Tychy 300.

Tychy today celebrates completing three hundred posts. Hearty thanks to all readers and visitors. The “Best of Tychy Fiction” page to your right has been updated to include the most recent triumphs.

Musophobia.

I was once far into a night of drinking with Tori, when the path of our talk brought us across a curious story, the events of which had occurred before I lived in Edinburgh. Tori was nineteen, and, frankly, worse than an animal. Stories of her early days in the city never fail to dismay and captivate me, they have become established in my mind as a frontier of research, and I am endlessly probing for further details, like one trying to sense the blast of a medieval battle from rusty arrowheads and stretches of tapestry. One thing which I have gathered is that whilst Tori conquered man after man like an influenza epidemic, this was not quite a reality: profound things cannot be reduced to spray and air, and the heart cannot sleep sweetly through screams of lust and pain like a baby in the next room. The heart remains as pure and as certain as an errant knight, with his Oedipal mission to complete, and all else is thickets for him to hack through. Tori’s heart, in those early days, was merely wading aimlessly through thickets.

Our story appears to begin when Tori received a phone call informing her that her father had been released from prison. Tori had not spoken to her father for many years, and when he had been convicted for some sort of carelessness – something involving money, I believe it was – it seemed merely a further way by which he had failed her. Yet now he was at large again, and Tori found herself entertaining a whimsical hope that he would visit. As far as she understood the situation, he had little money, and few friends, and it was therefore not unreasonable to anticipate that he would become in some way dependent upon her. The thought pleased her.

Everything really had stopped. There was a swarthy, balding man called Santos who hung out in the Forest Café – this was when it was in West Port – and once, when she had bought some marijuana from him, he had told her that she could crash at his flat if she ever needed somewhere quiet. Most teenaged girls would have become suspicious at this slightly-too-casual offer, and Tori must have been either very ignorant or very certain of the world’s true stock of danger. For she did not feel threatened by Santos, who, despite his vulgarity and grubbiness, seemed to sport an innocence like the natty colours of a songbird. Santos seemed always to be accompanied by a comic refrain – serenaded by inaudible kazoos as he stomped about. Hearty old Santos.

Tori arrived at the flat without announcement, and Santos offered her the baby of the bedrooms, which held a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, and what looked like a piano stool. It transpired that Santos was often away from this flat, which he did not care for, and Tori passed her first evening there alone. She went to bed after drinking half a bottle of wine, savouring the coolness of the new bedding which Santos had put down for her.

She slept soundly. Yet the next morning, she found Santos hanging up his washing in the hallway and she could not help voicing a slight complaint.

“Uh, I think that there’s a mouse in that bedroom…”

“Impossible. There has never been a mouse in all the years that I have lived here…”

“Well, to be fair, it sounded more like an elephant, crashing about under the bed…”

Santos shrugged. “Maybe an elephant. But not a mouse.”

Tori wanted to laugh, but she was suddenly repulsed by an unpleasant odour. Santos occasionally suffered from problems with his liver – she remembered once meeting him in the Forest Café and being appalled by his face, which had gleamed a sickly, incredible yellow. Despite herself, Tori took a step back. Luckily Santos did not seem to notice.

Settling into bed that night, Tori realised that she was waiting to hear the mouse, and that she could not relax until her suspicion of its presence was confirmed. Yet if the sounds of scuttling reached her, all sleep would be hopeless. Uneasily, she threw sleep over her mind like a thin, small blanket which cannot entirely keep out the cold.

Quite what a mouse would be doing under the bed was unclear to Tori. She had inspected this dark space and found nothing – just floorboards and threads of dust – and this surely offered inhospitable terrain for an animal which never stopped eating…?

“They are horrible little animals, mice,” I interrupted. “They have very weak bladders and they drip constantly.”

Tori smiled. “I didn’t know that you were an expert on mice, Biggy?”

“The agency once sent me and Noah on a food-hygiene training course about mice. It lasted three days. We learned all sorts of things, but the general point was that they should be wiped off the face of the Earth.”

Well, to resume, the next morning Tori was awakened by muffled noises from under the bed. She listened keenly until they had focused into a sound of complete clarity – she could hear each individual little footstep as the animal probed about directly beneath her. Gradually the sound faded, at which point Tori realised that she had been utterly transfixed with horror. She relaxed and tried to feel the blood flowing around her body. But she was suddenly stuck again as a bumping began in the wall beside her head, like somebody rapping gently with a knuckle. She then caught an alien, animal smell – a dry odour of rot. Tori tried to shake herself free of her terror, but it was like a corpse trying to dance, and her body just rattled helplessly.

“I don’t like mice too,” I chipped in. “Although, with me, it’s something about the way they trickle across the floor.”

“I guess so,” Tori agreed. “They zip towards you in a very straight line and you just freeze.”

“I once worked in a cafeteria which was terrorised by mice. One eventually ran out from under the food counters in the middle of a service and all the customers fled for their lives. It was a small cafeteria and about a dozen of them were killed – crushed to death in the stampede.”

Tori continued her story. The only way that she could escape from her bed was by keeping her eyes tightly shut. With her eyes packed into two balls of fathomless blackness, she keeled upright, her feet rested gently on the floor and she then tottered frantically to safety.

Outside, she wanted to confront Santos about the mouse, but when she found him, he hailed her with some news.

“There was a man here for you this morning.”

“A nice man?”

Santos frowned. “An old man.”

He had not left his name or any message, but Tori immediately thought of her father. She suddenly wanted to be back in bed, sound asleep. “Hey Santos, you don’t look so good? Are you okay?”

He did not look good. His face gleamed with sweat. He smelt terrible. “I have problems,” he muttered, gesticulating vaguely.

On hearing of the mouse, Santos made a mousetrap: a large piece of cardboard coated in a layer of glue, with a lump of cheese affixed as bait. Santos thrust the mousetrap under Tori’s bed, and she was immediately complaining about sleeping in proximity to this unlovely article.

After Santos left, Tori spent a listless day in the flat. She was poised, she realised, to receive a single cosmic signal – a knock at the door, a chirp from her phone – and everything was suspended until this moment arrived. She wondered whether she should go out to buy some beer – if her father called, they would need something to drink – but this would leave the flat unattended…

“So there was no alcohol in Santos’ flat?” I marvelled.

Tori shook her head. “I always get anxious if there is nothing to drink in the house,” I explained.

Anyhow, by mid-evening Tori had conceded to the unfeasibility of her father calling, but it seemed an effort to finish off the meagre remains of the day. Later, as she prepared for bed, a huge wave of sadness broke over her. That little bed seemed so bare, so desolate. She suddenly wanted to abandon this flat, and drown her wretched mind in drink and talk, but the lively Edinburgh streets which had once existed now seemed as faraway and unreachable as a twinkling star. Before climbing into bed, she checked the mousetrap – vaguely hoping to find the cardboard coated in frantically squirming bodies – but the space under the bed remained undisturbed, a secret little realm of dust known only to herself.

