order and the Seven Sisters? Was he talking about magic? Lord of the Rings and all that mumbo jumbo? Uri Geller and spoon-bending? Or was he just a smartass?

At the time, I may have mentioned the episode in passing to Mick and Keith or Roger and Pete before we went off to smoke dope and listen to Pink Floyd or Dire Straits or whatever was current back then. Apart from music and dope, girls were pretty much the only thing that pre-occupied us. Perhaps I was on my way round to Annette’s to do some ….. revision. I may have told her about the mysterious man but I’m certain we didn’t labour the point. At sixteen, you do not dwell on things for long and the curious encounter was soon forgotten. So much so that as time passed, I was not even certain it had really happened.

Stovepipe hats have not been fashionable since the nineteenth century. So it was strange to come across a man wearing a shiny black one in Vivary Park in Taunton, especially as we were in the middle of a heatwave. 1990 was turning out to the hottest year on record. Following a minor misunderstanding, Tamsin had gone off to stay with her mother in Madeira for a few days and I was taking our Irish Setter, Bono for a walk when the tall stranger appeared. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. In his tall hat, he looked completely out of place. It was not even a Lloyd George style topper, it was a proper vintage Victorian stovepipe. Apart from the hat, he was dressed unseasonally, wearing one of those long overcoats. The overall effect was to make him look like a giant. To cap it all, he was carrying a black violin case. He approached me and struck up a conversation.

‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he said.

It suddenly occurred to me this was the same fellow I had met on the beach all those years ago. He had the same faraway look in his eye, the same pallor to his skin, making it seem almost translucent. There was no mistaking him. I told him I remembered him.

‘Have you worked it out, yet?’ he asked.

I tried to recall our earlier conversation. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to have worked out.

‘You thought everything could be explained by causality,’ he said.

‘Actions, ideas, even things we put down to synchronicity can probably all be explained by cause and effect,’ I said.

‘As in a sequence of events, you mean?’ he said. ‘Chain reaction, butterfly effect.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. All action and reaction.’

‘Action and reaction, eh? That’s Newton’s Third Law, isn’t it,’ he said. ‘And you think you can apply that to everyday life?’

‘More or less,’ I said. ‘Things chug along from day to day, one thing follows another in your chain reaction.’

‘Things chug along?’ he said. ‘H’mm That’s an interesting view. That’s the way it works, is it?’

‘Everything is loosely connected and each thing that happens affects many others so what we have is a complex web of actions and reactions,’ I said.

Hatman wanted to up the stakes.

‘What about when a seismic event takes place?’ he asked. ‘Something, for instance, like the Berlin Wall coming down last November. Can that be explained by cause and effect? Action and reaction?’

‘I would say that is a classic example of cause and effect,’ I said, rising to the challenge. ‘The East was poor, the West was rich. People in the East were finding this out and wanted some of it. The Soviet Union was losing its grip. Gorbachev was liberalising the Party and freedom groups all over the Eastern bloc were taking advantage of this. Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia. With forces chipping away at East German institutions, it was only a matter of time before the Wall fell. It was the final step in a chain reaction.’

‘I’m afraid you are falling into the trap again,’ he said ‘Like you did the last time we spoke. You are just looking at the surface detail. To understand the way things work, you will need to dig deeper.’

Bono, meanwhile, had run off behind the bandstand to investigate another dog. He had an unfortunate habit of doing this and not coming back. I went over to put him back on the lead. When I returned, the stranger had disappeared. I could hear a violin playing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, softly in the distance.

The encounter left me perplexed. Who was the mysterious stranger? Why had he picked me? Was I perhaps just one of many unsuspecting people he tried to convert? But convert to what? What exactly was his message? Was he trying to say in his cryptic way that everything was pre-determined? Or that there was a hidden force, an all-powerful master of the universe? He was certainly peculiar but somehow he didn’t come across as a religious zealot. I could not imagine him calling door to door on a Saturday morning with an associate and a handful of thin pamphlets promising to put you on the path to salvation. Perhaps we were back with magic and the supernatural and he was suggesting the real driving force for everything that happens was something mystical. Perhaps he was trying to tell me I needed to familiarise myself with some arcane Oriental wisdom in order to transcend the mundane. But what was it about hats?

Each time I saw someone wearing an unusual hat, I thought it might be him. Bandanas, deerstalkers, turbans. Coonskins caps, fezes, zuchettos. In the street, at concerts, at the races, everywhere. Carnival parades were the worst. But as months went by with each sighting turning out not to be him, the memory of him faded.

I had all but forgotten him when, around the time of the millennium, he appeared again, this time in the Science Museum in Kensington. He was dressed in a black damask robe and a mortarboard. It was a lighter conversation than our previous ones. Moving on from the passing of time, we talked about the walrus and the carpenter and cabbages and kings. We touched on Cheshire cats and mad hatters. Did I realise Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and his work was full of hidden meanings, he wondered? I told him I had always thought he was writing about drugs. ‘

‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ he asked.

I wondered if perhaps he had the answer to the age-old riddle but at that moment, Tamsin returned from her visit to the Natural History Museum next door and he disappeared. I got the impression that beneath his bold exterior, he was rather shy.

We were back on the topic of the driving forces behind world events at our meeting in the bar of The Jolly Slaver. It was the year of the smoking ban, I recall because I had just come back inside after a cigarette when the stranger accosted me. He was wearing a superhero cape and a wizard’s hat. He wondered if I realised yet that things were never what they seemed. The discussion about what lay beneath carried over to our next meeting at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in Glastonbury, Somerset. He was wearing a tricolour beanie hat with his white suit. I think he may have been disappointed that I did not appear to always understand what he was trying to tell me.

He was always vague about what exactly his role was. His explanations for everything were frustratingly cryptic. Each time he appeared, I wanted to ask him why he had selected me. Why did he keep coming back? But each meeting was inadvertently cut short. Time, in the abstract sense, seemed to be a subject that kept coming up in our brief exchanges. He kept pressing me on what I thought time was? I have always had an unusual perception of time. I have frequently had to ask people what the order of past events was. When did we do this, when did we do that? Had we done this before that? More often than not, I appeared to have got it wrong. Tamsin was forever correcting my apparent temporal discrepancies, suggesting that I ought to keep a diary. My historical record frequently seemed out of synch with that of others. If I was like this now, I sometimes worried about what I would be like when I was older.

‘You keep referring to cause and effect,’ he said, the last time we met.

It was in the dining car on the Orient Express. Tamsin was resting back in our carriage. He came and sat beside me. He wore a sombrero vueltiao and big black sunglasses.

‘These chains of events, if that’s what you want to call them, can be unimaginably complex,’ he continued. ‘With so many crazy people in the world behaving irresponsibly, things can easily spiral out of control.’

I agreed there were some volatile leaders. In my view, most politicians were dangerous. It seemed to go with the job.

‘Without appropriate intervention, the world would have been blown to pieces by a catastrophic event by now many times over,’ he said. ‘I am one of a group of quantum gnostics whose aim it is to prevent such calamities escalating. We operate in the margins. It is our job to correct the course of rogue chains of events. Frequently, we are called upon to do so retrospectively in order to keep the boat afloat.’

Was he referring to specific events or was he generalising? Was he suggesting that he was able to go back in time? I didn’t get the chance to find out as before I had the chance to ask these questions, Tamsin came looking for me and the stranger upped and left.

‘Who were you talking to?’ Tamsin asked.

I tried to explain but she did not seem to be listening. She was more concerned with finding out what was on the menu.

Following the meeting on the Orient Express, I began to question whether time was, in fact, linear. The stranger had planted a seed of doubt in the conventional wisdom of a timeline where a series of events progresses regularly from beginning to end. Certainly, my perception of time was not linear. It had never been like that. I was all over the place with times and dates. I discovered I had some backup for the idea. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity suggested that there was no conceptual distinction between past and future, let alone an objective line of now. Also, he argued there was no sense in which time flowed. Instead, all space and time was just there in an elaborate four-dimensional structure. Furthermore, apparently, all the fundamental laws of physics worked essentially the same, forward and backward.

