Published in 'Ball Magazine' 1993
Most faces, these days, are kept behind glass, representing those too scared to venture into the city streets.
Still, they yearn for the outside, hence their mooning faces stuck to the inside of the wintry windows like posters ... seeking sights, often locking on to others of their kind in the windows opposite, then tracking the movements of those diminishing souls who do brave the urban phobias, watching with clouded eyes.
The streets grow empty, the streets grow dark and, even come the mornings, the streets only grow vaguely less empty, only vaguely less dark. As the cold closes in, too, the windowfolk's smeary ears can only hear the oil-slicks upon the seas of white noise.
The people behind such faces are hidebound by reality and tend to condemn the art of imagination. So, when one of their number--Tania--sees what she considers to be an elfin creature kicking its jingly-jangly foot in the gutter during its apparent saunter between two nowheres in particular, yes, when she thinks she has just witnessed this sight, a sight more fitting for her dreams--dreams which can only occur when she manages to sleep between her lengthening shifts of window watching--she looks imploringly towards another face, another of her kind, in the bedroom window of the house opposite ... in some attempt, no doubt, to cross-check. Cross-checking with each other was the only comfort that such faces could possibly muster having retained the art of reading expressions and, in rare cases, lips.
One wild Wednesday, it is, with winds of rain travelling up the river to the conurbation as if on a conveyor-belt. The windowfolk are settling in for a seemingly endless wet-watch, when the playing of out-staring competitions with each other across the city squares is the most amusement for which any of them can lightly hope--and, even then, most secretly yearn to lose such competitions without making it too obvious.
Tania's face hears the elfin bell-pad's earnest approach--and whips of wind eke teardrops from a sorrowful dusk, as her face finally sees the ambling cockiness of the tinkle-trod imp.
Faces that are kept behind the cold river-mapped glass are quickly warmed with the flames of sight that are switched on from some spigot in the soul.
Indeed, the rain was already, until then, threatening to turn to sleet or, even, to a swarm of snow--but the faunish entity seen splashing in the gutter with jingling joy aided the facefolk's weatherwatch 'gainst winter.
"Singing in the rain, I'm singing in the rain, what a glorious feeling..." it trills with the tune's runes tingling the gazers' newly pricked-up ears, the window-glass--through which the facefolk moon--cleaning itself not only of the frost but of its smears of sound-proofing, too.
And they all join in with the chorus.
But then the faces and their worst fears are reunited; they watch the creature being mugged by one of the plug-ugly bruisers whose crimes of brutal street robbery are so self-defeating in keeping the city rat-runs free from the wealthy footpad folk whom the faces used to be.
The imp's last plaintive song is a plea for help but it goes unheard as warmth wilts from the windows...
There's no money upon the elfin body for a bruiser to steal, of course. But the creature's plaintive song itself should soon be switched off from the spigot in its soul ... whenever any bruiser--with feasting jaws--reaches that far in its elfin body.
Hiram walked the outways until he decided that this was not a particularly efficient method to find a social environment conducive to meeting his future mate--the outways being between the suburbs and the city, a ring of gridwork housing called the Spare.
One dreadful morning, Hiram met a few city stragglers poking around some of those dead bodies who had, when they were real people, failed to reach the unemployment office on time. The stragglers looked at Hiram and then set about pointing dramatically into the sky. Through the scattering of cushiony clouds, there appeared an alien spacecraft like an endless tongue of metal. But who had ever heard of a spacecraft actually joined to its mother planet Light Years away? That was a universal question fit to beat the combined brains of a thousand top notch philosophers. It stood to reason that Hiram was not one such. However, he was man enough for most normal processes of the mind, but the softness inside his head certainly had to go into overdrive. He pointed, along with the others, and stated quite baldly to his new found friends: "It's a blow job! It's a blow job!" The world seemed a sunnier place from that moment on, but it didn't help Hiram much, since he was a tax-collector. The stragglers had scuttled off, except for those who were already corpses.
The Spare was indeed nothing but outlandish geography, but it was part of the city where the facefolk mooned; it actually existed beneath the common sky of man. Nobody outside its ringworld purlieus knew of its whereabouts. The faces in the suburbs knew not of the faces in the city and vice versa--and neither knew of the land between--except in dreams. However, one day, Hiram managed to beat a path into it, not via dream, but across this ring of reality. His existence as a tax-collector turned out to be a dream which he had thought was real life. He had been at war with himself and, imagining himself to be a mighty-thewed warrior whose boss-shield and three-handed broadsword had grown to become living extensions of his arms, he had seen himself off--but, now, with the imputation of insufficient blood to slake his thirst, he took his horny home upon widening shoulders; eventually and inadvertently, marching into the Spare ... seeking foes for their own sake.