Deep in the night, the thin blankets wrapped around Tori like a life’s comfortless ambitions, that odour of rot dived down, found her mind at the bottom of the blackness, and stirred it into an irritated awareness. Was it a dream? Tori was suddenly alarmed as that stench of damp and age and death was pouring undeniably into the whole room, making any effort to ignore or dismiss it futile. And there was suddenly a horribly-real rustling at the far end of the bedroom – a slow, unsteady movement, like something taking its first waking steps. Tori found herself transfixed with horror – the clumping footsteps of this thing were huge and sloppy, more like a bear than a mouse. There was a loud, almost-extravagant crash as the thing bumped into the wardrobe, and then lurched back into itself, its progress abruptly halted. And then the thing was on the march again – it was lumbering towards the bed.

Close your eyes, close your eyes, Tori thought furiously. Her naked leg swung out into the cold night air and found the floor. Her eyes tightly shut, she hauled herself out of bed and groped blindly, quickly, for a place of safety. Yet as the thing reared up around her, the room seemed to be arranged rather differently to how it was when she went to bed. She reached frantically for the doorknob, but found only patches of bare panelling. The mouse was approaching, looming around her, slobbering and grunting like a pig. Her eyes tightly shut, she wobbled through the blackness, wildly disorientated, her hands searching for potential weapons where surfaces had lain previously, and finding nothing.

Tori finally dived back into bed, pulling the blankets over her head. The mouse paused and she could hear it growling to itself overhead. Huge, sloppy paws were fumbling amongst the blankets, until there was a crack and the sheets were whipped off the bed. Tori was now naked beneath the night. A leathery hand bristling with old hair brushed her thigh. Tori rolled out from under the paws, landing slap on the floor. She bolted into that tight space under the bed. But the mouse’s body was suddenly in her face and her head was flooded with its unbearable odour of rot. There was a squeak of hope as her hands found the glue-smeared cardboard, and she rubbed this into the huge face of the mouse, maddening and blinding it, only to incite the animal to clumsy action and…

“It raped you?” I suggested.

Tori nodded.

 

[Associated information here and here. Ed.]

Wanderers They Knew Not Where (15).

While he stood on the landing-place, searching in either pocket for the means of fulfilling his agreement, the ferryman lifted a lantern, by the aid of which, and the newly risen moon, he took a very accurate survey of the stranger’s figure. He was a youth of barely eighteen years, evidently country-bred, and now, as it should seem, upon his first visit to town.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832).

Apocalyptic Porn: Jacking Off with Roland Emmerich.

Some people have far too much power. Elected politicians, generally speaking, do not have nearly enough. The popular premise behind the election of Barack Obama was that an easygoing liberal guy – who is rather like you and I – was being made the most powerful man in the world, when in reality Obama would turn out to have as much power and influence as the Barbie dolls which are sometimes attached to the fronts of trucks. The present generation of British politicians seem to have no ability to recognise power – let alone wield it – and they have duly just pissed away even more of our remaining sovereignty with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. But to behold somebody with genuine personal power one should look no further than the figure of Roland Emmerich.

Emmerich is turned on by apocalypse. Take some of the most beautiful, brilliant human achievements – New York’s skyscrapers, the Sistine chapel, the Houses of Parliament – and then obliterate them, smash them into smithereens! One suspects that  Emmerich’s assistants daily build massive and elaborate cityscapes out of Lego – presumably in some sort of soundproof bunker – before Emmerich is unleashed naked and raving in amongst the skyscrapers, to kick them over and tear them apart and jump on them.

His films – Independence Day, Godzilla, and the latest, 2012 (which will be released on the 13th November) – entail pretty much the same process. The world’s leading CGI technicians and artists find themselves in the hands of a quite glaringly flawed individual, and they are made to transform his unhappy personal fantasies – which at best deserve to be drawn on diary pages in biro – into monumental, million-dollar visions of exquisitely-choreographed apocalypse. The power of these scenes derive from their weightlessness, their effortlessness – skyscrapers disintegrate as easily as clocks of dandelion seeds. In a pre-released five-minute clip of 2012, we see Los Angeles falling apart, its infrastructure unravelling and liquidating into a sort of apocalyptic goo, and the whole thing could not look more beautiful or immaculate if interpreted by ballet dancers.

2012 would probably be a much better film if there were no characters or plot – just twenty or so minutes of Emmerich’s apocalyptic porn. It is unfair to require a filmmaker with a naked hatred of humanity and human achievements to try and imagine scenarios which feature sympathetic human beings. The hitherto-released five minutes of 2012, however, appear to indicate the enlistment of the established old hands of apocalypse land: the unheeded profit of doom, doubtlessly the embittered but still-determined holder of a powerless job (John Cusack), the miserable wife whom he divorced but must now befriend again in the face of disaster (Amanda Peet), and the mandatory rosy-cheeked children, who will be repeatedly exposed to exploding buildings, falling meteorites, and flying debris to tiresomely tease us with the vain hope that they will be gruesomely killed. The sad little faces of those children as they watch the Gomorrah-style levelling of Los Angeles – in which millions die like ants (all off-camera) – they look as if their budgie has just died!

Emmerich’s historic achievement as a filmmaker is to make apocalypse boring. It is not just that we do not care whether his characters live or die, but he has such a limited and inhuman vision of humanity – as essentially ants in clothes – that we do not care whether their entire world survives. Just as a child may conclude that the sole purpose of ants is to be jumped on, Emmerich’s cities seem to be purpose-built for apocalypse. Why else would they exist, other than to be raised to the ground? Amusingly, Emmerich invested the usual mayhem in The Day after Tomorrow with the moral purpose of warning against climate change, which is rather like somebody who enjoys being whipped by prostitutes claiming that they are championing the power of women. Emmerich is, incidentally, not very talented at political correctness: in admitting that he spared the Meccan Kaaba from his apocalypse for fear of being subjected to a fatwa, he achieved the twofold insult of implying that Christians are pussies whose outrage can be safely ignored whilst Muslims are humourless and potentially-murderous.

Whilst 2012 was marketed with a lousy and unimaginative “viral” internet campaign, commentators have already subjected the as-yet-unreleased film to a jolly good trashing. The Guardian’s Anna Pickard had to content herself with tearing apart the trailer, quipping that:

Yes, the world can end in so many different ways, but only some are cool when rendered in CGI. Tidal waves and meteors exploding into the earth? These look cool. Everyone coming down with a bad case of the runs all at once and pooing themselves to death? Not so cinematic. Unsurprising, therefore, that no one has ever made a film with that as the plot.

Meanwhile the five-minute preview is accompanied on Latino Review by a wall of vitriol, which includes such tributes as “Roland Emmerich really fucking hates the Earth,” “This movie is going to tank so hard,” “I’m tired to disaster movies. What’s the point?” “Is it just me or are disaster movies getting worse and worse?” “this is the first time i could not sit through the whole teaser for a movie.…,” “I think that was possibly the worst thing I’ve ever watched,” and “There is no way in hell I’m going to waste two hours of my life watching this shit.” And I feel fine.