If this were the case, then did this also put the very idea of cause and effect into question? If there was no objective flow of time, might causality also work backwards, effect now becoming cause? Or like Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter and March Hare, having fallen out with Time, might we too be stuck at 6 pm forever? The very concept of time might, of course, simply be an illusion. Everything could be happening simultaneously, with or without interventions and corrections by quantum gnostics. Everything that has ever been and ever will be could be happening right now.

There are so many ways of looking at it, I don’t see what is really going on in the cosmos ever becoming clear to me. Reality itself is a slippery concept. All things considered, it seems reasonable to assume strangers turned out in whimsical headgear are likely to appear anytime, anywhere.

© Chris Green 2019: All rights reserved

TIME

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TIME by Chris Green

Time is a bitch. You never know quite where you are with it. Einstein, bless him, argues that the distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, albeit a stubbornly persistent one. This morning as I go through the mail, I begin to appreciate the great man’s uncertainty. These bills are the same ones as yesterday, electricity, phone and pet insurance. Exactly the same. And there’s an identical postcard of an Agadir beach at sunset from Rick and Sammi.

When set against the bigger issues of political corruption, terrorist bombs, and the war in the Middle East, a duplication of personal correspondence is not a big deal. Puzzling, yes, but I do have a large green recycling bin. More importantly, I’m running late. It is 8.15 and the traffic on Tambourine Way will be horrific if I don’t hurry. I scrape the ice off the Skoda’s windscreen and give it a few squirts of de-icer. I put a Johnny Cash CD into the player while the inside windows start to de-mist, and move off into the February frost.

I have a sense of déjà vu as I flash the headlights at Pedro, in his SUV on Solitaire Street, and again on the dual carriageway when I find myself behind a learner bus driver keeping to 30 where you could easily be doing 50 or 60. Does this learner bus driver come this way every day? My progress is further impeded by an accident at the Scott McKenzie roundabout. As I edge through the flashing blue chicane of police vehicles, I notice that the two battered cars seem to be the same two cars as in the accident two days ago, a white Mercedes and a black BMW. The impact of the collision has buckled both cars irreparably, as it had in the previous accident. I shudder. The coincidence is way beyond that presented by chance.

I arrive at Sanctuary Inanimate Pet Crèche and Counselling Service where I work. I greet Boris and Gerhard. I can’t help but notice that the cyber dog that was collected by its owner the day before yesterday is already back. There is also a familiarity about the headline War Dims Hope for Peace in Boris’s tabloid. Admittedly inanimate pet care is a repetitive line of work but the conversation Gerhard is having with Major Churchill about his pet rock seems identical to the one earlier in the week. After Gerhard puts down the phone I tackle him about this.

He looks at me challengingly and says, ‘what are you talking about? I have never spoken to Major Churchill before. And this may be just a job to you, but the Major’s pet rock does seem to be pretty sick.’

I think of taking up the point. Yes, it is just a job to me. Unlike Gerhard who sees a visit to the dentist as a bit of an outing, I have seen a bit of the world. But I keep quiet instead. What is the point? One pearl of wisdom that comes with age is that past glories count for nothing. I am here, and it is now. My life has taken a bit of a nosedive. Like Orson Welles, I seem to have lived my life backwards, if not quite in the sense I am about to.

Over the days that follow I have a permanent sense of déjà vu. Everything in my every day has happened previously. I have the same conversation with Spiro about West Ham’s problems in defence, spend the same hour chatting to my daughter, Promise on the phone about the dangers of putting too many personal details on Facebook, watch Groundhog Day again on DVD, and buy another new metal detector from The Army and Navy Surplus Stores. The hours on my watch are still going forward but the date is going backwards. The presidential election comes round again and they bring the old president back, and that family entertainer that we all once liked is prosecuted again for entertaining children in an inappropriate way. All the papers on the news-stands each day are yesterday’s papers.

At first, I imagine that it must be a huge practical joke, admittedly one with a formidable amount of complicity. Whilst I do not advertise my predicament in case people think I am a basket case, no one I speak to displays any sense that anything is wrong with their own temporal world. There is nothing in the papers or on the news to suggest anything irregular in the cosmos. Just the usual reports on war, politics and celebrity indiscretions. It appears that I am alone in my renegade perception of time, although there is a short item in The Morning Lite calling for a twenty five hour day. NASA scientists have apparently researched this and found that participants in the experiment benefited by the increased levels of melatonin. The findings it says would come in handy if astronauts go to Mars. A Martian day it points out lasts for 24.65 earthly hours.

There are a number of contradictions of logic involved in whatever it is I am experiencing. My days are still moving forward in a linear fashion. I go to work, come home, go to the pub, walk the dog, watch the rerun episode of Spender on ITV3, and go to bed as normal, but when I wake up the next day, it is the day before yesterday. Each day, I become a day younger. This aspect of my condition is, of course, something that at sixty three I should be pleased about; instead of a creeping decay, there will be a gradual rejuvenation. In a world that places excessive emphasis on artifice, this is what millions of people dream of. Zillions of pounds every week are spent by slavish consumers on a staggering array of products promising the reversal of the inevitable. The consentient sorcery of keeping flowers in full bloom is the central tenet of our belief system.

If I am reliving the past there is plenty for me to look forward, or backward to. I have on balance enjoyed my life. There are all of the special places I have been with lovers or friends that I have felt I wanted to go back to sometime. All of the times I have said or thought, I’ll always remember this. Things that just could not be captured on film. I reason I will also know when to expect the difficult times, like the divorce from Monique, Sebastian’s fatal illness, and the bankruptcy hearing. Painful though it will be, I can be ready for these episodes. And I can go on to experience youth with a wise head. What was it Oscar Wilde said? Youth is wasted on the young?

Despite these deliberations, the sequential upheaval continues to be both disconcerting and disorientating. After a week or so of going over the same ground, I decide to seek professional help. I find myself limited by the need to arrange an appointment for the same day. The medical profession does not operate this way. There is no point in my making an arrangement for any time in future, and clearly, I cannot make an appointment for last week or last month. Similarly, I am unable to arrange to see a priest, a mystic, a philosopher, or even a time traveller at a few hours notice. The Auric Ki practitioner that I do manage to see at the community centre at short notice talks about meridians and explains that there might be blockages on the layers of my energy field. Over a dozen or so sessions she says she can balance my chakras and time will move forward again. I try to explain that she might need to do this in one session and she suggests if this is my attitude, then I should go elsewhere.

I begin to wonder what would happen if I do not actually go to bed. Will the day progress normally to the next, or will I at a certain point be flung back to the day before? It seems that despite my predicament, there is still an element of free will about my actions so I buy a wrap of speed, from Sailor, a friend of a friend in the Dancing Monk public house.

‘This is wicked gear,’ says Sailor, so named I assume because of his abundance of tattoos. ‘It will keep you busy for fucking days.’

‘Good,’ I remark. ‘I may need it to.’

I see the exercise as a demonstration of free will, and not therefore merely a duplication of what happened on the corresponding day a couple of weeks previously. At my age, I am not really a late night person and have not taken drugs since my youth, so I am not sure what to expect.

Despite taking the whole wrap of wicked gear with four cans of Red Bull and playing some kicking music, I drift off at around 5 or 6, anyway before daylight.

……………………………………………………………………

When I wake up I am not sure where I am. Everything around me looks foreign, almost alien. In a conversation that must be puzzling to my companion, Song, I establish that this is the balcony of one of the upper floors of an apartment block in north-eastern China. It is 1988 – the year before Tienanmen Square. I have gone back seventeen years. Song and I are filming the spectacular estuary of the Songhua Jiang below for a travelogue for Sky TV. It seems the Chinese authorities are keen to promote tourism in the area. It is a Sunday morning and from our high vantage point, Song and I can see for miles. It is late August, near the end of the rainy season, and while the rainfall this year has been concentrated mainly in July, much of the flood plain is still underwater. Around the swollen river basin acres of lush green landscape luxuriate. Song points toward a flooded football field to our right, saying that despite the pitch being waterlogged the locals are about to turn out to play.

