fiction | Marie Marshall

November 5, 2011

Bat, man, batman, batsman.

Crypto-anthropology is a word I thought I might have invented (like ‘polemophonic’ – pertinent to the sound of warfare, ‘polemophonics’ – the study of the sounds of warfare) but it seems not. A pity, considering my interest in the Moosh-Moosh. But then I didn’t invent ‘futilitarian’ or ‘eukelele’ either, although the latter is only a pre-existing, alternative spelling. Here is my butterfly mind flitting from flower to thoughtflower for the brief summer of its life, digressing from the off. Here’s what I mean to say:

Cities grow. Ours did. Track outwards from the centre and you will see where the margins were, how they advanced and were filled in, how they swallowed neighbouring villages and towns, how there are rural names for roads and faubourgs mixed in with the newer names that commemorate royalty, trees, Scottish islands. Between the city and me there is woodland and parkland, but in that woodland there is a golf course. Golf courses are things of the Scottish ‘edge’ as farmers diversify in hard times. Also there is a water tower for the nearest of the city’s housing schemes that lie on the other side of the wood. The parkland, once the estate of a conquering admiral, is now a pleasure park for the citizens, complete with zoo and funfair. Only on the edge could such things be.

Is my village itself still a village? Its dormitory status makes it almost a suburb, yet it has or had a number of edge-features – a caravan park, and at one time an indoor play-area for children with a ball-pool and such like. Oh flit, flitter, flutter, fritillary. Anyhow, here’s what I mean to say… no really…

Attached to our Millennium Hall are a bowling green and playing fields. There is fitba of course, but also a cricket pitch. Cricket is not unknown in Scotland, of course, and much further north in the land too, but it is nevertheless a curiosity to many, something you would have to turn your head to gawk at if you were passing on a bus. It isn’t entirely a haven for expatriate English and third-generation South Asian Scots either, but it is an edgy place where crypto-anthropology has recently taken a strange turn. I think so. I had to think so when someone told me that the cricket team had a member who was half-man and half-bat.

I remember thinking that they were making a play on the word ‘bat’, but no, they meant it literally. There is a man nominally on their playing strength who has the arms and wings of a bat. He goes by the name of Doug Millar. He can fly, though he hardly ever does, and only once has done so on the field of play. He was fielding at silly-point when a farmer’s son from Forfar let fly a square cut with his full strength. Doug dived out of the way to avoid harm – there was no way he could have stopped the ball, let alone caught it, without risk of injury – and in diving he spread his wings. He only flapped them once but that was enough to allow him to glide over the outfield towards the Third Man boundary where he banked sharply, caught a thermal, and soared. Thankfully the umpire was about to call a drinks break anyway and Doug wasn’t even off the field long enough to warrant substitution by Twelfth Man. He returned red-faced and apologetic for his lapse.

Doug is not of this world. He is a Thogrian, which many folk mistakenly write as ‘Thorgian’, a unique marooneer on our planet and a castadrift from the world of Goldilocks 4. The cricket club doesn’t shout about him, they’re cagey blokes. If he could handle the willow or the cork-and-leather a wee bit better, or if ever he flew from Fine Leg to take a catch at Gully, it might cause questions amongst the rules committee of the league in which our village team plays. But he’s a plodder with both ball and blade and an average though conscientious fielder, driven less by skill than by his love for the game.

I have always wanted to talk to him but have never succeeded. I heard that he was due to be at the last home game so I went there and hung about the pavilion, searching amongst the whited players on the field or waiting their innings on deck chairs. I couldn’t see him. Then someone told me he was in the scorers’ hut for that match and couldn’t be disturbed. And that’s when I caught sight of him, very briefly, walking back to the hut with a tray of teacups and a teapot, his wings folded across his back. For some reason he had affected a Mohawk haircut.

I am told that if he excels in any respect it is as a scorer. His entries in the score book are precise, instant, and accurate. He uses an ancient Parker fountain pen but never makes a blot, and indeed there is a little Gothic flourish every time he records a ‘W’ for wicket. I think that he’ll be in that hut whenever I make an appearance at the cricket pitch. I think I have missed my chance. The hut is sacrosanct.

You see… I want to tell him that I can fly too, even though I only have conventional arms. I can’t soar as he does, though I have tried it once or twice when leaping from the King’s Seat, beyond Abernyte. Each time I could feel the wind under my arms, but my descent was too rapid and I had to resort to flapping hard to maintain any height and to land safely. I want to share with him that sweet, intimate knowledge of the upper air and of seeing the land turn beneath me. I have to speak this truth to someone who will not say I have been dreaming.