Perhaps Emmerich’s days of obsessively destroying city after city are finally numbered, but I think that this is to underestimate the power of the man. It is inexplicable how such an unimaginative and incompetent storyteller could have been installed as our culture’s king-of-all-apocalypse in the first place, and it is unclear what constitutional levers exist to remove him. We may have many more years ahead of Emmrich aimlessly levelling cities like the Old Testament God, a law unto himself. Thankfully Emmerich is just a filmmaker – some madmen had whole armies at their disposal – and CGI provides a safe space where his potentially dangerous compulsions can be rendered inconsequential and banal. One is only saddened that something as sensible as the Mayans’ prophesy of a 2012 apocalypse should be caught up with Emmerich’s personal problems.

Travesty/ I.D.

I was walking with my wife, Polly, on the Meadows this morning when we met Pablo. He was with his girlfriend, Blanca, who cannot speak very much English. Pablo is a fascist – a member of Frente Nacional – and it is always amusing to hear him talk about politics.

Pablo surveyed the Meadows, which was full of students milling about, and he grinned fiendishly. “This country is going to the dogs. It will soon be as bad as Spain, which is now worse than Africa. The government has no authority, nobody respects it. And there are immigrants everywhere! They just come and go as they please, and the government is helpless, like a teenaged mum with wild children.”

Pablo and I are, of course, both immigrants. I have never been able to quite put this to him, sensing that his ideology is particularly vulnerable on this point. Unable to reconcile his position as an immigrant with his own fascism, Pablo would probably go crazy and start tearing out his hair. Or perhaps the supreme, surreal achievement of Pablo’s thinking is indestructible and can survive any encounter with reason.

Pablo’s girlfriend, Blanca, was getting restless, and she moaned at him to continue.

“This one is terrible,” Pablo complained. “Awful! She has no respect. If those weasels hadn’t made it illegal, I would chop off her head with an axe.”

“But Pablo!” I laughed. “Who would look after you? And clean your flat?”

“I can do those things myself and do them a lot better. I can cook and clean better than this woman. The women these days are not women. They are like boys – dirty, smelly boys – they swear and play with themselves like boys. They should not be allowed to call themselves women. It’s a travesty!”

I had a nightmare in which I was unable to get a drink in Edinburgh…

I first went to Scotmid and asked for a bottle of whisky. The woman at the tills wanted to see my I.D.

“I’m thirty-five,” I snorted. Despite myself, I was suddenly flushed with fury and instinctively squaring up.

The woman smiled sadly. “I’m sorry sir, but we do need to check. It’s annoying, I know…”

I fished about in my wallet and eventually retrieved my driving license. The woman looked at it and then handed it back. Yet the transaction did not continue. I stared in amazement as the woman began to deliver a little formal speech.

“I’m sorry sir…” she gazed into my eyes, still with that sad, wistful smile. “But I just don’t feel that I can sell you alcohol. I’m sorry – and please don’t be offended – but I don’t believe that you’re ready for the responsibility.”

“But… but… I don’t understand…”

“It’s an issue for my conscience. I couldn’t sleep at night if I knew that I had allowed you to have access to alcohol.”

“I want to see the manager!” I raged, but the woman’s sad smile was floating before me, filling up the whole shop like an opening parachute, and the shelves of spirits were going out like tides.

I marched to Tesco and demanded a bottle of whisky from the girl on the tills. But she also wanted to see my I.D. Exasperated, I handed over my driving license. My whole body burned with the indignity of having to provide written evidence that I was not a child. This humiliation is equivalent to the government insisting that you do a silly little dance before you can get a drink. Yet the Tesco cashier was frowning. For as her gaze had fallen on my driving license, it had transformed into the jack of spades.

She handed back the playing card. “I’m afraid that this is not acceptable I.D. sir.”

“But I’m thirty-five! I’m certainly at least fifteen years older than yourself,” I added angrily.

“I’m sorry sir.” The Tesco cashier pulled out a large device which looked like a library stamp, and with a vicious swipe, she stamped CHILD on my forehead. I was shrieking and struggling frantically to wipe away the word. My hands were caked with ink and ink was running down my face.

I ran over to the Peartree and ordered a glass of whisky. The barman also demanded to see my I.D. I was aggravated by the fact that all of the drinkers sitting at the bar seemed to be teenagers. I did not know whether to address the barman imperiously, as if he was a servant, or with humility, as if he was a doctor.  I finally tried to shrug casually, and I found that my voice was very small and choked up.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t seem to have any with me.”

The barman stared at me with naked hostility. “Then I’m afraid that you’ll have to leave the premises.”

I was remonstrating with the barman, begging him for a drink. All of the teenagers at the bar were cheering and whooping. I suddenly found that I was sliding out of the pub and into the beer garden. Behind the bar, the barman was pulling at levers and there was the snarl of grinding gears. The Peartree stood up on robotic chicken legs and began to lurch off down the street.

I was running after the pub. “Come back! I just want a drink! Just a small drop of whisky!”

The teenagers were screaming. “Faster! Faster” He’s catching up!”

The barman was now at the helm of the pub in an admiral’s tricorn, steering furiously. The pub had ducked nimbly around George Square and it was now lurching off across the Meadows. I finally gave up and watched it run away.

[This is a perennial theme. Ed.]

Girls.

A Quote for Halloween.

“Do the poor man justice, dear,” the husband interrupted. “You forget the treat he gave the school children.”

“Forget it, indeed! But I’m glad you mentioned it, because it gives an idea of the man. Now, Florence, listen to this. The first winter he was at Lufford this delightful neighbour of ours wrote to the clergyman of his parish (he’s not ours, but we know him very well) and offered to show the school children some magic-lantern slides. He said he had some new kinds, which he thought would interest them.

“Well, the clergyman was rather surprised, because Mr Karswell had shown himself inclined to be unpleasant to the children – complaining of their trespassing, or something of the sort; but of course, he accepted, and the evening was fixed, and our friend went himself to see that everything went right.

“He said he never had been so thankful for anything as that his own children were all prevented from being there: they were at a children’s party at our house, as a matter of fact. Because this Mr Karswell had evidently set out with the intention of frightening these poor village children out of their wits, and I do believe, if he had been allowed to go on, he would have actually have done so.

“He began with some comparatively mild things. Red Riding Hood was one, and even then, Mr Farrer said, the wolf was so dreadful that several of the smaller children had to be taken out: and he said Mr Karswell began the story by producing a noise like a wolf howling in the distance, which was the most gruesome thing he had ever heard. All the slides he showed, Mr Farrer said, were most clever; they were absolutely realistic, and where he had got them or how he worked them he could not imagine.

“Well the show went on, and the stories kept on becoming a little more terrifying each time, and the children were mesmerised into complete silence. At last he produced a series which represented a little boy passing through his own park – Lufford, I mean – in the evening. Every child in the room could recognise the place from the pictures. And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn in pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly. Mr Farrer said it gave him one of the worst nightmares he ever remembered, and what it must have meant to the children doesn’t bear thinking of.