‘We are used to a bit of water. We have long tradition. Chinese invent football in the Han period over two thousand years ago,’ he says. ‘Is called Cuju. Means to kick a ball.’

Song goes a little deeper into the history of cuju in the region and says that he feels the water football game would look great on film, with a commentary about the history of the game from its Han dynasty roots. I nod my agreement. I am not surprised. Through classes in Tai Chi back in, well, there is no other way to say this, back in the twenty first century, I developed an interest in Sino culture. I came to understand that the Chinese invented practically everything from paper and printing to gunpowder and aerial flight, and most advances in science and medicine can be attributed to them.

I feel distracted. The future seeming like the past takes some getting used to. While I am conscious of my vitality, I have the strange sensation that I am also an observer of my life.

A boat carrying a team decked out in carnival colours chanting something patriotic is coming up the river. It is hot and humid and a dank haze hangs suspended above the water as if waiting for an impressionist painter. The regressing part of me is trying frantically to get a handle on what is happening. According to the log, I am keeping to help with later editing of the film, I have been in the Peoples’ Republic for ten days and am scheduled to be there for another ten. I am missing Monique, Sebastian and Promise. Song says that the phone lines will not be down for much longer but I know in my world they will be down until my arrival, so I will be unable to phone home.

Sebastian is six and Promise is five. It will be Promise’s birthday soon. Then she will be four. She will stop going to school. Before long, I will be reading her bedtime stories and taking her to nursery. It is curious to comprehend that my life going backwards means to all intents and purposes that everyone’s life around me is also doing so. I can only experience their past.

Filming in China goes back day-by-day as the day approaches that I arrive on a flight from Heathrow to Beijing. During this time I ponder my situation continually. When Song says, ‘see you tomorrow’, I know I had already seen him tomorrow but I will see him again yesterday.

I contemplate the age-old question as to whether we control our destiny or follow a preordained path. This seems all the more pertinent to my circumstances. Am I just reliving events in a life that I have already experienced or could my new actions or thoughts as a person coming from the future have any effect? And how will I know whether they do?

More immediately I am concerned as to why time for me has gone back seventeen years rather than the more conservative day at a time that I came to accept. I am anxious to avoid such a dramatic leap happening again. The only clue I have is that I had tried to stay awake at night to find out why time was going backwards.

I begin to become anxious about sleeping and visit one of the four thousand acupuncturists in Harbin. I also buy various traditional Chinese remedies from a 114 year-old herbalist named Ho Noh at the local market. Not that Ho instils any confidence. He does not look as if he had ever slept. But I am particularly concerned that the flight on which I was to arrive in Beijing comes in at 5 am local time. There seems to be no way of rescheduling the flight and reducing the risk of more temporal upheaval.

……………………………………………………………………

And indeed there isn’t…. When I become aware of consciousness again I find myself on stage at a Pink Floyd concert. I have some difficulty at first working out the time and place but conclude that it is The Wall tour around February 1981 and this is one of several concerts at Wesfallenhalle, Dortmund in what was then West Germany. What is once again West Germany. I am a sound engineer, and it appears that the tape loops for The Wall have been mixed up with those from Dark Side of the Moon. I suspect I have programmed something incorrectly into the console. Roger Waters is storming around the stage set with a face like thunder and some of the band stop playing.

Back at the hotel, I have a call from Astrid from the house in Rheims.

‘You seem upset baby,’ she says. ‘Is something not good with you?’

I tell her that I have just been sacked by Pink Floyd management. It seems better than saying I have just been jettisoned through space and time from The Peoples’ Republic of China.

‘Why?’ she asks. ‘They seemed so nice at the party in Paris.’

‘A long story,’ I reply, intensely aware of two different life forces, the present, and the future in reverse. You cannot expect to have much of a conversation about space-time continuums in an international phonecall to someone, whose first language is not English.

‘You could come down if you want,’ Astrid said. ‘I have missed you, you know. The only thing is I’ve got Monique staying. Have I ever mentioned my friend, Monique? I’m sure you would like her. She came yesterday.’

It occurs to me that unless I travel the 400 odd kilometres between Dortmund and Rheims by yesterday I will never even meet Monique. It also occurs that I can’t anyway because I have spent yesterday in Dortmund with Pink Floyd. In a devastating flash, having travelled back to before they were even contemplated, I realise I will never see my children again, or for that matter, Monique.

Before The Wall tour starts, or after The Wall tour starts, I spend a month seeing the new year out and the old year in, with Astrid at the house in Rheims. Astrid is a freelance photographer who does shoots for Paris Match and Marie Claire, specialising in quirky subjects like Sumo wrestlers, dwarfs and circus performers. She is successful and works more or less when she chooses to. We make love, morning, afternoon and night, paint, walk along the Vesle, go to galleries, concerts, and French films without subtitles.

During this time I go to see a hypnotherapist and give up not smoking. Almost immediately I find myself getting through a pack of Gitanes a day. It is a revelation to me to discover that one session can change the habits of a lifetime.

With Astrid in Rheims I go with the flow, seize the moment, and try not to think about the disappearing future, about the first time Monique and I saw the Grand Canyon a morning in May, or looking down at The Great Barrier Reef through a glass-bottomed boat, walking amongst the mystical stonework of the sun temple of Machu Picchu or watching the spectacular patterns form in the Sossusvlei sand dunes in Namibia, the sun’s reflection on the water in the Halong Bay in Vietnam, about Promise’s wedding, or Sebastian getting in to Oxford, sadly just a month before his fatal illness took hold. I do not think of the excitement of my novel being published or the acclaim I received for the first feature film I directed. I certainly do not think of the months in The Jackson Pollock Recovery Home, the job at Don Quixote or about anything else that happened after my breakdown. The future is history. And the future from a normal chronology of events will now never be. I will not have to endure that period of time later in life when those around you are slowly dying off. Those senior years when if you see a friend you haven’t seen for a while, their news will be that someone else had died. Back in the future when I was sixty three I recall that this had already begun to happen. My parents had died and, of course, Sebastian had died. Also, in a few short months, my friend Giorgio had died from liver cancer, Jacques had died from a heart attack, and Marianne had died from complications during surgery.

I feel I can live with going back a day at a time, and being aware of what will happen next is not a huge problem. With Astrid, life seems easy. I am twenty six years old and it seems that this is a time for pleasure. Each day the mystery of our attraction unfolds as we know less about each other. An affair lived backwards is very exciting. The fascination increases day by day, the first time you will get a mutual invitation, the first time you will go away together, the first time you will get or buy a present, the first time you will have breakfast together, the first time you will undress one another, working toward that glorious, breathtaking moment when your eyes will first meet, when intuition and desire will form an immaculate, unstoppable, mystical union, that split second when love is heaven-sent.

……………………………………………………………………

Astrid becomes Francesca in Barcelona, then Isabella in Rome. In between, there is Natalie in New York, and before I know it I am twenty three. These years are wild and exciting. I go to parties with painters and dine with divas. I work on a film with Antonioni and play with Led Zeppelin. Keith Moon crashes my car and Marc Bolan throws up in my jacuzzi. In a wave of hedonism, I just soak up all the pleasure that is available and cannot recall when I last tried to exercise free will. I have gone with the flow, allowing my youth and libido free rein.

Time going backwards is by now the most normal thing in the world to me. Déjà vu has become so commonplace that it is now unnoticeable. I am no longer surprised that news items and soap opera plots unfold backwards. But I am sometimes made aware of echoes of a future life. A persistent voice in my head seems to narrate stories concerning an older person. The voice is familiar, and comes from within, but while it seems it belongs to me and has some sense of self, at the same time I feel a sense of detachment. I have recollections of having lived through many of the episodes, but they exhibit themselves like false memory.

