CONTINUED FROM HERE:
Ms Agnes Tidy
"Incognito"
Sucking Willow Ave.,
TIPOAK, Rutland.
Ms Ample Clavinty
"The Wink-At's"
Penny Farthing Close,
Kidderminster.
Dear Ample,
Thank you for your most interesting letter.
Sorry that I had not written since moving here, but you can doubtless imagine the upheaval. None of the kids came to help their poor old mum, but you can't blame them — young people are so busy these days, what with one thing or another. Ever since Dick died, it has not been easy filling in for him, whilst keeping up my own motherly instincts. He was not much of a father, if the truth were known, anyway. Don't let me kid you, the children have turned out a credit, and I'm only too pleased to see them settled in safe houses (on firm foundations without one sign of slippage or settlement) the other side of the country. You can never be too certain, these days. Travelling is so dangerous, especially with my funny head, and, like you, I rue the day they got rid of Ladies Only Compartments on British Rail.
Where was I? I've been finding it harder and harder to put pen to paper. But, now I've moved away from Kidderminster, I can see this is the only way. I hope you don't mind if I unburden myself to you, Ample. You were always such an understanding soul face to face and I could depend on your broad shoulders to cry on. I believe writing it down will be even better. I suspect my own children never learned to write — I don't recall ever receiving one word from them. Only garbled telephone calls full of gushing things.
You know, Ample, I'm a bit of an Earth Mother on the quiet. Always have been. I really want to tend to peoples' ills, care for them, ease their pain — I want them to sink their heads into my copious bosom, if I can put it that way. When Dick was alive, I could fulfil my true nature — because he especially enjoyed being babied. I never introduced the Ladies Group to him, did I? Well, he spent half his life, or even more, curled up in that big cot he made for himself out of the spare shed, He play-acted mewling and puking, begging me with his eyes to goo goo at him. Often the makeshift dummy wasn't enough and I'd drop one of my nipples into him for a nibble and suck and, quite often, an honest-to-goodness gnaw. I didn't relish the nappies for they were often too small for the mud that came out of him. When I suggested tea-towels with baking foil innards, he seemed actually to enjoy the discomfort. Poor old Dick, he died a baby. But it left a huge hole in my heart, too. I have to fill it with something.
I said Earth Mother, didn't I? It makes me laugh out loud now, but Dick actually used to call me Mud Mother, before he lost the will to talk at all. Come to think of it, modder is a foreign word for mother and mud. Old Swedish: modd. Dutch: modder. Danish: mudder. German: mutter. Icelandic: modha. I could go on, but I won't. Makes you wonder, all those foreign words doing the rounds, all the time when poor old Dick could hardly bring himself to say mama. What is mud, though? It's the weirdest, wonderfullest thing on Mother Earth. It's a hybrid of water and mineral, the two main ingredients in the recipe of life, if I am not too much mistaken. So, it must be something special. There's a woman here in Tipoak who's advertising in the local press about mud baths. I think I may partake. Black mud at 100 degrees. I wonder if that's fahrenheit or centigrade. The advert says it's good for chronic rheumatism and even incurable arthritis. Impotence, too. Don't know about premature senility, but you can only find out, by trying. I bet it costs a lot — doesn't say how much. Something about mud-worms, too, in the small print — better than leeches, by half, but I don't hold with all those old wives' tales — better, though, than some of the more modern medical practices these days where they poke and prod with steel claws even into your privatest parts, if I can be indelicate for a moment. I bet mud would be good for the goat in me. Whilst on the subject of mud, I scream with uncontrollable laughter every time I think of Dora Slight opening the door to me her face covered in the stuff (all half-baked into a lunar surface). Perhaps she knows something we don't. Still, there's more to life than mud in the eye and one must treat triumph and disaster not only with a pinch of salt but as the equal impostors they truly are.
It takes all sorts to make a world. And there are varieties of mud, you know. Loess is the best for the soul, they say. Ordinary river slime for the face is OK, but when it comes to deeper things, nothing is too good. How do I know, I hear you ask. Well, I've not been idle, whilst the removal men have been passing through the house. I put my thinking-cap on and, with a piping hot mug of thick cocoa and a black and white snapshot of Dick in his Christening-gown beside me, I've been riffling through ancient dictionaries. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So, what is a lot?
Gathered from all my painstaking research, the last word on loess is as follows: Mud deposited by the Rhine along its banks, and occupying a great part of the valley of the river. It consists of a finely-comminuted sand, or pulverulent loam of a yellowish-gray colour, chiefly of argillaceous matter combined with a sixth-part of carbonate of lime and a sixth-part of quartzose and micaceous sand. Sometimes it contains sandy and calcareous concretions or nodules. In some places it is 200 or 300 feet thick. It contains river and fresh-water shells of existing species. Interstratified with it are layers of ashes, thrown out by some of the last eruptions of the now extinct, or at least dormant, Eifel volcanoes. In Alsace it is called Lahm. There is a corresponding loess on the Mississipi. Both are Post Tertiary.
Must go. I'm sure I heard my phantom birth waking up for its feed.
Fondness from me, Agnes.
PS: Don't worry about me, Ample. My grown-up kids are good to me. I'd only fret if I saw them. People these days don't look after their bodies properly. Wallowing in honest-to-goodness mud would do them far better than all that hard jogging.
Later, there was a half-hearted attempt by an angel to contact George Slight, an attempt that failed abysmally, to such an extent that George ended up himself trying to to re-establish contact with the alien intelligence (if not an intelligent alien) — only to discover he was on a crossed-line with a lady he once knew as Agnes Tidy.
Agnes shut the hardback, having riffled through its pages in search of its ending, picked out the tin can from the flip-top and listened. She being religious thought George was one of God's messenger-angels. She was not sufficiently religious to have full faith in the existence of God Himself, so an agent, as she assumed Geore to be, was, presumably, more believeable than the principal.
"Wishful thinking if you think a message from me is a message from God," George said. George tried to conceal the noise of the recognisable traffic outside by cupping his mouthpiece nearer to what it was a piece of.
"Who are you, then? A salesman? Or one of those dirty, filthy..."
"I assure you, Mrs Tidy, I'm not any of those things — we must be at crossed purposes..."
She took her ear away, thankful that George was at the other end of a line rather than directly there. She had evidently abandoned him to the ranks of the cranks, without herself questioning George's knowledge of her name. He wondered how he had managed to cross wavelengths with Agnes. He could not possibly believe that their mind-entwined contact had been at either extreme of a taut wire stretched between two hole-punched bases of tin-cans now empty of their runny baked beans or chunky soup: a telegraphic device, if rudimentary, that always seemed to work, if only during earth-bound childhoods. Another one of George's inventions. An early one, perhaps.
It was a nonsensical statement to claim that a complete stranger like George was actually sitting just outside Agnes's kitchen door, where she sat book-browsing. A nonsensical statement that made less nonsense than saying George wasn't, because George was.
George then heard a key go. This was someone, he assumed, who had more right to be in Agnes's house than a complete stranger: her late husband, fresh from hospital-visiting, doffing his over-things in the hall so as to enter the chintzy parlour with a petal-based cone of forgiving flowers — or, perhaps, wanting-to-be-forgiven flowers. Only to find that Agnes wasn't there. She was in the kitchen, consigning the unspeakably jagged-mouthed baked bean can back into the flip-top waste-bin — wherein George heard the residue of rubbish resettle around its restored constituent. He heard it as if it was inside his head. He needed to resort to guesswork, he guessed, to pinpoint his avenue out of Agnes's kitchen, a place which, for all he knew, had become the sole extent of the universe.