“Of course, this was too much, and he spoke very sharply indeed to Mr Karswell, and said it couldn’t go on. All he said was: “Oh, you think it’s time to bring our little show to an end and send them home to their beds? Very well!” And then, if you please, he switched on another slide, which showed a great mass of snakes, centipedes, and disgusting creatures with wings, and somehow or other he made it seem as if they were climbing out of the picture and getting in amongst the audience; and this was accompanied by a sort of dry rustling noise which sent the children nearly mad, and of course they stampeded. A good many of them were rather hurt in getting out of the room, and I don’t suppose one of them closed an eye that night. There was the most dreadful trouble in the village afterwards.”

M.R. James, “Casting the Runes” (1904).

Tychy wishes all readers a happy Halloween.

Heartbreak Hotel: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dragon Volant.

[“The Room in the Dragon Volant” is one of the most accomplished works of suspense ever written, and one should therefore well heed the warning that the following contains plot spoilers. Ed]

The best story in Sheridan Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly (1872) – “The Room in the Dragon Volant” – is the only one not to feature a supernatural entity. Indeed, the story will conclude with a merciless application of Humean scepticism, everything mysterious and erroneous will be roundly explained, and the fabulous magician will turn out to be a corpse, leaving one to ponder gloomily on the significance that the adventuring hero was felled by that emblem of enlightenment – a “cup of coffee” – rather than the more traditional “flying dragon.” No dark corners will remain in this narrative; and yet if Le Fanu misquoted from St. Paul to promise that we will view ourselves “in a glass darkly,” in “Dragon Volant” we see human darkness all too clearly, and enlightenment is a far from happy or rewarding prospect:

As the well-worn phrase goes, I was a sadder if not a wiser man… My after life was ultimately formed by the shock I had then received. Those impressions led me – but  not till after many years – to happier though not less serious thoughts; and I have deep reason to be thankful for the all-merciful Ruler of events, for an early and terrible lesson in the ways of sin.

Compare this to the sunnier days of ignorance and folly:

What a number of things had happened within the last two hours! what a variety of strange and vivid pictures were crowded together in that brief space! What an adventure was before me!

I have read several accounts of “Dragon Volant” which sneer at the “stupidity” of Richard Beckett in not spotting the generous helping of clues which warn of his approaching disaster, but this smarty-pants told-you-so-ing disregards the fact that the con which ensnares Beckett is partially a fiction of his own making. James Walton’s 2007 study Vision and Vacancy compares the story to the slapstick theatrics of the nineteenth-century Harlequinade and notes of the initially “cadaverous” Colonel Gillarde that “it seems as if he, like the other members of the commedia cast, has been brought to life by Harlequin-Beckett’s magical thinking.” If Beckett is himself a creative force behind the fraud, then he is a significant variation upon the mere sucker, but in any case the tale becomes something of an endorsement for his particularly model of stupidity. We are implicitly invited to compare his early “youth, conscious strength, rashness, passion, pursuit, the adventure!” with the comfortless wisdom of his eventual enlightenment. Indeed, for Beckett, enlightenment will entail a devastating humiliation, a symbolic castration and the wholesale annihilation of his established selfhood.

Richard Beckett may be the kid brother of other notable dupes from nineteenth century fiction – including the narrator of Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (1845), Captain Delano from Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), and Pip from Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860). But these characters are worthy of our scorn – Poe’s narrator is a voyeur, Delano is a racist and probably a pirate, and Pip is a snob. Beckett’s only crimes are to be gallivanting, romantic, and Byronic. He wants to run off with a beautiful woman, cuckold her husband, and enjoy a wild, romping holiday in Switzerland spending her fortune. Aside from all but the most po-faced feminist harridans, who would not extend their heartiest wishes to Beckett? One suspects that “Dragon Volant” succeeds as a tale largely because the reader, like Beckett, simply ignores all the glaring forewarnings of his catastrophe, suspending their wits in the vain hope that his escapade will succeed.

“Maddened” by his desire for the Countess, Beckett had assumed that they were destined for a Swiss love nest. Yet if he had lain awake all night with her vision “always in the dark, before me,” his fate was to lie incarcerated in a coffin, bitterly aware that the vision “always in the dark, before me” would now never be enjoyed bodily. The death-in-life induced by the Mortis Imago (which arrives straight from John Galt’s “The Buried Alive,” 1821) is, we are told, necessary because if Beckett had died with the drug in his system, then incriminating traces would remain in his stomach. The drug also spares the fraudsters the unpleasantness of a straightforward murder. The physical and psychological torments which would have wracked Beckett in the darkness of his coffin are therefore not particularly intended by the fraudsters, and Beckett’s heartbreak is actually a very impersonal and businesslike affair. Indeed, when Beckett is finally incapacitated, the fraudsters will not taunt him but refer to him as if he was unconscious. In a picture of exquisite disinterest which contrasts starkly with the “lovers’ raptures and declamations” of old, the Countess “sat no longer looking at me…”

Whilst we may attach great emotional theatre to Beckett’s masquerade, to the backstage fraudsters he is just an object, like a doll or a puppet. His doom is unworthy of sorrow, guilt, or even derision, and it is only ever referred to in passing as “unprofitable.” His heartbreak was not even personalised – he was merely one amongst “other intended victims.” When the police storm the Count’s quarters, they are apparently not searching for an individual but “English and other goods.” Surveying the incapacitated Beckett, the policeman Carmaignac has “no recognition in his eyes.” The narrative is imprecise over whether Beckett’s body is arranged horizontally or “perpendicular,” and Carmaignac mutters over this disarrayed mass – an unstrung puppet bereft of a distinguishing costume – that there is “Nothing of the kind there.” The police will identify Beckett by his visiting cards and pocket-handkerchief, rather than his physical features, and this inhuman litter will find near relations in the glass eye and dental plate which comprise the mortal remains of Gabriel Gaillarde.

The fraudsters have shaped a dashing, Byronic hero out of Beckett’s raw material – a form animated by his dreams and narcissism (“I was conscious of being good-looking…”) – and when their fraud fails, Beckett is suddenly left without an identity. To Parisian society, he remains an “object” – not “an object of considerable interest” but “the object of a good-natured but contemptuous merriment.” The phoenix which emerges from Beckett’s ashes is “a balourd, a benet, un ane [a numskull, a booby, a jackass].” If he was marketed to the reader as a gallivanting adventurer, he will be sold to Paris “in caricatures.”

The transformation of the bankrupt and chaotic post-Waterloo France into a realm of adventure, romance, and high society – and one scarcely scratched by the Napoleonic disaster – is made possible by Beckett’s detachment and ignorance. British visitors to France often cut hapless and ridiculous figures: Napoleon seized about 10,000 British tourists as prisoners of war in 1803 (which was not amusing at all); a flood of French satirical prints ridiculed the English tourists who arrived in Paris after 1814 as socially clueless; and the holidaying hero of William Maginn’s 1823 Blackwood’s tale “A Traveller’s Week” regards the French town in which he finds himself with utter loathing (“all squalidness, stench, and clamour”), whilst making a complete fool of himself in front of its citizenry. Beckett – who will find himself at home in this world of “caricatures” – thus contributes to an established tradition of British idiots upon French soil.