This older person seems to have experienced considerable misfortune. He found his crock of gold early and bit-by-bit has seen it disappear. As a result of the dispossession, he has suffered some kind of nervous collapse. He lives a lonely life, works in inanimate pet care, drives a brown Skoda and listens to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Even if this were to be my own future, it is neither tangible nor attractive. It seems to me that as my life is moving irrevocably in reverse, nothing is to be gained by taking possession of a character surrounded with so much sadness. So the more that it happens, the more I try to block out the voice.

It is often said that when you are young, life is a timeless flight, but as you get older time seems to fly by like it has been turned to fast forward. I find that as I grow younger a similar thing is happening. Months fly by. One moment it is August and the next it is April and another summer is gone. Christmases and birthdays are closer together. No sooner am I twenty three than I am twenty two, and then in what seems the blink of an eye, twenty one.

……………………………………………………………………

After, or before, an especially profligate drinking session, with a group of Dutch football supporters, in a bar in the red light district of Amsterdam during the World Cup, I make the decision I am going to fundamentally change the way I live. We have consumed bottle after bottle of genever as Holland lose to West Germany. We continue our drinking into the night, inconsolable that Johann Cruyff, despite being the finest footballer in the world, will never lift the trophy.

The binge is just the last in a long line of testimonies to guileless self-deprecation. I am unhappy with myself. I have begun to feel that my youthful comportment is frivolous and empty. My behaviour is inconsiderate and hurtful, and I despise the person I am becoming – or have been. I frequently catch myself saying really immature things, and acting badly towards those around me.

What brings matters to a head is a chance meeting at Amsterdam bus station with Faith, a friend of my mother’s. Faith is dressed in a miscellany of chiffon wraps, scarves, bead chokers and jangly jewellery. She carries a tote bag with a yantric design on it and has rainbow coloured braids in her hair. Faith greets me with a warm hug, which brings with it an assault of patchouli.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m not sure where I’m going,’ I say. ‘Because it seems to be more a case of where have I been.’

In that moment I have a profound sensation of being disengaged from time.

In the 1960s both Faith and my mother will live on the fringes of a bohemian lifestyle. My father, a man ensconced in the decorum of the professions, will not. He will go to the races and Rotary Club dinners, while my mother and Faith will metaphorically burn their bras and go on demonstrations. It is not hard to see how they will grow apart and the disagreements and separation that will be the backdrop to my early life will arise.

‘Time present and time past are perhaps present in time future,’ Faith continues. ‘And time future is contained in time past. If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable.’

‘Where does that come from?’ I ask.

‘Those are the opening lines from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets,’ she replies, looking me in the eye. It is an English teacher kind of look. I look away.

When I am younger my mother will try to educate me in poetry, but I will prefer The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. I will get an appallingly bad grade in English by reading none of the books. My father will not notice because I am too unimportant to be of any significance.

‘But, if you do not know where you are going, you should not be at the bus station. Why don’t you come and have some lunch with me?’ Faith says. ‘I live in Haarlem.’

The bus arrives and we take it. Haarlem is just a few miles. I open up to Faith. I explain I haven’t seen mother since I was twenty six and then only briefly. She looks puzzled so I tried to explain a little of my predicament.

She quotes T. S. Eliot at me once again.

‘We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.’

I began to wonder if T. S. Eliot might have shared my sequential dysfunction.

On the journey, Faith tells me about the community in which she lives, all the time emphasising how happy she is. The community, she says, support one another, share everything, and work together towards a common aim. It seems idealistic, naive even, but I can see that Faith appears to be happy and feels she has found what she is looking for. Her view of life seems to be in marked contrast with my own.

We arrive at Haarlem. A lengthy explanation about eastern philosophy and the middle way sees us outside Faith’s house.

‘BEWARE OF THE GOD,’ says the sign on the front gate.

‘Which God?’ I ask.

‘It does not matter,’ she replies. ‘How about a Retriever?’

……………………………………………………………………

I come round in the playground of The Frank Portrait Primary School. I am wearing short grey trousers, grey flannel shirt and a blue blazer. I am fighting with a boy called Jon Keating. No!…..Wait! …… I AM Jon Keating. ‘Keating needs a beating, Keating needs a beating’ they are chanting, this swathe of little grey monsters. ‘Keating needs a beating.’ They empty my blazer pockets, and one of them, Nolan Rocco I think it is, takes my wristwatch. How will I know what time it is now?

© Chris Green 2019: All rights reserved

Trout Fishing

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Trout Fishing by Chris Green

FRIDAY


‘Sunsets on Mars are blue,’ says the man’s voice coming from behind her. It is too loud for her to ignore.

Suzy turns around to see a stranger in a badly creased seersucker suit has sat down at the next table. He is alone. Is he talking to her or talking to himself, she wonders? Perhaps he is practising lines for a play. The Apollo is just down the road and he has that theatrical air about him. Dishevelled hair. Lined face. Goatee beard. Wild eyes. Probably best to ignore him. But, what an odd thing to say, out of the blue!

‘Iguanas have three eyes,’ he says. He definitely seems to be addressing her. He is staring right at her. Intently. Might he be coming on to her? If he is, she doesn’t think much of his chat up lines. Or his style. He is looking her up and down, leeringly. She had thought this morning when she got up that wearing her red dress might lift her spirits. She had been feeling a bit low. With Lev gone, everything seemed to be getting on top of her. But in hindsight, perhaps the dress was a mistake. It makes her stand out too much at this time of the morning. Luigi’s Café is not a dressing up kind of place. Supermarket shoppers mainly. And it seems, the odd weirdo.

She looks around for a waitress to ask for the bill for her Profiterole and Macchiato but they have all temporarily disappeared. She takes out her phone and pretends to make a call hoping this will deter the stranger. It doesn’t.

‘The brain is composed of 60% fat,’ he says. ‘Did you know that?’

He’s just plain creepy, she concludes. Looney Tunes. A basket-case. She should leave. There is still no sign of a waitress and the other customers all appear to be engaged in conversations. She pushes a ten-pound note under her plate, gathers up her bags and makes a hasty exit.

On the street, she is relieved to discover the creep has not followed her. Just the other day, her friend Yvonne told her she had had a stalker. This had all started off with someone leering at her in Starbucks when she was on her own. He began to follow her everywhere and she had to bring in the police.

Suzy is about to get into her Ssangyong when her phone rings. She does not recognise the number. She decides to answer it, anyway. Kurt, her eldest was talking about getting a new phone.

‘Bluetooth was named after King Harald Bluetooth who united Denmark and Norway in the tenth century,’ says the now familiar voice. Bluetooth? Is this how the creep from the café has obtained her number? A bit tecky but how else would he know it?

‘I understand you feel intimidated,’ Holly at the hairdressers says. ‘But really, all you have to do is steer clear of Luigi’s and not answer the phone.’

‘I’ve already blocked the number,’ Suzy says.

‘It’s not as if he knows where you live,’ is it?’ Holly says.

‘I hope not,’ Suzy says. ‘It’s not something you could find out from a mobile phone number, is it, Hol?’

‘No. He was just some geek trying to be clever,’ Holly says. ‘You get them all the time.’

I guess you’re right,’ Suzy says. ‘He was talking nonsense.’

It is Friday night. Kurt and Axel are out with their mates taking drugs or two-timing their girlfriends or whatever teenage lads get up to these days. Either way, they are likely to be out all night. Suzy is alone in the house. At times like this, she wishes Lev had not gone off like he did. It has been nearly a month now but she cannot get used to being alone. At the time, she felt she wanted him out of her life but now she is not so sure. She is all over the place. It only takes the slightest thing to upset her. Perhaps they should have given it another try. Her friends keep telling her she should move on but in the meantime, she is finding it can be very lonely, especially as all of them are in relationships. She decides there’s nothing really for it but to mix a gin and tonic and see what’s on TV. On a Friday night! How sad is that!

She sips her drink and presses the on-button on the remote. Without warning, his face fills the screen. This is impossible. Yet, there’s no mistaking him. The dishevelled mop of hair. The goatee beard. The Keith Richards creases that line his face. The intense stare. This is the creepy man from the café. In high definition and larger than life on her 56 inch TV. How can this be happening?