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November 1, 2011

Dundee Literary Festival 2011

Last week saw Dundee Literary Festival up here in Scotland. The opening session consisted of an hour or so of ‘open mic’ readings and discussions. Thanks to my agent, the readings included two of my more recent poems and a passage from my novel Lupa. I managed to get to some of the other events during the festival myself, and was glad to see one of my favourite writers of ‘many a true word spoken in jest’ poetry, Eddie Gibbons, give a recital.

Readers of this blog might be wondering why there has been no news of my having published anything for quite some time. Well, I suppose the reason is that I haven’t actually submitted anything for publication for quite some time – it’s as simple as that. I am working on several things, but I have to admit that often when I announce or decide on a project that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to amount to anything. Basically I never know until I try. Some projects are destined to lead nowhere and to sit in abeyance. Other projects may be finished or nearly finished but are waiting for… hmm… let’s say factors beyond my control. Rest assured, as soon as I have news, you’ll have news.

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October 29, 2011

‘A Woman on the Edge’ – Railway poetry

Railway footbridge, Perth.

My careful paces, three to the second, carry me
across the worn, regular plates of the footbridge; a slight give,
spring, a dull noise that dies, and if I pause to look
over the rail into the slack, dark backwater,
the black-to-silver flash of heron-bait fry
flickers against the turvy tree and the negative sky.

I know that by the hedges at the far side of the bridge,
where an old gate leans, black flies will be haze-hanging,
trailing their lazy legs in the air, and that I might be taken
by the sudden ambiguity of a butterfly, resting
on a stoical stone, all red-gold-in-shadow.

Yet to come, but first a one-boy riot of slapping trainers
in a terrified sprint to win the far side before a train comes,
oh the clangour of drowned bells his feet make; be quick, be quick!
Who knows what cracks may open and
what worlds may be tumbled into if the monster should arrive;
would the boy be left senseless, eyes a-distance,
or a wicked, smiling changeling, or a pair of empty shoes?
Is there such magic, such old, unwritten wizardry in the everyday places?
I have no idea, but he has me running fit-to-win as well!

The view from a train

Travelling by rail gives me views I am not supposed to have. Human activity and urban sensibility demand that I approach by road, on foot or by car, and see the face that places want to project – the front of a house, the shop façade, the planned vista. The railway, on the other hand, ignores convention and ducks around the side and back, and for all that impoliteness it barges through in a straight line or at best in a gentle and graceful curve as though ignoring the things it passes. But surely things were built this way? Surely the railway was here before the majority of the landmarks of the townscape? Maybe. Nevertheless even the Georgian villas present the reverse of their wooden fences to me, the obverse being a quiet component of a garden. It is not the train that sees things at all, it doesn’t care a jot for the intrusion, its progress is a linear dance to the tune of its diesel motor and the rhythms of the track. It is I who am the voyeur, keeking at the dirty underwear of the town. The town doesn’t care. It was built this way, showing its bent and ugly back to the travelers, showing us contempt. “I shall show hoi polloi my arse! Folk of quality roll up to my front door by carriage, knock, present a gilt-edged card. Only the ragged are shuttled behind me. If they demand respect, let them come by foot and see my porticos, my pediments, my railings of wrought iron.”

Not that we notice, of course. Newspaper, book, and now laptop, iPod, iPhone, iPad, tablet, gamer… only the indolent (me) technophobe (me) lexophobe (me) looks out of the window,

and

sometimes the town shuts with a bang. Someone has built a new housing estate that just out into the countryside. Its edge is as sharp as a kitchen-knife, and the green field full of sheep with dirty wool and patches of reddle leaps up at me immediately the instant I pass in the train. Whose idea was this insanity? Who decreed that there should be no debatable area but instead of that an ugly, stark interface?

There is a pick-up-sticks of broken doors,
poles, planks, grey and shadowed in angularity;
my head turns in direct proportion
to the speed of the train, and the sight is lost…

unless of course… the weather turns against us…

… rain making scars
across the face of a window.