The conception of Beckett as a dim bumptious foreigner will lead the French state to merely use him as the bait in a sting, rather than recruit him as a spy. He has, of course, been previously involved in some rather unbecoming antics – such as his “reckless charge” through a series of carriages – although, at the time, this picaresque larking about did not seem incongruous with a story dipped in moonlight. We may acknowledge with hindsight that Beckett was, after all, just a common idiot – a Boswell rather than a Byron – but we may hesitate to join in the laughter of Paris, and sense that “balourd” is  rather too tight a costume for Beckett.

“Dragon Volant” possesses an elaborate multidimensional structure, but one does not particularly care for any sort of dew to clarify the geometry of this cobweb. Suffice to say, that most appearances in the story are shadowed by an conflicting reality: Beckett, the Napoleonic hero agitating and intriguing against the aristocracy, who is repeatedly associated with lowly “grooms and hostlers,” is actually an aristocrat conspired against by “the class who live by their wits”; his beloved is an actress and her pearls are paste; the dastardly villain will eventually save his life; and the Marquis is a three-decker deceit as spy, nave, and genuine agent provocateur. If the fraudsters had assumed that they were scripting Beckett’s fate (“I conjure you, sit down; sit in this chair”), they were equally puppets in a performance scripted by the Marquis.

In his ingenuity, the unscrupulous Marquis somewhat resembles the nimble-footed diplomat and spy Talleyrand, who had managed to serve under Louis XVI, Napoleon, and the restored Bourbons, freely switching sides and escaping the consequences of his old affiliations. Napoleon once raged of Talleyrand that “I could break him like a glass, but it’s not worth the trouble,” and the Marquis likewise escapes “scot-free.” Perhaps the reader finds Beckett sympathetic because his early adventures unfold smoothly and easily, investing him with something of an enchanted quality. It will transpire, of course, that Beckett’s effortless progress was actually the result of unimaginably intricate planning, and that his ostensibly kindly guardian, the Marquis, was merely allowing him to play at being an adventurer.

Parentage is generally a sore point in In a Glass Darkly. Whether or not Laura desires the perilous lips of Carmilla, a regime of older figures and their suffocating authority will protect her from the conflated forces of both vampire attack and her own desire. Being drained of blood by a bewitching vampire may well be a happier fate for Laura than returning to her “solitary” life within a Styrian schloss. In the height of their torments, Laura, Judge Harbottle, and Captain Barton are all reduced to the infantile state of being confined to their bedrooms, and constantly watched or attended by others, which vaguely recalls the fears of children about being left on their own at night. Yet parents in In a Glass Darkly are ineffectual or themselves vampiric authorities. Whilst Reverend Jennings pleads in vain to be saved from his little imaginary friend, his preposterous and overblown terror of this mischievous monkey – whose naughtiest action is to suggest to the Reverend that he throw himself down a mine shaft – probably indicates that he is uncomfortable around children.

“Dragon Volant” indulges the antique desire to conquer the mother – to reach for forbidden things – before unleashing the terrible reality of the devouring father (one may indeed find Beckett’s love a little inhuman – too much Freudian symbolism and not enough emotional life). Our Byronic and picaresque hero is exposed as a depressingly familiar Modernist subject: alienated, confounded, and alone in a hostile world with not very much free will. The sad achievement of “Dragon Volant” is to annex a Wasteland, and the reader may find the raw reality of its conclusion too awful to stomach. One may reject the Marquis’ backstage world of low trickery and hark back to the impossible moonlight and melodrama of Beckett’s adventure. “Dragon Volant” truly recalls the despair of awakening prematurely from a wondrous dream and wishing that it could have lasted forever.

[There is a very worthy Le Fanu website here. Ed.]

The Agency Workers (6).

On Tuesday morning, the agency sent me to work in the hospital canteen, where they have a large three-tank dishwasher. The dishwasher is like a peasant’s idea of industrialisation – a huge diabolical contraption, foaming and hissing, with the perpetual gnashing of pistons and monstrous internal rumblings and bumpings. My job that morning was to stand at the end of the conveyer belt and wait for the dishwasher to defecate baskets of plates and bowls. I would then stack this crockery into piles, which would be duly returned to the canteen. I had been given an assistant for the morning – my friend Renata, as it happens – and her job was to polish the cutlery.

As I have indicated, this dishwasher has three tanks, and when I arrived to work that morning I discovered that the “door” of the first tank was broken. During the shift, one occasionally needs to stop the dishwasher and pull up the doors, in order to scrape out all the gunk which has accumulated inside the machine’s filters. Yet the springs which held up the first door had burst, with the result that if pulled up, it would come shooting back down like the blade of a guillotine.

I briefed Renata about the situation. “That door is extremely dangerous. If it fell on your arm it could sever it.”

“It would break it. I don’t think that the arm would be severed.”

“If it fell on your wrist it would lop off your hand.”

“I doubt it.”

At that moment, a chef had wandered in with a tray of lasagne, which was evidently so cold that it had been banished from the canteen kingdom. I slid my fingers into the tray and pulled out two handfuls of cold lasagne mulch.

“What are you doing?” Renata gasped.

I was working away and gradually the shape of a limb was emerging. I was compacting the lasagne and then smoothing it into a droopy arm-like tube. I finally took off my polo shirt and tucked the lasagne-arm into its sleeve.

“Now pull up the door,” I told Renata.

“Biggy,” Renata huffed, “an arm is full of wires and tendons and muscles. It’s not just a lump of pasta.”

The lasagne-arm now rested beneath the door. “Right up to the top,” I instructed.

Renata glared at me. When she let go of the door, it plummeted rapidly down – as quick and suddenly vicious as a pouncing cat – and we both jumped back with a yelp. I then showed Renata where the lasagne-arm had been severed clean. She rolled her eyes. “I’m going to complain to the management,” I said.

The manager was called Ken, and he was a pompous little man with a fat red head and thin glasses, which vaguely gave the impression of somebody having taken a pen and drawn a pair of spectacles on a testicle. Occasionally, a little scenario plays out in my mind in which Ken is marching around a gentleman’s club in a top hat, waving his umbrella at terrified waiters, and shouting “I’m a very important testicle!” His office had been fashionably refurbished – rather against his will, I gather – and today I found him sitting unhappily on top of a large Pilates ball.

“Biggy! Come in!” As he waved me towards another Pilates ball, he lurched unexpectedly to the left and grabbed hold of his desk to steady himself.

“You should get stabilisers,” I suggested.

“Pardon?”

“Those little wheels which are put on the side of children’s bicycles, to keep them upright.”

“I hope you haven’t come here to be smart. What do you want?”

“A door on the machine is broken. It’s very dangerous. Look at this.”

I showed him the remaining half of the lasagne-arm. This, it turned out, was to be a mistake.

“What is that?” Ken snorted. “That is filthy” How dare you bring that into my office!”

“But I am trying to illustrate…”

“This office has been refurbished.” Ken was now bouncing away on his Pilates ball in indignation, his testicle head crimsoning with anger. “Take that away and throw it in the bin. And then I suggest that you stop messing about and get back to work!”