‘A tarantula can live without food for more than two years,’ he says. To add to her disorientation and distress, the freak is coming out with more surreal rubbish too. What kind of game is this? What can it all mean? What does he want?

She tries changing channels but to her horror, he is still there staring straight into the camera and, by extension, directly at her.

‘Earth has travelled five thousand miles in the last five minutes, Suzy’ he says.

He is even addressing her by name now.

‘She tries random buttons. He stays on the screen, leering menacingly at her.

‘There are too many black holes to count,’ he sneers.

Panicked, Suzy pulls out the plug. He is gone. She pours herself another drink. No tonic this time.

Andy Mann, the aerial installation technician who used to work with Lev assures her what she is describing is impossible. But as she seems distraught and he happens to be in the area, he says he will call around and take a look.

‘Take me through it,’ he says. ‘Show me exactly what you did.’

Suzy is a little reluctant, in fact, she is bricking it as she plugs the TV back in. She stands back and presses the button on the remote. BBC1 comes on as you would normally expect. The One Show. She changes the channel over and over. Each number brings up the correct station showing its normal Friday night fare.

Suzy does not know what to feel, vulnerable, confused, relieved, embarrassed.

‘Now that you’re here, Andy, why don’t you stop for a drink?’ she says.

SATURDAY

‘Thank you for staying over, Andy,’ Suzy says. ‘That was good of you.’

‘The least I could do,’ Andy says.

‘And you’re sure Amy won’t have wondered where you were.’

‘No. Amy’s visiting her mother. Anyway, I could always say my van broke down or something. It’s worked before.’

‘You mean I’m not the first. You are bad, Andy.’

‘The main thing is, do you feel better? You were in a bit of a state when I arrived.’

‘I do, Andy. Much better. Perhaps you could make me feel …… better again before you go.’

‘What about Kurt and Axel? Won’t they be back soon?’

‘You must be joking. It’s Saturday. Wherever they’ve been or wherever they are now, they won’t be up this early.’

‘You’re having trouble with this one, aren’t you, Phil,’ Patti says.

‘It’s ground to a halt the last couple of days,’ I say. ‘And I don’t know where to take it. The Philip C. Dark brand relies upon shock and surprise and this one has run out of steam.’

‘You could introduce a talking cat,’ Patti says. ‘That would move the story forward.’

‘Funnily enough, I was thinking of a talking cat,’ I say. They are always a good stand-by. I could call it Dave. Dave’s a good name for a cat, don’t you think?’

SUNDAY

Dave has been out all night. His people have left him and gone away on holiday. The lad who is supposed to be letting him and out and feeding him his pouches of Gourmet chunks has not been since Friday afternoon. Young people are so unreliable at weekends. Not the best of nights to be out either as it has been pouring with rain and he has had to sleep in a leaky old shed. It is now light and thankfully the rain has stopped. Dave sees an opportunity of some warmth and who knows, perhaps even a tasty breakfast from the lady at number 42, the one whose husband has left her. Nice smells are coming from her kitchen.

Suzy is unnerved by the scratching sound at the door. Not being accustomed to talking cats, she is freaked out when the ginger and white tom asks her if he can come in and snuggle up by the radiator to get warm.

‘I’m quite partial to bacon too if you have a spare rasher or two,’ Dave says. ‘And perhaps a sausage.’

Perhaps, in the wake of her recent experiences, she is becoming de-sensitised to strangeness. Rather than slip once more into panic mode, she finds herself quietly amused by the idea of a chatty moggy.

‘I’ve not seen you around here before,’ she says. ‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Dave,’ Dave says. ‘Would you like to talk about magic carpets?’

‘Magic carpets?’ Suzy is confused.

‘I thought magic carpets would make a change,’ Dave says. ‘All my people want to talk about are cabbages and kings.’

‘OK,’ Suzy says. ‘Let’s talk about magic carpets.’

‘Or if you prefer we could talk about Red Sails in the Sunset,’ Dave says. ‘Do you know that song? I could sing it for you.’

‘I think I might have it somewhere,’

There are thirty nine recorded versions of Red Sails in the Sunset. Did you know that? My favourite is Fats Domino’s’ Have you got that one or did Lev take it with him when he left?’

‘Perhaps we should stick with magic carpets.’

‘Or we could try Belgian Surrealists.’

‘Magic carpets would be better.’

‘OK. As you probably know, magic carpets originate in the area from Egypt to Iraq known as the Fertile Crescent, which of course is also where domestic cats come from.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Not going well with the talking cat, is it?’ Patti says.

‘It does need a little work,’ I say. ‘And a title.’

‘Would you like to read my Richard Brautigan book?’ Patti says. ‘Trout Fishing in America. I think it might help.’

‘Good title,’ I say. ‘I’m guessing it’s not about trout fishing, right?’

‘Not completely, no,’ Patti says. ‘It’s a series of sketches of a strange yet strikingly familiar world.’

© Chris Green 2018: All rights reserved

THE END

~ Chris Green ~ 2 Comments

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The End by Chris Green

At first, the sound is little more than an intermittent background hum. I put this down to tinnitus. But, the hum does not go away. Over a period of a few days, it becomes more pervasive. Eventually, it is a permanent drone. On her return from her counselling conference up country, my partner, Nisha tells me she can hear it too. What can be causing it, we wonder. The fridge freezer perhaps? An electrical overload? An alarm from an outbuilding? …… It is none of these.

‘What about Charlie’s radio transmitter?’ Nisha says. ‘That’s not far away.’

‘Charlie’s ….. uh, shed was the first thing I thought of,’ I say. ‘But there’s nothing at all coming from there. I’ve been round a couple of times. Charlie seems to be away on holiday.’

We live in a detached house in a quiet rural area so we conclude it cannot be noise from a building site and it is too loud to be from distant traffic.

I discover that others are hearing it too. Mrs Oosterhuis in the cottage down the road says it is upsetting her Mikey. Mikey is her Jack Russell. Bill and Gill who live at The Old Rectory say it keeps them awake at night and Ron and Anne at Rose Nook say they have taken to wearing earplugs. The animals at the nearby Rescue Centre are behaving strangely too, the dogs especially. It’s not just Mikey who has taken to yelping and whimpering. Animals sense something is wrong. Mr Chislett in the newsagents says the humming sounds like a swarm of bees. A plague of locusts suggests the lady in front of me buying her equestrian magazine. She tells us about her experience in Egypt in the eighties. We debate as to whether the hum has a constant frequency or whether it oscillates. I tell it sounds like the E chord at the end of A Day in the Life played at full volume and without the fadeout. The pair look at me blankly. Whatever its pitch might be, we agree it is getting louder. When I go in to pick up my prescription at the surgery, the customers waiting in the reception area are talking about the hum, describing it variously as a buzz, a thrum, a rumble. The pharmacist says that some folk have taken to wearing industrial ear defenders when they go out. He tries to sell me a pair.

Everyone now seems to be hearing it but no-one knows what it is. There is nothing on the news about it and nothing in the papers, just the usual blather about indiscreet arms deals, political brinkmanship and celebrity indiscretions. Why is it not being reported? Someone must know what is causing it. I trawl through the conspiracy theory sites online. I feel there is bound to be something there like there is with weather manipulation or chemtrails. Even if it’s just an unsubstantiated theory, someone will have come up with an idea about what is going on. But to my astonishment, there appears to be nothing, not even the token suggestion by a sci-fi fan that it might be a big black monolith beaming a signal to mankind. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might think that people had been posting prolifically but the posts had been systematically taken down.

‘Try not to become neurotic about it,’ Nisha keeps telling me. ‘It will probably disappear just as unexpectedly as it started.’

I think she is wrong. I have a sense of foreboding about it but I know what she will say if I share this thought with her.

I decide to go to see my friend, Vic on his houseboat. Vic often knows about things that are going on that others don’t. He is a mine of information, a veritable WikiLeaks. But this time even Vic is flummoxed. He too is concerned about the background drone. He says he has taken to playing Pearl Jam and Queens of the Stone Age to drown it out. But he tells me he has not been able to come up with anything about its source, perhaps it’s an invisible alien landing craft hovering in the sky waiting for the right moment to invade.

