Written today and first published here
THE HUMMUM
A man of the cloth was generally a man to be respected. But when Choffler talked about a man of the cloth I soon began to realise he actually intended me to picture a man-sized man made of cloth. Choffler was, by occupation, someone who illegally fished the Thames downriver of London Bridge upon the ebbing of the tide. He called himself a hebberman, although I’m still uncertain about the word. Why a man of such basic means and grizzled looks would be visualising a literal ‘man of the cloth’ was quite beyond me. Perhaps he was mad. That was easily explicable. The need to be alone on the river in tune with the unsociable hours of any set of currents calling themselves a tide was quite obviously a messer of minds. Poaching was not exactly a career one followed amid the (admittedly) shifting backgrounds of sane family-lines.
Putting myself behind Choffler’s eyes, if not in his soggy shoes, I would often have visions of the riverbank slipping by just before nightfall - and standing there, weeds up to its middle, silhouetted against a faint new moon, was Choffler’s so-called ‘man of the cloth’ like a well-dressed scarecrow just staring out at Choffler, no doubt positioned there deliberately, not to divert flying pest, but to scare the living daylights out of hebbermen.
I lounged back in the sweat-room, humming to myself, closing my eyes, thinking about Choffler. Perhaps he was a skeleton in the cupboard of my own family background, hence the ease of my empathy. He felt to me as if he had been dead for centuries, although, in my heart of hearts, I knew he was still alive. The heat of the steam was now searingly unbearable. Just the way I liked it. Casting out all life’s impurities from the pores. There were many others around soaking in the steam. We were the group of chums who liked it hottest of all, almost to the point of being roasted like pigs. The steam helped to hide who we truly were but some of us, I suspected, preferred to gawp at what each had managed to hoard away as a sign of manhood.
The music they played in the hummum was a gentle swish of Ravel or Debussy, a set of barcaroles, the sinuous harmonies of which we all knew like the backs of our hands. Habit was half the battle against stress. Routine ran off in the sweat, then back again, as we continued to recycle the body’s bloodless juices time and time again. It was as if the hebberman’s tides were in the streams that made us what we were: outer streams insulating the actual arteries with the ghostly form of blood.
Choffler’s boat rocked in a trapped ring of tides, as he watched the man of cloth sink to its knees in the river's gunk as if to wade out to rescue him. But the man's Savile Row bespoke skin soon grew sodden and ineluctably crumpled.
The bakelite-walled hummum was silent, if still echoey with a residue of something other than silence. The music had already reached the middle before the pick-up lifted its sapphire needle from where it was trapped on the whirlpool of dog and horn. I knew I had cooked my goose. Had I been possessed by my own craziness? Or possessed by a soul who had once lived in my soul before my soul was born? I’m coming to rescue you, Choffler. It’s no trouble. I’m a gentleman of expensive suits and war medals. I just need to get dressed again to prove who I am, as long as my own shape of cloth survives being poached better than my skin has survived it. Just stay there treading water, if you can. Keep humming, humming on. It helps with filling time’s own rocking tide with a routine that one can treat like being in a cradle when tiny. A habit to wear forever...
This has been my casting out of words as a sort of casting out of impurities, because the pores are now clogged with resolidified fat. I’m coming, hebberman. Don’t worry. I assure you it’s no sweat.
Each thought seemed to become an illegal catch.