I silently walked out of the office. In my mind, the scenario had been amended, so that Ken was now remonstrating “I’m a very important testicle!” before a revolutionary firing squad.

When we finally needed to empty the filters inside the dishwasher, Renata’s solution was to prop up the broken door with one of the shovels which are used on the canteen floors. The shovel fitted snugly under the door, creating a space of about two feet through which I could get at the filters. I was not happy about this.

My hand hovered tentatively under the door, awaiting amputation. “Stop being silly and get on with it!” Renata snapped.

“This is incredibly dangerous,” I muttered.

“It’s probably no more dangerous than those springs ever were.”

My arm extended into the machine and I pawed at the filters. I imagined the sweeping apocalyptic crunch as the door shot down to lop off my arm, and then the fantastic white pain, turning to spray the shrieking Renata with my hot innermost juices, blood everywhere, the frantic, hopeless reassurances as we waited desperately for the ambulance, squirming blindly in the lap of the pain, the grim job of retrieving the rubbery severed arm from inside the machine and then not knowing what to do with it once it was found, and then the slow, painful years of adapting to disability, of living incomplete and unbalanced, of trying to catch up with where the previous life had been broken off, and the bitterness cherished like a baby that so much had been needlessly and irrevocably lost!

“Woah!” Renata screamed.

I scrambled back out of the machine, gibbering with panic.

“I’m joking!”

“What? Huh?”

Renata was bent over, shaking with laughter. “Good one, eh?”

Preps.

The BNP on Question Time: Live Blogging.

Update 1145pm: Despite all the stuff which was thrown at him, Nick Griffin remained intact. At times, the show reminded me of an auto de fe or a Stalinist show trial, with Griffin being forced to confess publicly to his racism, or whatever watery form his racism now takes. Question Time was overall disappointing – Griffin is a veteran of unpleasant political confrontations, he took it all in his stride, and he was never really short of answers, however weak they at times sounded. The BBC played it very safe, preferring to bombard Griffin with outrage rather than explore his admittedly nonsensical ideas. Dimbleby kept re-acquainting him with quotes from his political past, which made the show seem like a rabid version of This is Your Life.

At the end, everybody seemed to be congratulating each other on defeating Nick Griffin. Given that he was on his own against everybody else, it would have been a bit strange if he had won.

I’m putting the TV back in the cupboard. Goodnight.

Update 1130pm: Things get briefly interesting in a discussion about a “population cap.” I rather favour a population increase – maybe this website would get a few more readers.

I’ve suddenly realised that I do not have a television license. It’s a bit too late for the enforcement officers to call now.

The programme is a bit more relaxed now. The panel are no longer united in persecuting Nick Griffin, and they are starting to bicker about each other’s immigration policies.

Update 1115pm: Jack Straw is suddenly having to explain why his immigration policy is to the right of the BNP’s. He looked happier with all the cheering. Baroness Warsi is quite naughtily describing the voter disaffection which she encountered in her election campaign in Dewsbury – of which Private Eye accused her of anti-immigrant scaremongering. As Tychy has previously noted, Nick Griffin was at least voted into office, whilst Baroness Warsi is a baroness.

Everybody is reciting hoary old cliches. The BNP is carelessly described as “far right,” when – as far as I can gage – it is something of a Communist movement, which advocates massive state intervention in the economy and the end to a free market in labour.

Update 1105pm: Everybody is starting to enjoy the kicking. Jack Straw is cracking jokes, the panel are lightening up. Griffin is looking like an idiot,  although, to be fair, so is Peter Hain, who would have had this monument of liberal outrage largely pulled off the air.

Griffin is suddenly on the up – when challenged about Islamophobia, he declares that Jack Straw has the blood of thousands of Muslims on his hands due to the Iraq War. Bit hard to argue against that.

Update 1050pm: Everybody is talking about history very wildly. Bonnie Greer is trying to argue that Churchill was the descendant of Mohawk Indians. A member of the audience suddenly starts going on about Ted Heath. There is a very histrionic atmosphere in the studio – we will not tolerate this intolerance! – everybody is telling off Nick Griffin and he is just smirking and shrugging. Bonnie Greer gets a good punch in about the Ku Klux Klan, although it still feels a little mad careering around Western history.

Update 1045pm: Oh no, they’re all talking about history. Politicians should really be herded away from this subject.

Jack Straw is an odd character – he looks about 400 years old – but I guess that he has been around for so long that everyone has grown desensitized to how repulsive and creepy he is. Nick Griffin looks like a wily fat farmer – he would perhaps be happiest riding around Northamptonshire on a tractor. Everybody is giving him a good telling off! Dimbleby tells him off for smiling – very like a primary school teacher.

Update 1030pm: The TV is working, but it is hissing and groaning. I’ve got a bucket of water to throw over it in case it bursts into flames. On the plus side, I have Pringles. On the down side, there is nothing much to drink: some Southern Comfort, but no mixer; and some cans of Tennents left over from a party a few months ago.

I have been looking at the photo montage of the protests over on the Guardian website. The protesters all look like yahs. You can imagine their parents arriving in a fleet of SUVs to pick them up afterwards. When I was a student there were similar protests about the geriatric French fascist Jean Marie Le Pen – for all that anybody noticed them, they may well have been held on the moon – but there is always a fashionable hate figure of the moment. I wonder if Le Pen is even still alive. And his fascist threat too, of course.

Update 1015pm: BBC News are now showing the first clips from Question Time. Nick Griffin comes across as sweaty and incoherent, probably because he is merely an attention-seeker rather than an impassioned fascist, and he has ended up in water which is far too deep for him. He disassociates himself from Holocaust denial and the prospect of mass deportations.

There is a lot of talk amongst commentators about the fascist threat, which is all a little silly. In the 1930s, Mosley was supported by several members of the aristocracy and a national newspaper. We still have a long way to go before Griffin can fill Mosley’s boots.

Update 10.00pm: A few words of reflection.The BNP have lately become the subject of an obsessive hysteria within the media and, verily, they are worthy of study, not because they herald the arrival of some sort of fascism, but because they form the focus of an ancient and very conservative fear amongst the liberal-left that the working class are themselves closet fascist.  The appearance of Nick Griffin on Question Time this evening is therefore akin to that of the demonic monkey in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea.” There is nothing to be afraid of – the demon does not even exist – but the hysterical gibbering of the afraid provides fascinating material for the psychoanalyst.

Update 9.30pm: BNP 1, Civilisation 1. A Sun journalist tweets from the studio that Griffin got an “absolute pasting.” I had no intention of writing about the BNP and Question Time any further, principally because – in being part of the YouTube generation – I do not actually own a television and therefore have no means of watching the programme. But then – incredibly! – I remembered that there was what looked like a TV in the hallway cupboard, and indeed it is a TV. There is no sound and the image is in black and white, but with a few encouraging thumps it will soon be ready for action.