Aura in the New Age shop that has opened in the village says each of the planets has its own vibration. She demonstrates the different frequencies with a series of cosmic tuning forks. Each fork, she explains, tones to the precise frequencies of each planet’s orbit around the Sun. None of them, however, match the hum. Perhaps the orbit of our celestial body is slowing down, she says. Ravi, the leg spinner in the Lower Dickley cricket team says at first he wondered if it might be a universal Om, but Om has a positive vibration whereas the sound we can hear has no such qualities. If everyone can hear it, it could be a force for unity, says Interfaith minister, Desmond Haynes. I think he’s clutching at straws. It’s more likely to be confirmation that things are falling apart. Look at the state of the world. Where is the contentment?

…………………………

‘My phone’s gone dead,’ Nisha says. ‘Right in the middle of my call to Astrid.’

‘It probably needs charging,’ I say. Technology seems to have it in for Nisha. She constantly experiences these kinds of difficulties. Last week it was the timer on her tablet, before that a virus on the cooker. Perhaps it was the other way around although she manages to lock her car keys in the car even though it should be impossible. It’s a good thing she has someone around to fix these things.

‘I’ve just charged the damn thing,’ she says, thrusting the Samsung at me. ‘Not ten minutes ago.’

‘You’d better try the landline,’ I say. No-one I know seems to use a proper phone these days. I wonder why we still pay for the service.

A few seconds later Nisha reports back that the landline is dead too. As if somehow it’s my fault.

‘That’s a bugger,’ I say, worried that the day might now take a turn for the worse. ‘I’d better go online to see if there is any information about a fault.’

As I say it, I realise that there is not going to be any internet either. The lights on the router are flashing red. I try for about twenty minutes but it will not reboot.

Next door, Mrs Oosterhuis has no phone or internet either. Nor do Ron and Anne. Our daughter, Lucy comes around in a panic to see if our TV or internet are working. Hers are not.

‘Everything seems to be down around our way, internet, phones, TV, the lot’ she says. ‘And it’s chaos on the roads too. None of the traffic lights are working and no-one knows who has the right of way. And there’s been a massive pile-up at the Jim Morrison roundabout.’

Predictably our TV isn’t working, nor the radio. Just static on both. The omnipresent hum though seems to be louder. The cups on the kitchen work surface are beginning to vibrate. It’s as if the source is getting closer.

‘What do you think it is, Dad?’ Lucy asks.

‘No-one seems to have any idea what’s causing it,’ I say.

‘I’m scared, Dad. It’s all a bit Black Mirror, except it’s for real.’

Seeing my puzzled look, Lucy explains that Black Mirror is a satirical sci-fi series.

Staying put and doing nothing doesn’t seem to be an option. Out here in the sticks, we feel isolated. We need to find out what is going on. The only way to see how far the communication outage has spread and maybe find out what is behind it would be to go to Chesterbridge, the nearest large town. This is thirty miles north. We set off in the Range Rover. As expected, the car radio is full of static but as we make our way along the road the ubiquitous hum strengthens. There is very little traffic on the road, just the odd military vehicle from the base at Edgemoor.

‘It’s the middle of the afternoon,’ I say. ‘What the fuck has happened to everyone?’

‘It certainly wasn’t like this coming from Milton Sodbury just now,’ Lucy says. ‘Hence the pile-up at the roundabout.’

Milton Sodbury is a small town to the south. The traffic chaos that Lucy encountered coming from Milton Sodbury will be down to the failure of computer systems, running traffic lights, satnavs and other tech devices. So why the absence of traffic on the road to Chesterbridge? It’s an A road. There seems no logic. As we drive on in watchful silence, we see that vehicles have been abandoned by the side of the road. Every hundred yards or so there’s an abandoned set of wheels, a car, a van, a lorry ……

‘Ought we to be heading this way?’ Nisha says, finally. ‘I don’t like it one bit.’

‘I don’t like it much either,’ I say ‘But we’ve got to do something.’

‘That was a dead bear we just passed,’ Lucy says.

Common sense suggests we should not be doing this. Everything about the journey seems portentous. It is getting noticeably colder now and although it is only two o’clock, it is already getting dark. The phrase, devil and the deep blue sea, springs to mind.

‘Let’s turn back,’ Nisha says, as we pass an overturned motorhome.

The hum was one thing. Once you established that there was a perpetual hum, you could learn to live with that as a norm but this is getting weirder and weirder. We don’t know what to expect next. What manner of devastation is taking place?

‘Look up there!’ Lucy screams, suddenly.

It takes me a little while to realise that it is a plane falling out of the sky. I can’t imagine what else I think it might be. Clearly, it’s much too large to be a bird, it’s the size of a Boeing aircraft, for Heaven’s sake. But here it is plummeting rapidly on a trajectory to a spot the other side of Brickley Hill. It’s going to crash. Hundreds of people will be aboard and they will die. They will probably be screaming.

My mind is a blur. I can’t remember the exact chain of events but I am no longer in the Range Rover driving to Chesterbridge. My narrative has moved on. I am now in…. I am in…… Where am I? I realise I am alone. Where are my ……. my family…..Where are the people in my…… in my stor……. my….….stery…. mystery? A deathly silence pervades the ravaged landscape. The hum has ……. stopped. There is no hum. I’m not sure if it’s the future or the past. But, it can’t be either. It must always be now. I just can’t put it all together at the moment. It feels like a kind of limbo. What has happened to the hum? Perhaps Desmond Haynes was right and the hum was the very thing that was holding the familiar world together.

The landscape behind me seems to be disappearing as if someone is rolling up a carpet. Amongst the devastation before me, a black crow is calling. A harbinger of doom? Up ahead in the distance is a large ramshackle structure, a depository of some kind perhaps. There is nowhere else to go. So, with a degree of trepidation, I approach the derelict building.

‘You are not going to like it in there, old man,’ says a gangly figure in torn black clothes. He has one eye missing and a shock of jet black hair hanging down one side of his pale face. He seems completely out of context.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘I am just telling you that you will not like it,’ he says. I look him up and down. His form seems insubstantial, his features other-worldly, ethereal. Reason and logic seem to have broken down. What is this place?

‘But, there is nowhere else to go,’ I say. ‘Nowhere! Look around!’

‘Exactly!’ he says. ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head, old man. There is nowhere else to go and there’s no going back, is there? This, my friend, is it.’

‘What do you mean? Who are you?’

‘Questions, questions. There’s no time for questions, old man.’

‘Where are Nisha and Lucy?’

‘Your wife and daughter will have gone to another ……. terminal.’

‘What is in there? What is in this …… terminal?’

‘Nothing!’

‘Nothing?’

‘Emptiness. A void. Non-existence.’

‘You mean……’

‘Yes, old man. Your time has come. This is The End.’

© Chris Green 2017: All rights reserved

QUINCE

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QUINCE by Chris Green

Giles Riddler tells me the quince tree blossoming in the front garden was the deciding factor in them buying the house. Had it not been for the quince tree, the Briggs and Mortimer board outside the 1930s semi-detached villa in Heisenberg Avenue might have gone unnoticed. Giles and Audrey apparently were out walking their labradoodle, Hendrix. They were not looking for a house.

‘Look, Giles,’ Audrey had said. ‘What a lovely quince tree!’

‘Indeed! Cydonia oblonga,’ Giles had said. ‘In such a beautiful sunny position. Exactly what we need. Let’s buy the house.’

‘Just like that?’ Audrey had said. Although I have not met her in person, I have formed the opinion that Audrey is in many respects more circumspect than her husband.

‘Absolutely!’ Giles had said. ‘It’s a sign. In this uncertain world, you have to be able to spot these things. And this is a first class quince tree.’

Their house in Cat Stevens Court was on the market the following day along with an offer of £400,000 on Heisenberg Avenue. Giles tells me they had not even looked around the new house when the offer went in. There was just no need, he says.