He watched helplessly as the strangest stranger possible in the guise of her late husband beat Agnes to a tomato purée as punishment for talking not about rubbish but to rubbish. Meanwhile, with this particular God's message undelivered, George returned Planetside to initiate another message. Indeed, it is said that the mad are saner than the sane — which makes them mad indeed. That trite tale of a one-eyed man in the country of the blind told of a situation which must have sent the sanest man mad, him seeing things which nobody else could see. Well, George Slight was now very much in that position
Wanda Reack was at a loose end.
She had recently quit the Ladies Group wherein for a time she had been a leading light. The other members had become more than a little wearing, even flouncing around in new frocks, each trying to vie with the other in the expensive hair-do's they could con out of their unsuspecting spouses. The worst thing, though, was that Wanda was the only one without a handle. The other stars of the Group were Dame Florence Wilson (President-for-life), Lady Dora Slight (Chair) and Ms Ample Clavinty (general factotum), with herself as Honorary Treasurer, of course. Despite being richer than the other ladies, Wanda felt uncannily diminished by all their lording about. She tried to compensate for this, by her natural aggression, but it only served to entrench the bitterness of the group towards her whom they considered to be an upstart.
The last straw was when a strain of premature senililty swept like wildfire through a good proportion of the membership. It was particularly virulent when each lady was at her most vulnerable time of the month, the attacks thus coming in tides. Wanda actually witnessed the effects rippling through the weekly meetings, as each lady succumbed to the onset of weak-mindedness. It was sod's law that the fits seemed to hit each one when she happened to up on her hindlegs braying at the others about her latest cause célèbre.
The crazy things they said!
Wanda, being the only one seemingly unaffected by the plague of senility, was truly agog at the sheer unadulterated ludicrousness of the others' behaviour. Lady Dora, fulfilling her role as the Chair (her elbows and knees splayed at the appropriate angles to imitate a Queen Anne antique with walnut-veneered armrests), creaked back and forth on the balls of her feet, heeding only the traffic rumbling by outside the conference hall. Dame Florence often picked at imaginary stains on her winceyette frock, desperately trying to find her spectacles, which Wanda could see were roosting upon her bird's nest of a hair-do. Ms Ample Clavinty, a wiry lass despite her name, frequently began to unbutton her cardiagn to see if the breast-restoring cream had done any good overnight (or so she would tell her cronies after the meeting as a rationale for her otherwise scandalous disrobing). Her fidgetting manouevres also served to make the ladders in her stockings to run like snakes from heel to suspender-catch.
Wanda herself scowled at such goings on and rose to her feet, to give them a piece of her mind, before finally storming out of the Group for good and all.
"Ladies, I've had it up to here..." Wanda raised her flat hand from the pit of her belly to the widow's peak of her hairline. "I joined this Group because I'd been led to believe it was a force to be reckoned with, a feminist vanguard, a battlecry for the free woman. In all good faith, I took unwanted men's suits from off our jumble mountain, de-mothballed them, placed them on my body with pride and care ... and what happens! I can't even smoke my pipe in the Group's common room!"
There was furore amid the audience, as the gathered ladies bobbed up and down in a Mexican "wave" from one end of the hall to the other and back again. Hoots and klaxons echoed such caterwauling from outside in the street.
Seeing that the audience was growing ugly, Wanda collected her multitude of carrier bags from under her seat (bearing the names of dress shops in town) and clip-clopped on her high heels down the aisle towards the exit. Her pin-stripe suit and kipper tie fooled nobody...
As Wanda left, there was a well-timed cheer, especially from Dame Florence. Lady Dora was in the process of contorting her body further, this time into the shape of a desk, her mouth open like a built-in ink-well. Her husband George had, of course, had a recent sex change, so Dora wanted to go one better and have a funiture one.
Wanda Reack, as she counted out her loose change back home, regretted the whole situation. She never liked scenes. Her days of being strident at the Bradford Arms had been long over and done with, and there were no more dreams of story-book romances under the California sun. At least she knew she was not mixed-up, but those ladies she had abandoned to their ritual agendas, they had really got problems.
The house was silent with running stitches,
She went to bed dog-tired, forgetting the loneliness through sleep. One of her bones cracked like the sound one often hears from inside closed butcher shops at the dead of night. Her breathing grew deeper with every startled snore. Tomorrow would hopefully be the fresh start of a new monthly cycle, and she was determined to remain at a loose end for ever more ... until the final casting-off.
Ms Ample Clavinty
"The Wink-At's"
Sucking Willow Ave.,
Kidderminster.
Ms Agnes Tidy,
"Incognito",
Penny Farthing Lane,
TIPOAK, Rutting Land.
Dear Agnes,
Thank you for your most interesting letter. I never realised your Dick was such a handful. I get the impression, though, you actually relished pandering to a husband's every whim. And him pretending to be a baby! I mean to say, did he really sport nappies and coo for comforters to gnaw on? I can't exactly believe it. But, another part of me can. There's always too sides to every story. With your real children flying your nest, you doubtlessly needed someone else to mother, didn't you? When you were here in Kidderminster, I could read untold depths in the dark wells of your eyes, dear Agnes, as if you yearned to drink in all our souls. To turn dross into gold? Or mud into pure love, as you might want to put it? That's why (and I can say it now when there are so many miles between Kidderminster and Tipoak) I "love" you so very much. Excuse the quotation marks — they seem to protect me from the true implication of words. And, incidentally, you didn't answer that bit in my previous letter. Was it you who played footsie with me under the Ladies Group table? I almost wish it was not you, for the sake of my sanity, which has already taken a bashing recently .
Well, I can sympathise with your poor late Dick, you know? I ache to be babied, myself. Even now, with my own consort in hubbies' heaven, I froth myself up in frills and garters. It's so nice to twang the suspenders against the silky soft flab of my thighs — as my hubby once did. He used to bring breakfast to me in bed, feeding me on steaming doorstops of toast smothered in oodles of wild honey and, then, I'd snuggle down into the duvet with the latest Barbara Cartland — listening to Housewives' Choice and to my hubby pottering about downstairs doing what men usually do. If I got up (even for a quick pee), he'd tell me to go back since, in the evening of my years, he wanted to pamper me. I wasn't exactly babied, like you did to your Dick. But I was certainly coddled. And he did eggs to the most perfect turn you could imagine, lying upon a bed of interleaved rashers of lean bacon.
So, be assured, Agnes, we're not souls apart in our preoccupations. Maybe, if I was a different gender you would let me live in Tipoak with you. Looking after and being looked after, like hand in glove, eh? I'm not incontinent yet, however, though things are certainly getting on top of me, from the bottom upwards. I get no sympathy from the likes of the Ladies Group. As I wrote last time, they've all more or less gone their separate ways. The only one I can now talk to is Florence. She has moments of sanity, when I can really unburden myself to her. Lately, I even told her about what I did to my hubby's dead body before they carted him off (or what it did to me!). She merely raised an eyebrow, as if to say she knew already. Despite her encroaching feebleness of mind, she maintains an all-knowingness which inspires one to come clean. When I used to go to real Church Confession, I never got the same satisfaction, since you couldn't see the face properly through the grille. And I was convinced that it was a different priest than the one we saw on Sunday mornings raising the Host aloft. The one behind the grille had a pot-boiled aura, ugly and twisted, tongue lolling lengthily up the cheek.
I've been having dreams, lately. And, soon, I fear they'll become as real as life itself, if they haven't done so already. We both rued the day they got rid of special Ladies' Compartments on trains, didn't we? I fail to recall how long ago it was, but you felt safer amongst your own kind. All with long fashion gloves and nice talk. They had Ladies' waiting-rooms, too. Wanda tells me, they still do, but I never believe her because she's always struck me as a bit too masculine for her own good, with her trouser suits and gaudy kipper ties from the seventies. In spite of her lack of breeding, she gives the impression of being stuck up, even in Flo's presence. How Dora can live under the same roof as her, since losing her sweet Georgie-Porgie, well, I'm at a complete loss to know — still, it takes all sorts. Bassets!