Update 5.15pm: BNP 1, Civilisation 0. Moronic anti-fascist protesters are preventing Griffin from getting into BBC Television Centre. Griffin has just told the media that millions of television viewers are being denied their right to hear what an elected politician has to say. He will probably get into the building, but this is all valuable P.R. for the fascists. Doh!

The BNP on Question Time: What may happen.

[Scene: The Question Time studio. The audience are furious that the fascist warmonger Jack Straw has been invited on to the programme, and they are now in the middle of a gigantic Royal Rumble. Police on horseback are galloping around the audience, firing off tear gas canisters to try and restore order.]

David Dimbleby [looking cool and unruffled, like Dr. Livingston surrounded by shrieking savages]: Welcome to Question Time. Tonight’s edition comes from Broadcasting House, London. On the panel: several representatives of the ruling class, and Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, who is a little bit different…

Audience: Boo!

David Dimbleby: Let’s have our first question.

Audience Member: Err… Mick Crackpot. A fascist is now on Question Time. How have we allowed this to happen in a democratic society?

Dimbleby: Fascists on Question Time… Allowed this to happen… Baroness Warsi.

Baroness Warsi: Well Nick Griffin is wicked and vile and evil. He’s an unspeakable, unspeakable brute. How could you!

Dimbleby: Although, to be fair, a few people have voted for him, whereas you have simply been appointed to your job without a vote being cast?

Warsi: Err… can we get back to the bit about how bad Nick Griffin is?

Chris Huhne: I’m actually glad that we’re having this debate. We should all take on the BNP and expose their lies and make them look stupid and make people see them for the racists they really are. I have a great respect for the electorate – they are rather like sensible children, who will assuredly be attracted by my firm, reasonable tone.

Dimbleby: Now let’s hear some of the audience make complete fools out of themselves. You sir, the gentleman in the shirt!

Audience Member: Err… Foreigners are getting houses and jobs. Where’s the justice in that? I’ve practised reciting these lines over forty thousand times in preparation for this moment – that’s what gives them their peculiar intensity.

Second Audience Member: I’m not a racist. Some of my own children are black. But I think that all the blacks should be sent back to their own country.

[Wild cheers.]

Dimbleby: Bonnie Greer – you’re the only sensible person in the studio. We’ve surely reached that moment in the programme when somebody says something sensible?

Bonnie Greer: Well I think that Question Time is turning politics into a pantomime just to boost its own ratings.

Dimbleby: Oh no it isn’t!

Everybody: Oh yes it is!

Dimbleby: What do you think… Nick Griffin?

Nick Griffin [Gazing directly into the camera.]: Look into my eyes. You are feeling very sleepy. When you wake up, you will all go on to the internet and join the British National Party. Then you will march out into the streets and commit apocalyptic ethnic cleansing. White supremacy will last for a thousand years! Muh-ha! ha! ha!

[Further reading here, here, here, and here. Ed.]

Wanderers They Knew Not Where (14).

This venerated emblem was a pine tree, which had preserved the slender grace of youth, while it equalled the loftiest height of the old wood monarchs. From its top streamed a silken banner, colored like the rainbow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836).

Pizza/Octomonkey.

When I first lived in Edinburgh, I briefly dated a girl called Ewa. She was practically my only friend in the city, and whenever we both had an evening off work we would go to her council house on Granton Road and watch television through the night. We would usually eat pizza, because it was both the cheapest meal in the supermarket and the easiest to cook. Whenever I look back on those days, I shudder slightly and touch the nearest thing to hand, to assure myself that I am now safely in the present. That tiny house was constantly full of the fumes of cheap pizza, a sort of pizza mildew was spreading over the walls of the kitchen and living room, and whenever I made love to Ewa, her sweat seemed always to taste of pizza.

One evening, however, I went to Ewa’s home by myself for the first time, and found that I could not remember which house in that long road was hers. Whenever we had gone there before, she had always lead the way, but now I found myself looking at a row of identical houses. I narrowed the choice down to under six, but beyond that I was at a loss. I did not have my mobile phone with me – in those days, we had not yet learned to carry them about – and I could only imagine Ewa inside one of those houses, sliding the pizza into the oven, putting new sheets on the bed, and waiting for the doorbell to ring. I stood in the road for about an hour, watching the houses sink into darkness. Everything was still and quiet. I finally went home.

The precise circumstances in which Scott Mahony’s Octomonkey was created – in Appleton Tower’s “Animal Experimentation Lab” – remain unclear, although it is unlikely that the engineering of such a thing, which has no discernable social benefit, would have been funded under the present Research Excellence Framework. Octomonkey is at first turned away from the University of Edinburgh because it is a “distinctly white, middle class institution,” and he is only let in after disguising himself as Caucasian. He gets into Uni without any mention of grades, so he must have octopus/monkey parents with deep pockets – in this particular sense he is probably a foreign student. Yet in being forever alienated from campus life – abandoned by half-arsed lecturers,  unable to obtain basic textbooks in the George Square library, vomited over in Big Cheese, and having his tentacles sliced off by skateboarders in Bristo Square – he is a figure for every lost and demoralised fresher to identify with.

It is a pretty grim fate being an Octomonkey – one has merely the sad wisdom of a monkey, and none of their agility and fun. Octomonkey instead slides along on his landlubbered tentacles. He is probably a celibate – there is no Octomonkeygirl, and he is unlikely to meet anybody who would be turned on by the prospect of fucking an octopus with a monkey’s face. He has a good sense of reality though – he can see that the guy talking away on his mobile phone in the George Square library is “a knob.” How odd that the best thing in Edinburgh University’s Student Newspaper – and its most accurate reflection of student life – is a cartoon about a monkey-fish. They should make him editor.

The Bride of Christ.

Mary Polly had risen before dawn to prepare for the prayer-picnic. Her sleepy brain was not yet laced properly into its boots and it tottered unsteadily over the details of the morning. Or rather, it was as if her mind remained as an unmade bed which the hands of sleep had not been allowed to gather together and smooth plain. And then, whilst she was combing her hair at the dressing table, Mary Polly was suddenly struck by a desire to put on her wedding dress.

Mary Polly’s mind fell to the particular chamber of the wardrobe where the wedding dress hung, like the carcass of a moth, in its dust sheets. She wondered at this sudden compulsion – to slip into this great dress and twirl around, like a child clothed as a princess – but then she collected herself and banished the desire. Righteousness was the clean linen of the godly.

She made some waffles for the family’s breakfast. As she began to pour a glass of orange juice, the glass jumped out of her hand and broke with a pop on the kitchen floor. She had been delivered an opportunity to atone for her vanity, her weakness. She collected a handful of the broken glass and rubbed it into the back of her neck, allowing shards to slip down the collar of her dress. She felt the blood wandering across her shoulder blades and the shards gather itchily against the brow of her rear.

She helped her husband, Increase, out of his pyjamas and into his Sunday clothes. He was anxious again – he did not want to go to the picnic. He kept moaning “no! no!,” and Mary Polly let him fret unhindered, sensing that this would burn off his energy. She had not allowed herself to look out of the bedroom window, but when she finally faced the day, a great pillar of smoke – as huge as a cathedral – was suspended motionlessly against the blue of the sky.