Their offer was accepted. The Cat Stevens house too sold in a day. It was as easy as that.

………………………………………..

I first came across the word, quince years ago in Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat along with the mystifying word, runcible. Something about dining on mince, and slices of quince, and eating it with a runcible spoon. Mince presumably refers to sweet mince and not spag bol mince and quince is a fruit used primarily to make jelly. A runcible spoon is probably a spork.

Edward Lear was born in 1812 and was the youngest surviving child of twenty one. There was a high infant mortality rate back then. Average age expectancy at birth in cities was nineteen. A precocious child, Edward first became celebrated as a teenager for drawing parrots, before turning his hand to landscape painting, travel writing and composing music. Although nonsense verse is what he is mostly remembered for, this was apparently just a sideline.

………………………………………..

I am a writer of experimental fiction, trying, like the paperback writer in the Beatles tune to get my new novel published. Like the one in the song, it’s a thousand pages give or take a few. Unlike Paul McCartney’s scribbler, I do already have a large and varied body of work. Sometimes I give readings at Nena Emanuel Care Home. One of the residents, a Hilma Faraday, tells me she grew up with Edward Lear in North London. They used to play in the streets of Holloway together and Eddie talked endlessly about the land where the bong tree grows and told her the tale of the Quangle-Wangle’s Hat. By my reckoning, this must make Hilma around two hundred years old, yet she doesn’t look a day over eighty. It’s a strange world. Things are not always what they seem.

………………………………………..

I was only familiar with Heisenberg as the pseudonym chemistry teacher, Walter White chose to do his drug deals in the cult television series, Breaking Bad but I discover that Heisenberg here is a reference to physicist Werner Heisenberg, the fellow behind the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of a particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. Walt’s choice of the name Heisenberg is by all accounts a joke by series creator, Vince Gilligan, aimed at fans who might remember the uncertainty principle from the long afternoons in the lab for double Chemistry.

And then there’s the observer effect. The act of observation makes changes to a phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. Reality is hard to pin down. If you take this to its logical conclusion nothing can be verified.

………………………………………..

Writers sometimes find they have time on their hands. In order to get myself out of the house, now and again I help out at my friend, Max Brooks’s bookshop. Brooks Books stocks a comprehensive range of reading, the type of books you may not find at Waterstones. Giles Riddler is a frequent visitor. He comes in for a cup of coffee and likes to spend an hour or two browsing the shelves. Sometimes he makes a bulk purchase. A week or so ago he ordered a dozen copies of Costa Rican novelist, Quince Duncan’s, A Message from Rosa. Today he is asking for Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. He wants fourteen copies and we only have one on the shelves. While I look it up on the catalogue, he asks about the new Edward Lear biography that is due out. I don’t believe there is a new Edward Lear biography due out. He might be referring to the new Paul McCartney biography, but we don’t stock that. I humour him. He tells me about the yellow fruit on his tree. I may be wrong but I think I notice a thread running through our conversations. Although I can’t quite put my finger on it, there does seem to be a recurring theme.

Giles goes on to say that the quinces from the tree ought not to be ripe yet. It is only August. Quinces should not be ready to pick, he says, until September or October. Yet they are. He has one in his pocket to show me. He takes it out and puts it on the counter. I can’t help thinking that it bears a remarkable resemblance to a jar of sweet mince. I don’t know what to believe, anymore. As the great Jorge Luis Borges says, ‘reality is not always probable, or likely.’ Could we possibly be living in a hologram?

© Chris Green 2016: All rights reserved

HOMBURG

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Homburg by Chris Green

Ben Maceo told me about the clock last week. Ben has special powers, you see. He can tell when things are going to happen. Had it been anyone else, I would never have believed them, but as it was Ben, I knew that it would happen and so I was able to prepare. Ben knew that the big clock in the town’s main square was going to explode and that there would be fragments of time scattered everywhere. He knew you would no longer be able to rely on your watch or the numbers you saw on your phone display to tell the time. He knew that time being the key to practically everything, the chaos would spread. Perhaps I should have shared his warning with others, but I did not. I find that not many people are ready for unpleasant truths, and especially not to hear them before the event. The others on the campus already think that I’m a bit weird for hanging around with Ben.

Anyway, time is all over the place now. Not just hours and minutes, but years and months are coalescing, or separating. No-one knows what is going on and from what I can see from the television pictures, there is panic on the streets. Film crews have been shipped in from far and wide to take a look at the chaos that is happening in the town. Many of course have not been able to get here as time is buffeted around, but some have arrived, or are arriving. But others who have arrived are stuck here, whether they want to be or not.

Every aspect of our everyday lives, as Ben points out, is time dependent. I am not going to even venture outside until things get back to normal. Perhaps they will never get back to normal, but this is a chance that I have to take. In the meantime, I can take some cuttings from my agave plants and practice some Janacek on my ukulele, and there’s that Schopenhauer essay I have to finish off. Schopenhauer’s view on time is that we spend too much of it ruminating on the past or planning for the future that our lives quickly pass us by. So, I’m going to try to get on with mine. After all, Ben has my phone number. He will let me know if and when there is any change. Perhaps he might even call round. We could listen to my new Ozric Tentacles CD. And, who knows what else?

I have learned to trust Ben’s intuition. It was Ben who told me about the man in the Homburg hat’s arrival at the railway station last June. Ben was aware that the stranger’s very presence in the town would bring about the worst snows on record, and this in the middle of summer too when the rest of the country was basking in the seasonal sunshine. The mystery man was also responsible for the disappearance into thin air of the 11:11 train from the capital to the west country on November 11th, somewhere between the ancient burial sites and the land sculptures by the artist with the unpronounceable name. Ben told me this was going to take place days before it happened.

His gift is that he can detect what is happening behind the scenes. He can see the invisible threads that connect all things. He knows that when one of those threads gets broken that something anomalous will happen. By tracing the path of the broken thread, he says, he can tell exactly what will happen, along with when and where it will happen. He does not do any of this consciously. He says that it’s just like having the radio on in the background. This is how he knew that we would have blizzards in June and he knew the train would disappear.

‘There is more strangeness in the world than most people realise,’ he is fond of saying. ‘Most people cannot see the mechanics of things happening. They just put events down to cause and effect, without understanding what cause might be or what happens in between cause and effect or else they come up with some claptrap about theoretical physics to explain things.’

I’m right with Ben on this one. Theoretical physicists seem to know very little about the universe. Their theories change every five minutes. They talk about red shifts and blue shifts, expansions from the big bang and contractions down to gravity, dark matter, and dark energy, but despite all this blather, their understanding of what is really going on never seems to become any clearer. The great Karl Popper summed it up by saying, ‘Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.’ Ben Maceo takes it a step further and argues that there is no point at all in universal theories, each event is unique and has its own explanation.

……………………………………………….

Time is still all over the place. So far as I can tell, it has been three days, give or take, so far as I can tell, since it all went down and Ben still hasn’t been round to see me. He hasn’t so much as called me. You would think that given his intuitive powers, he would have detected the undeniable chemistry between us. Surely he has spotted that I always sit next to him in Paradox and Plurality. He must have noticed that I hang on his every word. What can he possibly be doing that is getting in the way of our blossoming romance? Especially now. He can’t be busy. College has been closed since the upheaval. He has no excuse not to get in touch.

I left several messages on Ben’s phone, but amidst all of the temporal disorder, I suppose it’s possible he may not have got them. Perhaps he will get them tomorrow or maybe he got them and thought they were from last week. From before the clock exploded. This could explain why I haven’t had a call. On the other hand, the messages may still be up there in the ether, struggling to find its way, along with all the other communications that have been disrupted. They said on the news that messages from weeks ago were still bumping around out there, trying to find their destination. I suspect some people will have made it out of town, but the newsman said that this would be a risky undertaking because of the wormholes. I imagine the term wormhole is perhaps being used here because they have no idea what is going on.