Anyway, where was I? If this were a conversation, face to face, we'd be able to meander all the branch-lines of life, cover the whole network of existence. Conversations between soul-mates are like that. But, even so, our conversations always used to hold certain things back. For instance, the dream I am about to tell you. I was standing on a windswept railway platform at the edge of dusk, alone except for a child that held my hand for dear life. No portmanteaux, nothing else. The child was a pretty little girl in a pinafore dress. Golden ringlets sat upon her shoulders and her eyes welled sheer dependance on me. When the train steamed in from the mouth of a tunnel at the other end of the platform, I was relieved to discover that we were already in the right position for the Ladies Only Compartment. Imagine my horror, when out of it walked several men in swimming costumes, each with a circular hole cut in the trunks to allow their little "hoses" to poke out. I covered the girl's eyes with my gloves, my very first impulse. Thankful to see that they had entirely vacated the compartment, we got on — amidst the small puddles left on the floor — whereby I immediately tugged the emergency cord that hung from the slot in the arched ceiling — a wide leather strop it was, which resembled a device that I recall was once used to open carriage windows. I looked down to the little girl and she had transformed into the very likeness of a glistening black beetle, her tiny cold hand into pincers that my own gloved hand had failed to notice. Ignoring my alarm, the train shunted back into the dark tunnel!
Whereupon I awoke in a foul sweat. I automatically felt for the other pillow but, of course, he'd long gone to hubbies' heaven. I sobbed bitterly. I felt tainted. Can you explain it? For the life of me, I can't. I bet those new-fangled shrinks would have a field day discussing what lay behind it all. You're the first person on this Earth I've told about my dreams. Is it old age? Will Death be like that all the time? Agnes, I despair for us all. Promise me, if we should meet on the other side, that we'll be bosom pals again.
It was you. I'm sure. Often we slipped off each other's stilletoes under the table and let the bare stockinged feet have free rein. Like bodies with five heads each in forbidden love-making. I shudder now in yearning memory. Barbara Cartland couldn't've put it better. I sometimes wonder whether she knows anything about true love. What, for example, you felt for your Dick. And me for my hubby. Love was once high on my list of priorities, but now life is top of the agenda. With age, I think sex becomes a wrinkled old busby fit for nothing but hiding behind the curtains of our skirts. The dustman asked me the other day what that thing was in my dustbin. First time, I'd ever spoken to a dustman. I told him what it was. He didn't look convinced, but what can you do when there's nowhere else to throw it. The last time I had a plumber, he literally undressed me with his eyes. And when he bent over to look in the bowl, there was that dimple again over the back of his trousers. God, Agnes, how can we go on when there are such beasts as men roaming the Earth?
Must go now, I feel so very tired all of a sudden,
Lots of Love, Ample. xxxxx
PS: That cream I once used to rub into the upper half to bring out my best points seems quite good also for lubricating the mangle. Like you, I don't hold with tumble driers. It seems so uncouth watching my smalls go round and round in a saucy soap opera. Worcester sauce!
PPS: It was Bassets that used to make All Sorts, wasn't it? Licquorice — that brings back all manner of memories, doesn't it? We used to scare old people by jumping out at them with string-ties of the stuff hanging from our mouths. Sweet cigarettes, you don't see them these days, either. Proper pads for the awkward time of the month, they've been replaced by tampons, shame to say. And nobody's heard of dock leaves for nettle bites.
Now out of hospital, and consigned to his own devices, George was the only person in the world who could actually see the mad monster that lurked invisibly at the back of everybody's mind — this ability being, in his case, a sure sign of severe sanity. And he tried to visualise a part of the town down by the Sludgy River, near the Farmer's Arms, with a mind sufficiently pliable to focus on Wilson Arches where the Underclass congregated, taking advantage of the many competing soup kitchens — not a million miles from Hell, it seemed.
All this took at least a smidgin of invention. So, now, George had to close his eyes. He hoped it was not too much to ask, because, self-evidently, without being in complete darkness he wouldn't be able to empathise with those inhabitants of the country of the blind. He appreciated that closing eyes in a lighted sitting-room was not exactly the same as being blind. So, to improve the effect, he switched off the light, before closing the eyes. Squeezed them tight, so that any residual floaters were drowned...
One night, when the moon had vanished behind a clutch of dead stars, there was a stirring among the dossers under Wilson Arches down by the Sludgy River. Dreams were reaching their heads. The young male angel was awake, forking away with its eyes' stares. It never slept. It was able to stay awake, slipping into real dreams, rather than the false ones of the surrounding dossers. Darkness was constituted of black straw — a not unfamiliar phenomenon when everybody was snoring. Then the angel saw the poking through of the sucker, the same size as an elephant's trunk, a trunk covered in smaller suckers like women's pouting kisses. The mangey head was even larger than the angel had predicted from the leading sucker — covered in ripe green wounds and weeping sores, each edged with hair not unlike ranks of eye-lashes. There were no real eyes of which to speak, no eyes to cross swords with the angel's. Others might not have realised it, but the full-length version of this creature (the whole of which the angel had not seen) haunted all waking and sleeping moments — thankfully, however, beyond the retention of most waking consciousnesses. Now, George Slight opened his eyes...
The all-clear sounded. Back at the Sludgy River. Soon, morning would buckle the prison-bars of night as he heard again the competing cries of soup kitchens touting for his beggary. But that was wishful thinking on their part, since woman-like George was sitting or lying in a warm lighted room — or within a train or aeroplane or water craft — or bathed in sunshine amid nature's and man's wise accoutrements — with a book or magazine open. Yet, he had nothing but madness with which to invent himself. And even madness would not last.
Lady Dora Slight, being someone of considerable standing in Society (not least because of the title), knew that, if she should stumble from the steep, straight and narrow path which had been first placed in front of her toddling tentative steps by the Guardians of Pedigree as Establishment's version of the yellow-brick road, she would have much further to fall and the landing would consequently be that much harder, despite the angel's wings she imagined embedded in her shoulder-blades by her own personal God, ripe for unfurling in just such an eventuality. She had heard about other Lady This-and-Thats who had been crucified for minor shop-lifting offences, or been brought to book before the beak for masquerading as common street-women intent on trawling kerb-crawlers with their fish-net stockings (or, more likely, with their huge bloomers), or had gone to seed through too little water in their stiff drinky-poos or...
The list was endless. So, the potential dangers were not lost on our Lady Dora. She would rather commit suicide before being tempted to stray from the unswervable principles instilled by her upbringing. Just such a crime of self-destruction was what many of the ladies (the gritty arcana of whose lives were reported hand to mouth in the coffee-morning enclaves) had committed after the occasion of their downfall; which, in many ways, was more understandable than Lady Dora's pledge to pre-empt shame with her own premature death.
She was not a gossip-monger, let us hasten to say. She cringed at the dirt underlying reality and would prefer to sweep it under the carpet ... except most of those who figured in her circles sported only wall-to-wall Axminsters, neatly tacked along the skirting-boards. However, like most of us who creep and crawl through this thing loosely called life, she had a secret yearning to be fed with the filth of others' misdoings and disgrace. She was, in other words, the one with the poop scoop for doggies' doings. It made her feel cleaner in herself, more wholseome. Coffee-mornings, as a consequence, had very little to do with coffee.
It was all very well ... until Shame incarnate slithered from under Lady Dora's own carpet. It must have been incubating there for several years. Also, being quite unpredictable and outside her direct responsibility, she was not even given the opportunity to avert it, before the long-percolated festering thing came out into the full scorching scrutiny of Society.
