Unpublished
OVERTURE
I watched two of them mate, thus multiplying almost instantaneously. How many times this must have happened when I wasn’t watching is now impossible to discover. Not mosquitos, but similar, both in sound and look. I heard one of my French colleagues call them mousquets, spelt ‘mousquet’. Sometimes mousquetaire. Spelt ‘mousquetaire’, Not to get mixed up with mosque or musk, both with standard spellings.
FIRST MOVEMENT
They shot from the hip, my partner told me, in a moment of drunkenness. Her drunkenness, not the mousquetaires! Drunk on duty was a sin, but in view of what we had to endure, excusable. I didn’t understand the expression ‘shot from the hip’. A proboscis or something I imagine ought to be called a proboscis, spelt as one would expect the dictionary to spell it, and whether I got the meaning of the word quite right adds another layer of doubt – but whatever-it-was stabbed out and impregnated another of its kind with a rapier-like motion or as if wielding a freshly rifled bayonet fixed with a blade. And, straightaway, a gummy scum stretched between the two creatures, followed by another smaller creature emerging through it as if taking an audience call via gluey curtains towards some stage of life.
This was a dream yet not a dream. Such dreams are spells cast by some confused magic of the mind. My partner in real life never gets drunk, for a start. But it was one of those dreams that you know is a dream at heart but you can’t wake up from it and if you did you are deadly afraid that you will not find it a dream at all but a real life that you cannot avoid.
Many mousquetaires, with filmy wings, were now coupling across the floor of my dream. One of my French colleagues was pointing silently at the geometrical progression of the sliding bodies as their appendages spurted - and layers of infolding curtains erupted like textured lava to reveal yet more of their kind. An insect swarm, an insect spawn, a thick honey river of sex and softly batting wings. Why I needed colleagues at all, let alone French ones, to accompany the action in my dream like a background music of crossed tongues and double entendres was not within the comprehension of my dream self. I used my eyes to appeal to my partner to see if she could solve the situation, so that she could wake me up and then I could be in bed with her again where we had both started the night.
SECOND MOVEMENT
And it happened just like that. Imagine the surge of relief as I opened my eyes on the familiarities of our bedroom scene. My partner snored beside me – perhaps still involved with rescuing me from my dream, or from her dream, or from our shared dream. The room was floodlit with the moon. One of those clear skies which come once in a Winter season, when the snowclouds disperse fleetingly and leave a gap of mock daylight in the night. I gazed at the bodies on the floor. Four of them. Dead bodies by the appearance of the wounds they sported but, nevertheless, bodies that appeared to move. Almost lovingly upon and among each other. Only four of them, however, dressed in some historic garb that reminded me of a swashbuckler by Alexandre Dumas. How I could rationalise all this with real life was beyond me, though rationalise it I did. How I reconciled all this with the context of our bedroom was impossible, though reconcile I did. It was like a spell. Three musketeers had become four. Come to think of it, there had always been four musketeers, if you counted D’Artagnon as well as Athos, Porthos and Aramis. A mistitled novel. A mistitled story.
THIRD MOVEMENT
“It doesn’t sound plausible.”
“What?”
“Your dream.”
“Dreams are never plausible.”
“No, I mean not plausible enough to be real life.”
“What, you mean this real life?”
“You said the title was wrong. Real life doesn’t worry about titles. Only make-believe needs a title. Make-believe needs a label to make it real. A suspension of disbelief that is called a story that people read and believe is real life. They expect it to have a title”
I looked at her as she spoke. She was talking to me and – on the face of it – I was talking to her. My partner in real life. She meant well.
FOURTH MOVEMENT
Dreamtime came before I could even give this version of my partner a reality check.
I had by now left behind the four men on the floor – those corpses that coupled with each other. It was a scene far too nasty for me to countenance, especially to consider as my own dream. If they were representatives of real life, then at least I wouldn’t be responsible for their existence on my bedroom carpet. Only if they appeared in a dream that I was dreaming would it be possible for me to take the blame: that would mean they came from my head: or been given to my head by an external force to dream about. But it was still inside my head.
If they existed outside my head – as they seemed to do (on the carpet) – then I was absolved.