Ben would be able to explain what is going on, but he probably wouldn’t want to tell them. Perhaps they would not understand it if he did. If you can’t understand something without an explanation, then you can’t understand it with an explanation. I read that somewhere. I wonder where it was. There is an innate tendency to feel that things have always been as they are now and always will be. This is the way the human mind seems to work, but there was always a before and there will always be an after. It’s just a question of learning to think this way. We need to take a more Zen approach.

It is dark much of the day. Sometimes light breaks through for a few minutes but then the sky blackens again. With nothing to regulate them properly, night and day seem to be entirely arbitrary. My laptop is continually doing a system restore and my bedside clock is like a random number generator. I keep picking up numerals off the floor from the various clocks around the flat. Living without the certainty of time takes a lot of getting used to.

Ben did say that in the beginning, at least for the first few days, the aftermath of the explosion in the town would be difficult to live with. Perhaps he has left town. He knew that it was going to happen and seemed to understand the effect it would have, so this would make sense. And this is why he can’t communicate. Bit he should have taken me with him. Instead, I am stuck here. Oh well, no use dwelling on it. If it stays light for a while, I think I will paint some yantric mandalas to focus my mindfulness.

……………………………………………….

The stranger in the Homburg hat. …… The one that Ben described. ……. He is outside my house. ……. He’s looking in the window. ……. He has something in his hand. He is holding it up for me to see. It looks like an envelope, a black envelope, one of those A4 folding ones that you use to keep documents in. …… Oh my God! I can see his silhouette through the frosted glass of the front door. He is wearing a long black overcoat and with the hat looks about seven foot tall. He’s knocking on the door. ……. What should I do? What should I do? I’m not ready for this. I am terrified. He knocks again and shouts something. I can’t make out what he is saying. His diction is not good, but it does sound like a threat. ……. Suddenly, there is another rupture in time and to my great relief, the man in the Homburg hat is no longer there. But, the black manilla wallet is lying on the coir doormat inside the door, in front of me. Anxiously, I pick it up and inspect it, afraid to open it to see what is inside.

Finally, I pluck up the courage to take a look. The wallet contains nine sheets of A4 paper, each with several paragraphs of text on, but it is like no writing that I have ever seen before. It is perhaps a little, but only a little, reminiscent of Arabic script. In any event, it looks to the untrained eye as unintelligible as Kurdish or Urdu might be. At the bottom of the last page, as if acting as a signature, there is a line-art graphic of a shattered clock. How am I supposed to make anything of this arcane communication? We covered theosophy and The Golden Dawn and all that Zoroastrian mysticism in a module last semester, along with Rosicrucianism and the Kabbalah, but I can’t pretend that I followed it that closely. It was too easy to get one mixed up with the other and I drifted off a lot. I think I may have just sat in on the module to be around Ben.

The curious thing is, I find that I am able to read this bizarre communication. Not all of it, certainly, but I can make out passages of the strange text. Where has this remarkable ability sprung from? The letter contains none of the mumbo jumbo from esoteric teachings that the blocks of arcane lettering suggests. Instead, it mentions a meeting. I am to meet an undisclosed party, by the statue of Neil Diamond. The statue of Neil Diamond? Crackling Rosie? Sweet Caroline? Why is there a statue of Neil Diamond? The statue, it says, is located next to the harmonica museum. I didn’t realise there was a harmonica museum in the town. Where on earth is the harmonica museum? The letter doesn’t offer a map. Oh well, I expect I will find it. It is not a large town. The main problem might be the one concerning the specified time, midday. Time has not settled down yet, so how will I know when it is midday and if I do find out, will it still be midday when I get there.

……………………………………………….

‘Light doesn’t necessarily travel at the speed of light,’ says a muted voice. I cannot see where it is coming from and, at first, think it might just be a voice in my head. After all, it is an odd line in conversation.

‘The slowest recorded speed for light is thirty eight miles per hour,’ the voice continues. Is it perhaps some kind of coded message? I turn around to see a short stocky one-armed man in a Pablo Picasso blue and white hooped sweatshirt and black sunglasses emerging from behind the statue of Neil Diamond. He has a Siamese cat perched on his shoulder. Even though there is a lot of competition for strange, if this fellow is going for strange, he has surely succeeded.

‘Would you like to sing to my cat?’ he says. ‘He likes sea shanties best.’

‘I don’t think I know any sea shanties,’ I tell him. ‘Sea shanties aren’t a very girlie thing.’

‘Of course, you do,’ he says, dancing on the spot. ‘Everybody knows at least one sea shanty. What about Blow the man down?’

‘No sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know it.

‘What about a folk song then,’ he says. ‘My cat likes Wimoweh. My cat is called Trevor, by the way.’

‘OK I’ll give it a go,’ I say, finding myself somehow being drawn into Pablo Picasso’s veil of nonsense.

Wimoweh is easy as it doesn’t have a lot of words, but as soon as I start singing, Pablo Picasso disappears along with his cat. One minute they are here and the next they are gone like thieves in the night. I am still no wiser as to what the meeting might have been about, or indeed if this was the meeting at all. I wait outside the harmonica museum for a while, but no-one else turns up to meet with me.

I notice that some men are trying to rebuild the town clock. It is a great brute of a thing, much bigger than I remember it being. It is surrounded by crude scaffolding and one of the men is struggling to carry the minute hand up an improvised ladder while another holds the hour hand in place at three o’clock. Perhaps time will soon be back to normal and I will see Ben again. After all this singularity, I’m looking forward to some straightforward metaphysics and philosophy.

……………………………………………….

‘By the new saxophone shop? Yes, Ben. Of course, I can meet you there. I’ve got my bicycle. The new saxophone shop, though? I’m not sure where that is…… Ah, I see. Jack of Clubs Street. That’s round the corner from the kaleidoscope repair centre, is it?’

At last, to my great relief, Ben has called me. It’s so good to hear his voice. Since he’s been away, I have had to suspend belief with some of the things that have been happening.

‘Yes, up Jack of Clubs Street and about a hundred yards on the left,’ he says. ‘You can’t miss it. It has a large Selmer saxophone hanging outside. I’ll meet you in an hour.’

I’m concerned that if I let him off the phone then he will be gone out of my life again. ‘Look! I’ve been worried about you,’ I say. ‘And I’ve been living a nightmare. Where have you been?’

‘I’ve been here and I’ve been there and I’ve been in between,’ he says. ‘You’re right. Things got a bit mad back there for a while, didn’t they? But, I believe the man in the Homburg hat has gone now.’

‘Thank God,’ I say. ‘He was sinister.’

‘I hope the dancing painter with the cat wasn’t too much bother,’ he says. ‘He comes out of the woodwork sometimes when he sees an opportunity. I expect you had to sing a song or two.’

It is uncanny the way Ben knows what has been happening, even though he has not been in town. Or has he? He did say he’s been here and he’s been there and he’s been in between. Anyway, I’m thrilled to be meeting him again. I can hardly contain myself.

I pass the clock and see that the hands are now in place and the men are taking the scaffolding down. A small group of cheery vagrants are gathered around it, celebrating with their bottles of cider. I pass the new statue of Neil Diamond, although I have to say, it doesn’t look a bit like him. I take a detour to avoid some men putting up a hoarding to advertise a new blockbuster called Rocket Man, or something. I’ve not been this way often, but eventually I manage to find Jack of Clubs Street. It is a long narrow street and it is enveloped by a haze so I cannot immediately make out where the saxophone shop is. Then, I spot the silver Selmer saxophone shimmering through the murk. It seems to have fallen from its mount onto the pavement.

But, where is Ben? There is no sign of him. What can have happened to him? I get off of the bike and as the haze clears a little, I look frantically up and down the street. It is then that I notice the man in the Homburg hat. He is walking slowly towards me. He has something with him. He is holding it with both hands on his shoulder. In the haze, it is difficult to make out what it is. Is it a balloon? Or, is it a kite? It might be a surfboard. Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! It’s a …… rocket launcher! Jack of Clubs Street is not a safe place to be. Why has Ben brought me here?

© Chris Green 2016: All rights reserved