When Mary Polly and her husband arrived at the breakfast table, their girls, Delivered and Accepted, were already eyeing the pile of waffles eagerly. Mary Polly recited grace and then the family tucked in. Mary Polly contemplated popping over to the home of Pastor Chris to check the weather report on his television. She would not allow a television inside her own home, believing that it excited Increase and the children too much. And she did not have time to supervise the watching of the television.

After breakfast, Mary Polly seated herself on the porch and Accepted lay her head obediently in her mother’s lap. Mary Polly probed briskly inside each ear with a cotton bud. Increase, who was already dressed for the picnic, was bored, and he squirmed and kicked petulantly. He wanted to play ball with the dog, but Mary Polly would not allow him to mess up his Sunday clothes. Although the sun was scarcely over the treetops, Increase was already labouring to breathe, and Mary Polly gave him two puffs from his inhaler, and then told him to breathe through his handkerchief. One could never manage to ignore that tightness of breath, that constant sense that oxygen was slightly out of reach.

The girls were soon in their Sunday dresses, and they were given the job of together carrying the cool-box. Mary Polly had assumed the duty of providing the congregation with ice-cream. She had made three flavours: chocolate-chip, banana, and butterscotch.

As the family walked out to their car, they were hailed by Neighbour Goody.

“Neighbour! You do not mean to keep your dog out in the yard? In this heat?” Neighbour Goody crooned wickedly.

Mary Polly almost frowned, but her gathering fire and brimstone were quickly buried beneath the butterscotch ice-cream of Christian neighbourliness. “My, how thoughtless I am! I’ll turn the sprinklers on, so the poor creature can have some relief.” She returned to the porch, dabbed at the touch screen, and bright arches and faded rainbows duly materialised over the dusty lawn. Sensing vaguely that she had been humiliated in front of her children, Mary Polly waved merrily at her exultant neighbour, and hurried her family into their car.

The countryside swept past, pristine and almost bleached in the summer heat. Mary Polly had wound down the windows and the car had filled with wild, dancing air, but at a sudden turning, a blast of thick smoke ploughed straight into the car, with the amazing force of a punch on the nose. There was a moment of total suffocation, total panic. And when Mary Polly had recovered herself and stopped the car, she found that Increase had been sick down his Sunday jacket.

The girls were wailing, their little faces were black with soot. Mary Polly was scolding Increase, and pawing at his jacket with a succession of wet wipes. He looked dismayed. The vomit was the exact picture of the waffles which they had all eaten for breakfast that morning, resurrected bodily from the dead. After several minutes of desperate, hopeless wiping, a large damp stain remained on the jacket. Increase would have to wear a plain shirt at the picnic, and then he would be whining about the cold.

They resumed. A little along the road, they beheld a line of fire racing down the hillside like the border of an invading nation, as fast as water issued from a cup. A dirt-coloured tree exploded inexplicably into a ball of flame. At the sight of this, the children began to shriek blindly. Increase was roaring like an animal and hammering his fists on the dashboard. Mary Polly repeatedly told them to be calm, and they eventually sank back into their seats, exhausted.

The heat was terrible. Accepted wept that the ice cream was melting. Mary Polly remained silent.

The smoke was now so thick that Mary Polly could see no further than a few feet ahead. She put on the headlights and slowed the car to a crawl.

Suddenly the smoke rolled from the road and a man stood before them. He was a dishevelled and totally blackened figure – a veritable scarecrow – although from amongst his rags, Mary Polly could distinguish the yellow smock of a fire-fighter. She observed with slight bewilderment that the man’s face had been burned and that a large patch of his jaw-bone was exposed.

“Ma’am,  you have to turn your car back. It is extremely dangerous. You must turn back.”

Mary Polly did not understand how the fireman’s voice reached them – it seemed to emanate from within their car – but at that moment, a tower of smoke plopped down on to the road and the man was staggering overwhelmed beneath it. Mary Polly turned the car around smartly and drove away.

“We’ll go to Pastor Chris’s house. He can tell us what has become of the picnic.” It was now raining thick ash and Mary Polly put on the windscreen wipers.

Delivered wanted to eat the ice-cream before it was all melted. Increase and Accepted agreed that this was a good idea. Mary Polly told them that this was unhelpful and that they should all be quiet.

The roof of Pastor Chris’s house was on fire. He was nowhere to be seen, but his mother was standing on the front lawn, crying like a child.

“He wanted me to stay and look after the horses,” she jabbered, her eyes agog. Her cotton dress was singed and Mary Polly noticed little flames crawling over its folds like lice. “But when I went around the back, they were screaming. Screaming! I never heard anything like it before – it sounded horrible – like damnation, total damnation.”

A fringe of flame fell over the face of the house. A window burst in the heat.

There was no room for the pastor’s mother in the car, but they gave her a cup of warm lemonade and told her that they would pray for her deliverance.

Back on the road, Increase was demanding that they go home where it was safe. Mary Polly thought it best that they drive around for a bit, just to ensure that the pastor was not holding the picnic anywhere nearby. It would be unfortunate if they had driven past the picnic and missed it. She told the girls to keep an eye out for the congregation praying on one of the hills above the fire.

The road was climbing into the hills and their car plunged anew into a churning, roaring cascade of smoke. Mary Polly was losing control of the car and her hands fell helplessly from the steering wheel as the car left the surface of the road and was cast alone like a bird against the burning landscape. She clasped her hands together in a silent prayer for protection and deliverance.

It was as if a line had been drawn straight from her heart to that of the Saviour Jesus Christ, and that this line was pulling him towards her like a fisherman wading out into the river to retrieve his catch. She distinguished him approaching their car. His robes were caked in the blood from his wounds, and there was a stark streak of blood across his forehead from where, presumably, he had absent-mindedly wiped a bloody hand. As he drew near the car, the windscreen was rolled up like a scroll and Mary Polly rose into her Savour’s arms.

He clasped her firmly and heavily, and her arms fell automatically around his body. Glancing back, she saw her husband and children cast alive into a lake of fire, still strapped helplessly into their car. She was surprised and indeed alarmed to feel nothing at the loss of those whom she had once loved so passionately, and, as her mind plunged and reared like a panicking horse at this apparent failure of Christian reason, she realised that they had been only worldly, the insubstantial stuff that dreams are made on. They had been a false substitute for her true lover, Christ, just as a child sucks its thumb to replace the nipple of the withdrawn breast. She had thought that her love for her family was forged from adamant, but she now realised that it was as baseless as all flesh.

She was kissing the Saviour with a mindless fervour, her heart suddenly filling with light and song. All nostalgia for illusory pasts and longings for empty futures were dissolved, and the word of the Saviour remained the only certainty.

Her hands reached around to lift Christ’s robes, she found his buttocks and parted them, inhaling the rich camel smell and kissing him tenderly. As she did so, the smoke fell away and the two entwined lovers ascended in a swirl of heavenly chorus to their awaiting thrones.

[There are some excellent and, if so you choose, explanatory pictures here. Tychy previously wrote a little on these themes here. Ed]