In summer the rose bay willow herb is dense. Or is it loosestrife? The former I think. Someone I knew called it railway weed, or parson’s prick because it pops up everywhere – episcopalis vulgaris erectens or some such. I wrote a story once about being asked by an elderly Japanese couple what the tall, pink weeds at the side of the track were, and how I watched them mouth each word carefully. Rose. Bay. Willow. Herb. I can’t find it now. This tall, waving plant is the hair on the back of the town’s neck. It blushes and is beautiful from a distance, ugly close-to. It sighs and bows to the train’s bow-wave. It has its own eyes and watches back, pink-lidded and dusty with sleep. Left to its own devices it would colonise no further. It seems not to need to. It seems to know the limit of its domain. No flower defines the edge more than rose bay willow herb.

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October 23, 2011

Thirty years before, behind, and either side of the mast*

Ha! ‘Tis many a long year since I strode the deck of a tall ship. Well I remember how I bound my breasts and put on boys’ clothing, signed articles as a deck-hand on a cat-boat. I worked my way up by hard tack and little sleep, on luggers, cutters, coasters, trawlers, whalers, schooners, and square-riggers (in fact everything that showed a sail, apart from scows and dhows), till at last I became a deck-hand on the good ship Fancy out of Liverpool. Thirty years before the mast!

The Fancy? She was a floating purgatory, I can tell you. The captain was a bully, the mate was a bully, the bosun was a bully, and the ship’s salt-beef was a little too al dente for my taste too. But that bully captain – Dan Thirkell was his name – could drive her to make eleven knots, and that close-hauled! For all that the life on board her was hard, she was the trimmest tops’l schooner you could ever wish to see. Holystoned from keel to topmast she was.

Many’s the long voyage she saw, and many’s the time we beat around the Horn, Valparaiso-bound, half-seas-over. Aye, and many’s the good shipmate was washed overboard and never will be found until the sea shall give up its dead. Scurvy and yellowjack we endured, lateen-rigged pirate sloops we outsailed, monsoon and hurricano we withstood; sometimes Dan Thirkell would drive her until scarcely a piece of sailcloth remained aloft, while the mate and the bosun drove us fo’c’sle hands just as hard! (‘Twas thus on the very worst voyage; we saw St Elmo’s Fire on the topmast, mermaids off the port beam, and the mate shot an albatross. As all good sailors do know, ‘tis bad joss to bring golf clubs on board a ship!) But she was a fine sight with new canvas and new rigging, sailing goose-winged with a following trade wind.

But all things pass, shipmates. I mind the time that meself and me old mucker Bill Bracey from Boston (Lincs) were on the foredeck. We were a-skylarkin’, a-spinnin’ yarns, a-tellin’ tall tales, and a-spittin’ over the t’gallant rail the way that old salts do, when up comes Bigton Bill Buchan the bully bosun.

“Lay aft!” says he.

“Watch below, bosun,” says I. “Watch below until eight bells.”

“Damn ‘ee for a sea-lawyer!” says he, and starts a-lambastin’ me with his Malacca knout.

Later, in the fo’c’sle the ship’s cook (who was the nearest we had to a chirurgeon or a sawbones, being handy at jointing) tended to my wounds, stripping the shirt from my back and the breeks from my shanks to rub on tar-oil and goose-grease. Well that was the dismasting of me, because all of the hands could now see how I was rigged fore and aft!

“Why, Markie boy, you be a-sailin’ under false colours!” exclaimed Bristol Bob Bannerman, the sailmaker and ship’s carpenter. “For I see you be a judy!”

I was taken before the captain, and I expected the worst. To my surprise he was most civil when he saw what quarter the wind blew from. He cleared the mate out of his cabin and gave it over to me, gave me crinolines and petticoats to put on, even allowed me to wash. The rest of the voyage passed in pleasantness. I would stroll the deck, my parasol in my gloved hand, listening to the sea shanties and the orders from below to aloft borne on the wind, and they would seem exotic to me, sounds from another world. The crew would knuckle their foreheads as I passed and call me “Ma’am”; and the captain would stroll along half a pace behind me, hands clasped behind his broad back, head bowed, brows knitted, always as though about to speak of something.

Only later did it occur to me to wonder why he kept such an extensive female wardrobe aboard. I did notice that the dresses were a size or two large for me.

Y’know… even now, when the wind is set fair from the sou’ sou’ west, I have a longing to go to sea again. But this old peg leg of mine does warp so in the wet, and breaks my rolling gait.

Sorry – all this nautical reminiscing comes about by a circuitous route. An old Cheyenne woman knocked at the flap of my teepee this morning asking whether I still had the frying pan I borrowed from her village lo these many years. While Consuela (my Tejana maid) was rummaging in one of the yet-to-be-emptied tea-chests downstairs, she found my old pea-jacket and brought it to me.