What indeed was the source of her downfall? What shocking scandal could possibly sully one with such an unimpeachable reputation for high morals and matchless scruples? Well, it is all history now and, if the truth were known, a bit of a damp squib.
Her husband, George Slight, one otherwise unmemorable day, went out, supposedly to his club, as the man she always thought he was — although it cannot be said with any degree of confidence that she had recently seen the hard evidence of his manhood. Not that she had ever seen it in the cold light of day, having been reared in the notion of married couples preparing themselves for bed in separate dressing-rooms. She could only really recall once touching it gingerly during their honeymoon all those years ago, when he had asked her in a whisper to help him guide it in: and, whether the consummation had been obtained prior to his jumping to premature confusions as to his role, she was still uncertain ... and she had been tempted on many an occasion to anonymise her voice and consult a radio phone-in on the matter. Well, much later, that day, he returned as a woman dressed in a beige frock of swinging pleats, a bright yellow-bead choker, a flowery Fascinator hat-pinned to the top of his head and shimmering sheen stockings of such a low denier they looked fit to have ladders run merely by breathing upon them. His bosom pouted at the cleavage.
Lady Dora was dumbfounded, needless to say.
She knew it was her George, for he bore a five o'clock shadow like a ghost upon his jowls, recognisable from its customary close following of the map of the Americas. As if reading her mind, he tentatively stroked his chin and said, "This will all disappear as soon as the new hormones take purchase on the old ones. And, by the way, my dear, I saw Dame Florence in town, and she says the transformation suits me a real treat. I should have done it yonks ago, she said. And, it's true, the frock's so liberating..." He twirled upon his stilletoes, as if it were a circus trick which he had been practising.
Dora fainted upon the carpet, only to feel the floor moving beneath her. Then, she was dead to the world for at least five minutes, until George could ease her back into consciousness by saying: "Don't worry, my dear, I'll do the housework from now on." He had evidently forgotten that only the servants knew how to work the new-fangled Hoover. Still he would be able to cook supper tonight for them both. He had brought something home that would be nice and tasty lightly fried in groundnut oil.
Well, whether these are the correct facts of the matter or even in the right order. Quotes and misquotes, these are all part of the tangled tapestry of life. In any event, Lady Dora Slight recovered from the shock, shook off the slithering shame (which was more apparent than real in hindsight) and resumed her coffee-mornings. In fact, it all became rather pleasant, because George now accompanied her and, in his new persona, was, in everybody's eyes, a delightfully winsome companion, unquestionably preferable to the stubbly creature he had once had the misfortune to be.
The moral, supposedly, is: don't jump to premature suicides, for each apparent humiliating disaster forms a natural compensating triumph elsewhere amid the rhythms of unscryable time and will eventually become just one more decorative strand in that giant embroidery basket of Creation, through which you should proudly stride from cot to coffin.
#
The Ladies Group was an institution. No one person could break it, as Wanda Reack eventually discovered.
After the now legendary Group meeting, where she had stood on her hindlegs and lambasted the audience for falling short of the feminist ideal, she had sat at home and moped for weeks on end. Had she been too hard on them? Had her claim of being the only one in the whole Group not suffering from premature senility been just a teeny weeny bit hurtful, not to say far-fetched? The leading lights of the Group since that affair had indeed not cut her dead when seeing her in the street. They had nodded politely from under their sunshades, thus acknowledging Wanda's existence with the minimum of effort but, as they thought, with the maximum of forgiveness.
Wanda's gut reaction was to cut them dead, however. She was an aggressive woman, who had been lately utilising rummage sale cast-offs in experimentation of role-seeking. The more she could become like a man, the less she would need the protection and bonhomie of the Ladies Group. But the smidgen of illogic with which this theory was imbued niggled her.
The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into monthlies, as all particles of time have ambition to be longer than they actually are. And, as some say, time is the great mender. (But, as others would say, the great bender). Wanda often found herself kicking the segs of her heels along the pavements outside the Group meetings, hoping against hope that she would be invited inside.
Other ladies had been re-established as Pillars of Society, having once suffered downfalls that at the time seemed terminal. There had been that Rachel Mildeyes who had married, of all things, an out and out foreigner — what was his name, Dognahnyi, or something? — and she had returned, tail between her legs, claiming that it had all been a beestorm in the brain during a particularly heavy period. She'd been restored to the fold. And, of course, what about Baroness Barmbrack! She'd had the temerity to admit full and incontrovertible trust in the Genesis part of the Bible, whilst it was accepted belief, certainly among feminists who'd have no truck with the Adam and Eve malarkey, that the New Testament was the only part that Our Creator had intended to be taken seriously: the Old bit was merely propoganda on behalf of some foreigners who couldn't find somewhere to live. Still, the Baroness had found a few seats at the back of the hall where she and her cronies could hold meetings within meetings.
And then there was Lady Dora Slight herself: she had even been stripped of the Chair when her so-called husband George had seen fit to have his sex changed. Although slightly unusual, most of the ladies were willing to accept the fact, especially as he turned out to be a delightfully winsome member of the Group, preparing teas and generally making himself useful in what he saw his new caring role to be: but when he changed his name to Menorrhagia and started up a cabal within the overall Group (much more visible than that of Baroness Barmbrack) propounding anti-women's suffrage and claiming that a woman's place was in the home as some kind of "Earth Mother", then the knives well and truly came out. Lady Dora Slight herself faced the ignominy of becoming a rank-and-file member, having been one of the Inner Cabinet ever since the Group had been founded in the last days of rationing.
Menorrhagia (née George) fulfilled his ambition and was kept under house arrest (where, even now, Wanda believed, he pottered around doing and re-doing the chores): nobody knew whether he was happy or not, as he'd lost all the art of conversation. The important point was that Dora was now on the brink of forming her own Inner Cabinet (an opposition party, as it were), despite the earlier scandals caused by her husband. This new element within the Group were currently fighting for support on the question of Pre-Menstrual Tension, one set of protagonists holding the view that it was a positive force for good, stiffening the thews, the sinews and the otherwise weak vessels in which God had seen fit to pour womanhood: and the others (backed up by the original leading lights such as Dame Florence and Ms Ample Clavinty) claimed that there was no such thing as PMT and, even if there were, it was a sickness only affecting their opponents in the debate, by draining any sense from their brains.
All this tended to give Wanda Reack encouragement to return to the fray. As she stood outside listening to the gradually increasing hubbub of the meeting, she considered she was bound to be picked up by at least one in-fighting splinter party or another as a very valuable ally. As a grit as well as a light, who didn't mind getting her hands bloody.
She walked into the hall, head held high. All grew silent, as the red sea of faces parted in her path. She could make out Dame Florence up at the front, still searching for the spectacles that all knew she would never find.
Despite wearing her late father's demob suit and medals, Wanda felt pride drain from her soul. She felt one of her hot flushes seeping up and the tremors of an impending prolapse: she cursed her frailty as a woman. However, she plugged on...
Wanda tried to deepen her voice but only served to make it croak as she shouted:
"Ladies, I return, unabashed and shameless. I withdraw nothing of what I said. But I think I can lend muscle to your debates. The Ladies Group without Wanda Reack is the Bible without Jesus Christ..."
Wanda took a deep breath in the midst of her carefully prepared speech. Then, like St Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, she saw Baroness Barmbrack striding towards her, hand held out, like a man would, in greeting and welcome. A small cheer went up. Wanda sighed with relief, for she would not need to deliver the rest of her speech which was more ludicrous than the first part of it.
Ms Wanda Reack, as she now felt able to call herself, found a seat next to Lady Dora Slight in the gangway, surprised also to see that Lord Menorrhagia was sitting on the other side, licking envelopes for the next Group mailshot. His acceptance by the other ladies seemed to lessen the value of her own. It had indeed been rumoured that Menorrhagia was a carrier of genital warts, as well as a traitor to all womankind in his retention of Old Wives' Tales.