Such a puzzle or predicament of the realities and dreams that I tried to fathom and compartmentalise was soon in the past – as I returned to the dream where my French colleagues smiled as they picked through the remains of the mousquetaires (same spelling as before) as if they were a scientists dissecting specimens. My partner – fresh from a conversation we had just had about plausibilities – was also there with me in the same dream. But she looked inscrutable. I could not predict what she was going to say. I couldn’t predict anything about her in real life, come to think of it. So the dream was just a layer too far beyond any understanding of her intentions. We had been together for years, but never married. We were a good couple, though - made for each other. But I was at a loss most of the time. As with women in general I was ever in a pea-souper of a fog about what made them tick, especially her.
My French colleagues ignored us and our predicament. They were assured that this was their real life at least and not a dream at all – and they proceeded with the intensive care they were now administering to the mousquetaires, believing them to be, I assumed, a rare species of terrestrial life that needed preserving. Dream or not, Natural selection was in full sway, and these scientists were determined to defeat Natural Selection by salvaging any remnants of life in the sex-exhausted creatures, bringing them back to life, even at the cost of bending the rules of biology and good sense. Then, I suddenly realised – the mousquetaires were not land life at all, but sea-creatures, beached in our reality, dry-docked as it were: and the mating process in which they had just finished indulging had ended up almost killing them because they had not possessed their natural habitat wherein to conduct it. The sea no doubt acted as a lubricant for any frictions involved. Perhaps it was a different sea to the one I knew. A more oily, thick and turgid sea, where refinery-rigs stirred rather than dredged or dug.
The Scientists, by now, were wrapping the central torpedo-like bodies in the gossamer wings the creatures had earlier sported prior to coupling. Another figure – and I was astonished to see it was my partner – had been given the job of carefully detaching other appendages from their central bodies. Call these appendages muskets, for want of a better word or, if a better word existed, it would bear a more cumbersome spelling. These ‘muskets’, then, came off quite cleanly, or with just a smidgin of mucus still clinging to their triggers. Each had a blade-like super-appendage: an appendage of an appendage, as it were, which was left intact. My partner seemed to be putting these bayonet ‘muskets’ into pickling jars.
FIFTH MOVEMENT
“What’s in those jars?”
I saw a shadowy hunched figure in the residues of moonlight cast by our bedroom window. I had woken, it seems, but the continuity of the dream was buzzing through my head. I had not yet noticed the snoring lump by my side. Otherwise I would have inferred that was my partner, and not the see-through shape by the window. That shape indeed was replacing a lid on one of the pickling jars and she swivelled – like a shop window mannequin suddenly come to life – with a plastic creak. She bore an iron mask and the voice was muffled into indistinguishable syllables by the clamped mouthpiece. Or so it seemed. But I deciphered the words for my own purposes;
“It’s a stick insect … or a stickleback … fixed in aspic.”
I’m sure none of that was said but I replied as if it had been said:
“Why were you dreaming about insects in jars just now?”
I ignored the fact that a stickleback, I knew, was a tiny fish; one that I collected as a child in jam-jars from the Walton-on-Naze backwaters. It did not seem to fit the context. Nor did a stick-insect, for that matter. A dream’s context seen in hindsight was never easily rationalisable or reconcilable. But here I was suffering from foresight of hindsight! Not, in any shape or form, a comfortable disposition to be in.
“I wasn’t dreaming. You were the one dreaming,” replied the fast diminishing shape by the window. Even the iron-mask faded or became insubstantial: leaving the silhouette, for a split second, of a flower, something like a tulip: and, being a silhouette, like all silhouettes, it was black. Only shadows are grey. Silhouettes have the deepest black despite their one-dimensionality.
I and my bed-shape partner joined the other four on the floor, making six of us. We drew our muskets and fired. Leaving only the tears.
CODA
We were collected later as wrinkled drape-silhouettes (folded together like a patchwork quilt thrown off the bed) – collected by the French scientists for later investigation and dissection. They discovered at least one of us had a hip replacement. They mumbled of mosquecristos as they counted them and one scientist wrote notes; the spell-check would come later when they were processed.