Ah that old pea-jacket… still smelling of the salt wind and the spray… that old pea-jacket. I found something in the starboard pocket. It was a pea.

______________

* This story originally appeared in a series of humorous writings on an earlier blog

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October 15, 2011

The Happiness Machine*

This will be the last entry I make in my journal. I may not die today but nevertheless I shall write no more. I have written and read and studied all my life and, yes, I have painted. I have painted faithfully as Master Leonardo da Vinci taught me, because there could be no other possible response to his selfless and incandescent love. I have no more to do and must set my house in order – praecipe domui tuae morieris enim et non vives, says the scripture. I have made my will and have left all Master Leonardo’s works, designs, and notes, and indeed all scraps and chits with his signature upon them or in his hand, to my son Orazio. They are to remain here in Vaprio d’Adda, safe in the hands of our family, for ever. They are now our birthright – or, no, we are their custodians.

There is an exception. I make this confession now. It is not a sin so I do not need to make it to a priest. It is a work of Christian charity, I see this now in my old age, in my final days. While I was young I might, I might, have dared to challenge or to stir things up, but now I seem to hear to echoes of a great hall of judgment, I know that all my deeds are being weighed, I will be judged. The exception is one bundle of papers that I have burned. It was the design for a machine and notes on its construction and use. I wept as I burned them for the simple reason that Master Leonardo had entrusted them to me on his deathbed. I was with him in France when he died, and it was I and not the King of France – disbelieve the legends! – who cradled his head as he died. I returned the Master’s love with a pupil’s devotion and its incandescence is within me still. He put his trust in me to seek a time and place where the knowledge in those papers would be accepted and I betrayed that trust. God above, will that weigh against me?

Leonardo’s designs were, the master himself told me, refinements and improvements of some earlier patterns for a machine that had actually been built by Verrochio, his own teacher. You all think of Verrochio as a painter, but just like Master Leonardo he was a natural philosopher skilled in geometry, architecture, medicine, and alchemy. Hearing that Verrocchio was dying, Master Leonardo journeyed from Milan to Venice to be with him, and he received the first draft of the designs he later gave to me, and he heard from Verrocchio’s own lips the story of the building and demonstration of the machine. He told it to me and whether he put flesh on the skeleton in his telling I do not know, but as he recounted it to me it was as though I heard the voices, saw the scene, witnessed the workings of the machine for myself.

It all happened in the time of His Holiness Pope Paul the Second. His Holiness was, in a way, a natural philosopher too, inasmuch as he loved machines. They delighted him, he understood them, appreciated the beauty of the mathematical principles behind their processes. It was said that he built his own Archimedes’ screw in the Vatican in order to demonstrate its properties to his cardinals. He authorized the setting up of printing presses throughout the Holy See and all Christendom, but immediately he had done so he realised their power, their potential for independence, as though they had minds of their own and could decide whether to lie or speak the truth. He imposed strict control on their construction and use. It was said that he had a small army of clerks who drew up an index of every press in existence and every printed work they produced. All natural philosophers who were concerned with the building of machines brought the plans or working models before the Holy Father who, if he approved of them, would affix his seal to the plan and grant a license for their construction.

Master Verrocchio was one such maker of machines, and one day he gained an audience with His Holiness for the purpose of demonstrating a machine of his devising. It consisted of a fixed chair over which two hoops were suspended in such a way that they could each spin freely. Each hoop had, on the outside of what I might call its northern, western, southern, and eastern points, a counterweight of lodestone, placed so that there was a tendency for the hoops to return from any eccentric alignment to one of ninety degrees relative to each other. The inside of each hoop was lined with reflecting plates like those described in the writings of Ibn al-Haytham. As a description that is the bare bones of it. There was much more to it, great delicacy and precision in its construction (oh, much more so in the drawings of Master Leronardo, believe me), but I shall leave all that dark.

Master Verrocchio explained to the Holy Father that it was an engine for generating happiness and that he had devised, it out of a sense of caritas, for the benefit of mankind. He hoped that the Pontiff, as the Vicar of Christ who wished nothing but good for all His children, would be the first to try its efficacy.