Wanda shrugged. She had been granted a new lease of life, whichever way you liked to look at it, and she would sure make things sizzle around here! And she decided to bide her time in clarifying the Chinese whispers that had led to the general belief in her abundant riches, a mythology which she had not had the heart as yet even to admit to herself.
However, only time would tell, as it eternally expanded to fill the gap between now and death.
Meantime, having been steeped overnight in sanity, George Slight simply sloped off alone by the stinky Sludgy River, waving his albino trunk like a blindman's stick before him. Or a wireless engineer's trial aerial connection...
"I don't think this wireless is working," said George.
Having now been given a home by the hospital, he found himself twiddling the knob of the wireless, trying to tune the voice a little more clearly, yet, give or take a little background static, the voice that said "said George" was far less audible than the voice that purported to say what George said.
Giving up the ghost, he clicked the wireless fully off. The room's consequent silence was heavy and he began to hum tunelessly so as to break the monotony. He stared at the wireless' sound-vent, a tightly woven wickerwork surface that pre-dated the invention of stereophonic twin-loudspeakers by about a half century. The voices had been so muffled, when the tuning-bar was lit up, it felt as if the vent was knitting closer: noises trying to break free from their prison of valves.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" That was Baroness Barmbrack. She always came into the sitting-room at about this time of day and asked the same question. A heart of gold. But a tongue like jagged glass.
George turned round from the lace-trimmed backgammon-table, where the wireless set sat, and nodded. He did not want to converse with this woman who he considered to be the older version of an erstwhile sweetheart of his, in case she noticed that he was about to dismantle the built-in speaker. Lodgers had no right to meddle with the landlady's equipment.
One couldn't help smiling that the Baroness once gave a previous tenant called Mr Tidy a piece of her tongue. Not that Mr Tidy's crime deserved such punishment, merely replacing, as he had, a light bulb in the smallest room upstairs. She had wanted to check the wattage. Still, Mr Tidy hadn't lasted long under the Barmbrack regime. But George should not be so presumptuous as to call the Baroness by her Christian name. She was a stickler for standards. And her tea was sixpence a pot. Nice tea, though, and well-strained.
"Yes, please, Baroness." She had evidently not seen George's earlier nod. "Nasty day." He nodded again, this time towards the rain-blurred bay window, which looked out on several different bus routes. No 67 went into town, and out towards the football ground the other way. No 45... No 22... No 56... And so forth. He often used No 22, having much business at the warehouses on the periphery of the town. Other than playing Patience with a deck of nothing but double-headed Queens, he enjoyed looking at all the audio equipment, the various breeds of loudspeaker, complete with tweeters and woofers, Nicam Stereo TV's, personal headsets, digital sound-quality and so forth. Pity Sickness Benefit couldn't allow him to afford to buy any of them. Still, nice helpful young men were there who knew him for what he was. One even gave him an adaptor plug free of charge telling him his shaver was on the blink. The young man (who looked a bit like George imagined an angel looking) said George needed a transformer. But an adaptor plug would do just as well. The shaver was still on the blink, but it was the thought that counted. George wondered what they'd think to invent next.
With the Baroness now pottering in the kitchen, clinking frangible crockery and tinkling sugar-spoons in an attempt to order her utensils into some system of order, George turned to his screwdriver-set which he had purchased at one of those DIY warehouses soon. He was preparing the ground for removing the back of the wireless, to see if he could straighten out some of the voices. Dramatic plays were a real devil when the rush-hour was on. He could only hear one word in three, if that. Perhaps he should have a shave first, in view of his grizzled chin. But now he could hear the tray coming nearer, bearing, no doubt, a steaming samovar, a jug of milk, a crystal bowl of sugar cubes, a silver strainer, a wedge of lemon, a cup, a saucer and a teaspoon. He dug into his trouser pocket in search of a sixpence. Charity didn't go far these days ...
Suddenly, the wireless burbled into life. He had not twiddled any of the knobs. A bus was passing in rather a heavy-handed fashion, as if it were over-loaded. (The house was on a hill). No doubt the number 45 on its way to the cattle market. But George had never heard of unsuppressed static causing a wireless actually to turn itself on without the invention of some other motive force. Through the hiss, he could hear his erstwhile neighbour’s voice from the hospital ward saying, "You remember hospital radio? Well, the plays are all different on this wireless. It's not even a public channel, George."
He tried to speak back through a mass of ill-tuned mush, his prised-open mouth healed over with the thickest spider-web his tongue had ever had the misfortune to be tangled up in...
"What's the matter?" shouted Baroness Barmbrack.
“Dora wants me back,” he replied, pointblankly.
Throwing all caution (and her long-held standards) to the wind, she smothered his spiky kisser with her own less spiky one. But it was too late. The man in him was doornail dead, if still slightly warm. She withdrew his fingers and thumbs from the ten-pin adaptor plug, with herself already in too much shock to notice a new shock. A numberless bus grunted by, also unnoticed ... and late. Listening to Beethoven's late string quartets, as Ms George Slight, now a woman, often did, she wondered whether they would have been any different if they had turned up early or, even, on time
Mrs Agnes Tidy
"House of Rest"
Kidwelly Drive
TENBY, SWales.
Ms Ample Clavinty
"The Wink-At's"
Penny Farthing Close
Kidderminster.
My dear Ample,
I am most disappointed that you have not written back to me. At first, I gave benefit to the doubt that you may have mis-addressed the envelope, but as the days now turn shorter than I can ever remember, I begin to dread that I myself may have mis-addressed the last letter to you. I'd ring you if my fingers were not so arthritic — bent double with pain they are, you wouldn't credit. Like square "Y's" they seem. Have you a phone, in any case? I forget.
When we were together, I thought we were such bosom chums. Now we're so far apart, I feel almost closer to you. It seems we can say things in letters we would never even have dreamed about in the old days. I am starting to have strange dreams. Never had them when I was in Kidderminster. Suppose I got them off my chest, really, by talking about things with you and the rest of the Ladies Group. Gossip purges, you know. And I know writing this letter to you, Ample, will serve a similar purpose.
The dream I have most is standing on a strange station platform, watching a group of brawny men in bathing trunks getting on a train, but not only that, they are entering the special Ladies Only compartment! I can only see their backs. And then the dream switches itself off. Another regular one, is us two playing footsie again under the Ladies Group meeting table, kicking off each other's high-heels and intertwining the toes. Do you remember that time when your little toe was sticking out the side of your shoe, through a hole that had been worn. It was a devil's own job to prize you out of that one ... surreptitiously! Anyway, as soon as our tootsies have simply started to breach the rules of foreplay, I wake with a start and find they are my own feet doing battle with each other under the duvet, like two wild ferrets.
I think I must be going mad, or I am mad for so thinking. Whichever way you look at it, it doesn't bode at all well.
Believe it or not, I've had a note from Dora — in Tenby, South Wales, of all places. I thought you'd told me she'd shacked up with that Wanda Reack woman, after her George passed away. Well, she certainly isn't now. It sounds as if she's in some sort of Rest Home, all her creature discomforts being ironed out —just in time for dying! Makes you laugh, doesn't it? Why the Hell did God saddle our souls with the likes of bodies? I feel like setting up my own Home for the frail, senile and demented, laying my hands upon their brows and wishing away all the cruel senses that flesh is heir to. I am a dab hand at hot mud baths, too. Anyway, another dream of mine is where I think real life is dream, and vice versa, and vice versa again, quickly alternating like the frames of a crazy film, only understandable if you're equally crazy yourself. It's that sort of grainy, black and white flickering in which those beefy men in swimming costumes appeared. There are insect feelers at the margins waggling across the picture.