Many whispered good riddance to bad rubbish. But, if they had read their hearts to the bottom, they would miss having Hiram around and sleep less easy in their beds for lack of the devil they had known. Their proverbs churned over and became confused as well as more meaningful: "One nasty giant in the hand is worth two in the offlands", "A blood-letter in time is worth nine already in the post-hole", "A rolling limb-hacker need gather none of your bad rubbish", "Bad riddance to tax-collectors" and so forth. Hiram shrugged off these confused maxims with some crazinesses of his own devising: such as walking for eternities in empty city streets where roamed scrawny goats which, at the very least, allowed him to quench the top-edge of his thirst for blood.
Soon, that was not enough, since eternities are a very long time and the eager under-thirsts clustered in the pit of his cavernous stomach and, one day in a million, they hit the gullet with one combined forward-push just as he came upon the ring of reality between the jagged jaws of his own imagined horizon. And, the place being so unutterably nowhere, the loneliness sent a buzzing louder into his skull and the crazinesses which he himself had earlier engendered began to flush out certainties from his mind. He was the only foe he could not slice in two with one deft stroke. He crouched and sobbed, whilst wrestling tooth and nail with himself. He sobbed even harder at the sight of his bent shield.
The faces in the city, and those in the suburbs too, could not believe their dreams when they saw the pitiful sight--but dreams they surely were. Yet at the edge of the Spare, where no man's lands meet, there stood a single block of flats that seemed distinct from its neighbours, one without numbers. Hiram, in a disguise more amenable to his true state, had so much libido, he felt as if he had a sputnik between his legs. He was romantically attached to Tania's face at one of the windows and he would wait outside till kingdoms came and went, rather than regret his impatience for the rest of his life. The other faces at the many windows often stared out at him as he loitered outside. The sole streetlamp settled a steamy light upon his snazzy stuffed hat, the brim of which hid his features as if he were a spy or an tax-avoidance scout. Equally, the faces in the house were overshadowed--to Hiram's mind--by large eaves and leaning chimney-stacks.
He breathed hard. One of the faces he knew was Tania (but he didn't know her name). Hiram wondered why he had fallen in love with her, in view of her steepness. Moreover, she was far from pretty and doubtlessly carried a small butcher's shop between her legs--and her meat would have gone off years ago. A young elfin creature had arrived out of nowhere and knocked on the secret door. It delivered something to the block's letter-box and then placed its mouth to it, remaining in that position for longer than was necessary to share a password with the any off-duty face acting as a doorman. This impish seeker of sex was evidently a cheapskate. One window winked shut as if someone quickly turned on and off a light inside and the tallest smoke extractor exuded a thick black liquid into the evening sky, looking almost like fumes. It streamed upwards and outwards in the shape of an umbrella. Hiram pulled up his collar and walked on, eager for a pee.
Tania was evidenly busy tonight counting her elfish customers in and counting them out. He would return for yet another day tomorrow. Ever tomorrow. Never today. Hiram had no hard readies himself. But love couldn't be bought, only sex. He wondered if the passion he felt for the face in the counting-house was platonic and he tried to wipe away the soot-black clinging tears. He could not even count on the unnumbered house, let alone its faithful tenants. The Spare was just another no man's land, after all and, forthwith, Hiram suffered from nasal hair which he was not adept enough with the nail scissors to snip clear of the gaping nostrils. The points always jabbed the soft bony flesh. "Ouch!" He held his free hand to the nose, whilst the other tipped up the empty pint pot. He was back amongst his own back-doubles, on the State bread-line and the current Government, if there was one, collected taxes at source. Hiram had yanked out the hairs scorching the membranes, as if they were weeds whose roots were sunk into the brain itself. His head bulged hugely in an erysipelas fever, the flesh audibly ballooning and separating from the tent frame of the skull.
"Don't pull out your nasal hair by the roots! Always cut it, or otherwise you will end up like that bruiser Hiram," said the tippling suburban doctor who--because he was a wanderer not merely a windowface--was also the local optician, as well as the dentist, chiropodist, manicurist, boil lancer, pest controller and dream interpreter. He could read palms as well as lavatory bowls and the blotched surface of a full moon when it was eerily magnified upon the Spare's blurred horizon. Being the vet in disguise, he could not stay put for long. The mating season was one that never came naturally. Madness and hair growth go hand in hand, he often maintained. "There she blows!" he roared as he sped off in his car--whilst Hiram's newly affixed face of elfin perkishness was scooped off by the tongue and swept into the only sky with space spare enough for snow as well as sad songs.
As the snow slowly turned black, a twirling broadsword toppled from the sky like a dislodged spiky satellite, its clang on the concrete marking the end of the last jingly-jangly morning.
Tania, this time, does not bother to cross-check with the face opposite. She simply knows.