I'm sitting up in bed, writing this letter. But in many ways it's writing itself. I'm too sad to think. I can hardly see the Basildon Bond for floaters in the eyes. I think I must lay the pen to rest (or lay the ghost in it) and just trust this reaches you. If your next letter arrives, I'll more than likely not open it for fear of your castigation. My hands are all fingers and thumbs, anyway. But I will check the address on the envelope for future reference.
The woman in charge here has had an accident — broken her sternum, they say. It wouldn't hurt so much without the body. I'll lay my hands upon her, given half the chance, and drain the pain out — the pain in my fingers, that is. But I can't find her anywhere,
Lots of Requited Love, Agnes.
PS: Last night I had another dream I can't explain. For some reason, I was standing watch outside a block of flats. I was wearing my best costume that my hubby bought me when he was demobbed, and holding a trusty handbag. It was a very rundown part of an unrecognisable town. As the day shortened, I could see a young man getting undressed through his bedroom window. His thing was quite unbelieveably big. Abruptly, his body exploded, cascades of it spattering the glass with a crazy pattern of crimson. First time ever there'd been a colour to speak of in one of my dreams. Before I woke to my shame, I recalled unaccountably those days as a little girl when I'd eagerly follow raindrops racing down the nursery window. Even then, I thought I had control over things I couldn't understand.
PPS: I don't suppose you'll be able to read this letter, because my curled up fingers can hardly hold the pen. Please forgive my illegible scrawl.
SUNDAY
It is always fitting to start a diary on a Sunday, especially when it's the first day of the month. Flo says such a Sunday marks the beginning of a new cycle and I've been aching inwardly for a rebirth for ages. Flo has been getting me down, though, running the Ladies Group without recourse to my advice, making us into a sort of evangelistic sect of charismatic feminism. I never liked the trappings of the Church, at the best of times ... I like them even less under the anti-phallus banner than I do under that of the male Christ figure on His Cross. Alzheimer's Goat haunts me come the night...
MONDAY
I had to break off yesterday, because the Goat crossed my mind...
TUESDAY
I've started a new page, in the hope I can get at least something down on paper. I've always been a woman on the skinny side. A bit of a laugh, really, when you think of my name ... Ample ... Ample Clavinty ... Ms Ample Clavinty ... I've always wanted to be curvy ... it would set off my specialist underwear a real treat, if I were. Dora says I need not worry, because men are all at the left handjob anyway (whatever that means). Wanda really needs a better brassiere than that floppy thing. This diary's getting a bit catty.
WEDNESDAY
This diary's getting a bit unfocussed since, without specific dates, it could relate to any period, heavy or not. I suppose I'm doing that on purpose, so that I can always manage to live in the past. I've accepted the fact that the Goat is now well and truly a factor in my existence and I'm no longer fearful of its hairy face staring through the barbed wire of my dreams. It has my son Kenny Herbert's eyes. Wanda is trying to oust Flo and there's a new member who's too young for her own good and is trying to oust poor old Dora from the Chair (they've both put intricately crocheted antimacassars on their shoulders and preen themselves like Bishoprics). Baroness Barmbrack (who doesn't seem to have a Christian name) is ever quoting the Old Testament at them as if the universal wisdom is contained therein. I'm not sure if I've got the next bit entirely correct, but Dora's husband has become a woman! If I hadn't seen that in writing, I'd never have believed it. Calling himself Menorrhagia, of all things, and is heading a campaign to increase the numbers of those he calls archetypal women who have no vote, have heavier and heavier periods and do out the front room twice a day.
THURSDAY
I've just looked in the mirror, to see who is the furriest of us all. Huge pointed face with doleful eyes. Wanda says she "understands", whatever that means. Dora says she has similar trouble. Flo died yesterday. It came as a bit of a shock. She apparently killed herself after having a long chinwag with Menorrhagia in the Ladies room. Funny, I don't go in there much these days to gossip, and the smell of us women on heat or in blood gets right up my nose.
FRIDAY
Another clean page, enough room for my shopping list. 1. 3lb Turkey Giblets. 2. 17 Pots Noodle. 3. Jar of Lime Pickle. 4. Carton of Goat's Milk to make cheese.. I'm sure I've forgotten something. I'm catering for Flo's Wake, so I'd better get it right. The Goat was actually in the bed with me last night, snoring, heaving and bristling, growing fatter the leaner I got. If I didn't know myself better, I'd say I was on the road to becoming doo-lally. My bones are dismantling. I'll soon be Mother's Ruin.
SATURDAY
I've just looked back over the diary (so-called) ... one week in the life of a lost soul. I conclude that none of it's about me. So it must be fiction. Blimey, my foot is playing me up. There's a dirty great fissure down the middle of its sole like Cheddar Gorge. Just had a phone call from Wanda. She wanted me to recognise her voice. I put the phone down without replying, because it was too deep. Or maybe I just don't enjoy guessing games. The Ladies Group will never be the same without Flo.
The man in George Slight had other quaint thoughts, like believing, now he was he dead, that he might be the reincarnation of one of God's young angels, like believing things that beggared belief, like the Mona Lisa's smile being that of a woman who has just dined off her husband. He found himself worrying, too: needless worries in the main such as next day's weather or the imponderables of death. He even fretted over his vasectomy. He imagined the seeds, or whatever they were called, building up behind a dam, until the pressure, one day, would make his testicles explode. Even the actual origin of such nagging worries in his mind he blamed on the vasectomy — some of the seeds seeping back up his bloodstream, eventually reaching and then curdling the chemicals of the brain. No wonder he had spent half his life already in the funny hospital.
In two (or even three) minds about the nature of reality, he worked hard at crystallising it into something fixed and certain. Dreams could not bother him since he spent sleepless nights keeping them at bay, mainly by counting the silent nightingales to which he listened. But, sometimes, his many invented children in far corners of the house could hear him shouting at the top of his voice: "Get thee hence, damn dreams!"
George had eaten Dora. Or so he thought. On one of those rare nights of peaceful slumber, without even the suspicion of a rogue dream, he woke up before daylight, feeling decidedly full. He looked at the pillow next to him, expecting to find his dear wife of some years' standing laid out in the trench she had gradually worn into the mattress — a trench deeper than his own, for no reason he could fathom, since their relative weights were roughly equal. She was gone. Perhaps for a light surreptious snack. Or a glass of lemonade. Or to calm the nightmares of his multitudinous children.
George's belly swelled to pregnant proportions, which he decided was Dora not agreeing with him (which had always been her custom). Bile was rising in his gullet, except it tasted slightly odd — not his normal style of indigestion. There were bits of stringy gristle on his tongue as if he had gnawed at his own innards. There was an undertaste, too, which reminded him of childhood nosebleeds. The children, by their very nature, ignored his frantic shouts; they'd heard them all before. Meanwhile, the enormity of his crime slowly dawned on him. Burying their heads one by one under pillows to dull the dire dirges of Dad, even his children became as non-existent as dreamerless dreams. The neighbours eventually called the police who discovered Dora in the fridge barely alive but with an inscrutable smirk on her face. The shelves had been removed to make room for her. Nobody could explain the huge mound of bubbling come in the bedroom, so this was diplomatically omitted from all police reports.
After treatment, Dora met a hospital visitor whom she had as a toy boy then married. He was able to bless her with the surrogate delights of several children — real ones this time — something George had not possessed the bottle nor the nous to do. So it was a most happy situation and, what was more, her new husband couldn't abide Beethoven's string quartets, whatever their punctuality. He enjoyed clicking his fingers to boring middle-of-the-road ditties and dire dirges with a samba rhythm. His children buried headfuls of ears under pillows and prayed longingly to their guardian angels for a different Dad called George. And dreamed of having no heads for sharp ears to grow on.
Dame Florence Wilson had come to the end of her tether.
She had been running the Group for Ladies of High Standing ever since she could remember and, now, the whole kerboodle had ended in a bit of a pig's breakfast. It was nobody's fault and, if it was, nobody could find him for a spanking. But, of course, being the leading light, Florence would tell the whole world that she was to blame. The Buck would stop at her door and the Scapegoat would find haven upon her desk. There were alternative homes for Scapegoats, though, if she'd care to find them: not least Wanda Reack, masquerading as a godawful man half the time.
Dame Flo was a shadow of her previous self, sitting hunched up behind the leather-topped desk, mindlessly doodling on a lilac green blotter (leaving oblique clues as to the reasons for her projected suicide) and staring at the cradled handset of the telephone, begging it to ring and reprieve her. She was haunted by the image of the Scapegoat , fearing that any footsteps would be his. The rumpus of gallopping senility confused her mind even beyond the daze of imminent death.
Abruptly, she received a moment of relative clarity shafting through the mental dust-storms like golden sunshine from the God's Eyes in Heaven. She travelled the byways of the past, recalling with what high hopes she had founded the Ladies Group, its enshrined aim being to further the life satisfaction of the well-heeled. She had established "Make-Do-And-Mend" conclaves (much in the tradition of the Second World War utility drive), knitting patterns, crochet mantras, discussion huddles, coffee-mornings; thus, the panoply of female wholesomeness could be enhanced and its good breeding accelerated.
However, ineluctably, the Group grew old, more incestuous, through the rigid strictness of its membership eligibility conditions. The ladies became back-biters, the causes more feminist, the rituals anti-phallic. At first, Flo had gone along with it. After all, the Sixties were the heyday of the emancipated woman, so the Ladies Group, almost in spite of itself, followed suit. Then ... Flo recalled the admission of one Wanda Reack to their ranks ... on a technicality. A house of cards, the one big mistake. Ms Reack, as she eventually called herself, was a representative of the nouveau riche, but none of the right blood ripely oozing from her monthlies. Wanda was a firebrand and, latterly, a man in all but body, to which even Flo's defences were not impervious...
Wanda Reack had wanted the Group to be a cult, a charismatic religion, worshipping all the paraphernalia of womanhood as positive forces, rather than as the negative ones they had been heretofore. The Bleeding Heart became the Bleeding Womb. Venus revolved upon the plinth, pulled the arrow against the sprung shaft and skewered a tumescent Christ upon His Cross.
The Group's Chair, Lady Dora Slight's husband had tried to pull the creaking see-saw in the opposite direction. Reaction is married to counter-reaction. He actually had his sex changed, the physical negativity of which feat could not be matched by Wanda Reack. He did it with all the openness of someone now at peace with the world. He became Menorrhagia Slight and, in a sweetly simpering way, wheedled a large section of the Group against Ms Reack, under the cause and banner of frillier clothes, increased housework and fewer female votes.
The Group divided like a cell in a sick body, and Dame Flo had been caught in the Gorge, wallowing in the prolapse of her highest hopes.
Only yesterday, she'd had a long heart-to-heart with Menorrhagia in the Ladies Room. It had always been a salubrious venue for a chinwag, with its dim romantic lights and red-tinged tiles.
"You know, Flo, they're blaming you for the whole tarramadiddle." Menorrhagia's voice ever seemed strained to keep the tone high.
Flo had never suspected such recriminations were being harboured by her so-called Lady soulmates.
Menorrhagia continued: "Yes, all that butcher's muck Miss Reack has put on the hall stage for all to revere and bow before like icons, is little better than spiritual cannibalism. They say she's got your blessing. They say you have eyes only for her..."
Flo scryed the wash basin: her face in the mirror got her goat. Soapy tears welled at the large, doleful eyes, irrigating the wrinkles.
She ran and ran into the night, could not recall where she reached nor how she came back. The blotter on the desk was full of convoluted scribbles and large patches of absorbed tears. The nib of her fountain pen was actually ripping into the fabric of the desk-top.
Then, the steps came, more like hooves than feet. They clip-clopped down the marble corridor, ever on the point of arriving, but not quite doing so. A large worm with a one-eyed snout extruded from the desk's ink-well.
The door eventually swung wide on shrieking hinges, revealing the Scapegoat. But Flo had since escaped to the real God in the sky, so was not in a position to see him ... or her.
#
Ms Ample Tidy
"The Willows"
Winkingsuck Lane
Kidder Minster.
Ms Agnes Slight
1/4 Penny Close
TipOak,
Bute,
Dormansland.
Dear Agnes,
How are your mud baths coming on? Trust they're toning you up nicely. I can quite believe there's more goodness in Mother Earth than anything made by man.
I am really writing this in a very sad frame of mind. Firstly, no sign of a letter from you in reply to my last one. And, secondly, Florence has gone to meet the Angels. I am sorry to be the one to break this news to you, as I do know how fond of her you were, and she you. Being so far away and with the decided lack of Ladies Only compartments on British Rail, I did not bother to inform you of the funeral. It was such a sad occasion, I wish I'd not gone, too. Knowing what dear Flo must have suffered in the last few years, however, it was, I suppose, a happy release. When life becomes a prison, one has to be thankful for the sound of God coming along with His bundle of rattling keys. One good thing, she didn't suffer at the end. Her mind had already gone walkies. I, myself, had not seen hide nor hair of her for several months, since her twin daughters kept her from me. Seems as if not only her thinking had got all mixed up, but bits of her body, too. Though, I didn't follow exactly what they were telling me. How can she have grown fur and a face pointier than a goat's? I wish they'd let me see her and I'd not now be imagining something probably far worse than really what happened.
The outfits at the funeral were a sight for sore eyes, I can tell you. Wanda had on a shimmering black cat suit, set off, to my mind, with a rather too bright a rose. Dora was done out in wild black lace cascading all around her like a waterfall that had suffered an oil slick — she never had much dress sense (her George had more than her, I believe!). Black doesn't suit me, so I wore a lavender blue costume which I run up quickly from my bed quilt. I hope nobody recognised me.
The tears flowed as they lowered her into the hole in the ground. So many snuffling noises (even snorts), I actually imagined some of them came from inside the coffin itself! Baroness Barmbrack literally brayed — have you ever heard the like of such weeping? Then her act of contrition, it was like listening to one (or more) of those gospel rebel-rousers. And Rachel Mildeyes (remember her?), well, her method of showing remorse was by streaking her mascara in front of her dressing-table mirror, before she left for the funeral. Of course, I might be doing her an injustice. Her bright red lipstick was so over-applied, too. Made her look so cheap. It turned my stomach, I can tell you. I felt I was in a Dracula film.
Still, you know how it goes. Things don't change much round here, by hell or high water. Poor Flo, she's having the ultimate mud bath, now, isn't she?
So, why has there been no letter? I hope you were not too upset by the recounting of my dreams in the last letter. If I can't set them out to you (and thus purging them) to whom can I? I've arrived at the conclusion that it was you and I who played footsie inder the Ladies Group conference table. Florence (apparently, and this, I know, is hard to believe), I was told by her daughters, never had feet to talk of. I dread to think what was really within those high fashion shoes. I trust that the secret of her cloven hooves will now be between her and her tomb. Her daughters don't seem to care much at all and have left Kidderminster lock stock and barrel.
Not long after the funeral, I had another dream. I dreamt that I was really a man. That's why I have no boobs to speak of in real life, I suppose! My hanging thing in the dream (it was so realistic) I could actually feel flopping from thigh to thigh. But it was when it grew large and bloody, that I woke up in a foul sweat — to find I was having my first period for yonks. So menopauses are not forever, after all. I am glad us women can talk so intimately. You can't imagine real men being so free with their privities, can you? My hubby was always so secretive in the bathroom. All those funny scratching and panting noises, I wondered what he was up to. Now, I'll never know.
Well, it's time I wrapped up another bundle of sanitary pads in newspaper and put it on the fire. Can't have the dustmen finding that amongst the clutter he's used to fom me. But they clog up the toilet, don't they? So, no other option. What do do do with yours? Or perhaps, you've lost the monthly art completely. I'm surprised I'm still on the production line for blood puddings, myself, at such an advanced age. It does not seem to be stopping. Perhaps it's the last great splurge before the Grand Old Drought. It's lasted 3 weeks already and I'm having to keep the fire banked up to put those bundles on, despite the sweltering weather.
I feel a bit peeky. I think I'll go and lie down, before I fall down. Hope I don't dream. Dora's coming round later. She says I've got to take things easier, so she's bringing a tray of her speciality high tea from the other side of town, steaming waffles in wild honey, lapsang souchong, manicured cucumber sandwiches and crumpets weltering in strawberry jam. Can't seem to face food, though.
I hope you're enjoying the mud wherever you are. Do keep in contact. We go back a long way, don't we, so let's not give all that up so easily as those devil-may-care folk that seem to abound these days.
Affectionately, A.
PS: It's getting darker. It's only 3 O'clock in the afternoon. Feels as if the world's about to end. Heard something rattling down below. It can't be Dora, as she's not coming till 5. Just dozed off and had another dream of being a man. God's a man. But why? Why should He be?
And, meanwhile, a young man saw a likely looking victim idling along the opposite side of the busy street. Another mortal young enough to fail to "find the lady". One with no nous and a decided no-way code. The pavement dealer loved streets. Always a dosser, once a dosser. He hated shopping precincts. The sound of traffic was part and parcel of his act. The eyes in the sides of people's heads, where ears should have been, were engendered by the necessity to avoid jay-walking: a deck-shuffler's bread and butter, since such people tended, paradoxically, to notice him more — in spite of or, rather, due to their over-active weather-eyes.
Yes, the trickster spied, beyond a trundling truck, the tiny joker: this the prestidgitator's next sucker. And, lo and behold, the boy started to cross the street between the trucker's tail-lights and the staring beams of a sleeker beast, with a lady at the steering-wheel. It would seem, so as to miss giving the boy a glancing blow, the lady would have to swerve — together with a touch of a touch on the foot-brake.
"Stupid kid!" Wanda Reack said so quietly, she may not have said it at all. She would have shouted it, had she not despised traffic hogs who loudly cursed everybody, disowning any blame. But the real reason why the expostulation faltered between voice and lip was the finger-twisting gesture from the down-and-out card sharp on the pavement, a young man whom she vaguely recognised as an angel from her past.
Yet there was nothing worse than stale terror except, perhaps, terror undergone vicariously. Wanda remembered where she had first met that plug-ugly conjuror. At that time, too, he'd been semi-circled by a splay of cards (all Queens) — each upside head joined to another upside head, with scarlet and black spots more akin to a geometrical dose of the plague than items of gamble. She shook off the memory by concentrating again on her driving. But too late. Horrifically late. The boy — the one who had been tempted to cross the road to "find the lady" amid the man's fan of icons — had actually ensured that a real lady found him instead. Wanda killed the ignition with a mindless flick of the wrist and a consequent fingers' twitch of the switch. She stumbled from the car to investigate what or, worse, whom she had spread like jam — dreading, in her middle somewhere, that it was the worst possible victim: a male child at the dawn of its life — snuffed by her wheels — a boy whose gamble came before he'd guessed his name was Kenneth Herbert Clavinty.
The young card sharp was standing now. Even if the incident was half his fault, surely that meant the other half was his credit, not blame. And he smiled to himself. He picked up his white stick and waggled it like a vestigial trunk at the invisible traffic. Or a wiry wand with ability to pick up signals from the dead.
Upon alighting from the car, Wanda had toppled and both her heads hit the concrete of the street. And a red yolk spilled from the top one. She was not Wanda Reack, after all, but a two-headed Angel, that perhaps being why her feet couldn't focus on foot-brakes. Water on the brain. Ruptured pomegranates in the unbifurcated middle areas.
George wondered who they'd get to visit him in hospital. Not a nightingale, he'd be bound. Not the card sharp. Not the dosser. Not any of these visions of himself as an old woman. An entirely wireless puppet, perhaps, with more motion than impetus.
Whatever the case, no curtains could be invented to stop an Elephant Man's trunk poking through.
"Grown men can understand things, too, you know," said Dora Slight, on discovering that the conversation around her had lapsed.
All the heavenly hair-do's swivelled in her direction, wondering why she had spoken at all, raising the plucked eyebrows to the strangeness of the statement itself. This was a reunion of the Ladies Group, long disbanded since those heady days when their feminist principles had become terminally entangled with that logical trap of superiority through elegance, grace and positively poised helplessness. Charm and forcefulness had never really been comfortable in the same bed and, when ensconced between the sheets of such ill-considered sexless lesbianism, their humbug had allowed only masculine taunts free rein to reveal the soft, if delicious, centre.
Dora had once been rusticated, not only because her husband George had defected to the ladies' own side of the fence with a dose of convenient surgery upon his person (and, thus, showing the very bed-rock of their faith to be shifting sands) but because she had in honesty lived a fiction. Lady Dora Slight was no Lady. It was merely a self-honorary title she had assumed when the old George used to lord it about the house, sniffing at the motes and microbes she had left accummulating on the furniture. (Of course, George was only too happy with the duster himself, following his "change").
"What did you say, Dora, dear?" was the thoughtful response of Dame Florence Wilson amid breathless silence.
Across the tea table, Ms Ample Clavinty self-consciously mothered over the tea. Considering her scrawny blouse, ghosts couldn't have been more anorexic. She decided it was high time to broach the subject that was on most of their minds...
George tilted his Fascinator with a deft twist of a tortoiseshell hat-pin, knowing that come-uppance was nigh ... but for whom?
Wanda Reack sraightened the kipper tie upon her dress shirt. She had recently won the football pools. No score draws were her forte. Little need to come clean now, a contradiction in terms in any event.
Baroness Barmbrack sniffed gloriously. She was not going to be drawn. The Bible said the meek shall inherit the Earth, after all.
"Why don't we start up again?" Ample spluttered, hot tea steaming from her nose as she eyed St George, so becoming with his blusher, across the table. "The time is ripe. There is a gap to be filled. A veritable gorge..."
Dame Florence Wilson, erstwhile Mother Superior of the Group, smiled in secret. If she were never a real Dame of the Empire, it was too late to admit it now. This was meant to be a reunion, she thought. It was not intended to be a reappraisal of the world's hierarchy, sexual or otherwise. She had expected it to be a trivial game of gossip and counter-gossip with a seasoning of innuendo. Seriousness, in any shape of form, was forbidden to rear its head. Intensity was out the window with the dodo, or at least with what turned out to be the last meeting of the Group where sexist evangelism was more an act of Tampax fetichism than debating whether the prime minister should take more people of the female persuasion into the Cabinet. They all had a lot to live down.
George squirmed in his seat and grunted. Why didn't he snip out his nasal hair, it made him look so ... manly. Dora winced. As his wife, she wondered what was going on his head. Even her feminine intuition could not reach that far.
They all departed with reasonable, if untapped emotions. Wanda and George, much to Dora's annoyance, escorted each other from the tea-room, she striding, he mincing; flirting was not too strong a word for either of them.
Ms Ample Clavinty, in her strapless ball gown, bounced out to the rhythm of the Edmundo Ros combo in the corner, that had just struck up a Latin foxtrot ... as if in honour of their intricately choreographed exit. If only Dame Flo could have been with them today. Ample sobbed at the thought.