The Holy Father agreed, and seated himself in the central chair. Master Verrochio made adjustments to ensure that the machine was at a certain orientation relative to the sun, the moon, and the known bearings of divers points on the earth, and set it in motion. Slowly at first and then faster, faster, faster until they were a blur, the hoops spun around the Holy Father, who sat gripping the arms of the chair. The facets of the reflecting plates on the inside of the hoops merged, and it seemed to onlookers as though the Holy Father’s face was magnified in them, round and shining. To the amazement of those onlookers that face began to smile, to beam, to grin, and then its eyes closed and great guffaws of delighted laughter could be heard over the mechanical whirring. The Holy Father was laughing as merrily as a child at a fair.

Master Verrochio let this continue for some minutes and then applied some careful friction to the moving parts of the machine, one by one, causing the spinning to slow. More and more slowly spun the hoops, until at last they stopped.

Wiping a tear from his eye with the sleeve of his vestment, the Holy Father stepped, still smiling, from the machine. He was still smiling, but with a smile that was at once beatific and confident, when he turned not to Master Verrochio to congratulate him but to an attendant. He ordered bell, book, and candle to be brought. He ordered firewood and faggots. He ordered pitch, oil, and torches. He ordered all these things to be fetched without a moment’s delay, while Master Verrochio stood mutely by, half bewildered and half afraid for his life and his immortal soul.

Once everything for which the Holy Father had called was assembled, he solemnly excommunicated and burned… the happiness machine.

When it had been reduced to ashes, he turned to Master Verrochio, thanked him for the demonstration, blessed him with the sign of the cross in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, and held out his hand so that Master Verrochio could kiss the ring on his finger. There was no further exchange between them and Master Verrochio left the papal presence never to return.

He had realised perhaps (though it is more likely he was now afraid to defy the Holy Father openly by continuing with his machine) what I came to realise once the sobriety of age had overtaken the rashness of youth, and what I realise more than ever now that proof of my mortality is stark before me. What was once supposedly evident to me in my confident and humanistic youth has faded and faded to be replaced by a simple and blessed faith – oh such a thing as never happened in the case of my own beloved Master Leonardo! – and my eyes are opened. If man could, by his own contrivance, build some machine, distil some elixir, devise some physical or mental exercise to ensure his happiness, what need would there be for the guiding presence of Mother Church? What need would there be for the salvation of his immortal soul. What need would there be – dare I breathe this even now? – for Christ Jesus? When I ask these questions I know that the act of destroying the last record of the happiness machine, although it was in defiance of my earthly Master whom I loved without reservation, it was in obedience to my Heavenly Master to whom all love, all reverence, all obedience are due. I will go to my eternal rest with peace in my heart. Peace, indeed, but not happiness. That is not my lot, nor anyone’s – homo ad laborem nascitur et avis ad volatum. The book is now closed.

Written on the 31^st day of January, anno domini MDLXX, at Vaprio d’Adda, by me, Fancesco Melzi.

__________

* This story is inspired by, but not based on, the story of the same name by Ray Bradbury

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October 6, 2011

On the centenary of Brian O’Nolan

It is the centenary, give-or-take, of the birth of the Irish scriever Brian O’Nolan, famous nowadays for comic-fantastic novels such as ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’, ‘The Third Policeman’, and ‘An Béal Bocht’ (the latter written in his native Irish). He wrote under many names, the best known of which is Flann O’Brien, and for years under the cognomen of Myles na gCopaleen (Myles of the little horse) he wrote the humorous column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ in the Irish Times. What follows is a small selection of my tributes to him, originally published, shall we say, elsewhere; a small number of my contributions to the canon of adventures of those two pals – yer man Keats and yer man Chapman.

_______________

Keats and Chapman were once obliged to make a journey across the city by public transport. They boarded a bus and it set off. The vehicle was quite ancient and close to obsolescence, and its progress was erratic. This was made worse by the fact that it was a very windy day, and every time the bus passed a side-street or a gap in the buildings, it was struck by violent side-winds and caused to lurch terribly, as if about to capsize. Also the window-catches were defective, the windows would not close, and great draughts of air made it impossible for Chapman to continue to hold his copy of The Thunderer before himself to read. Chapman, being able to stand no more, paradoxically stood. He seized the conductor and began to make loud protestations about the fitness-for-purpose of the bus. The conductor took him on, arguing strongly that no one but Chapman was complaining. The exchanges between them became (in best cliché fashion) heated, and Chapman was within moments of being put off at the next stop. Keats, however, rose and put a placatory hand on the shoulder of each one of them.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “De gusty bus non disputandum est.”

_______________________

Keats and Chapman were at home, each at peace reading a newspaper. Chapman looked up from the cartoon page, and remarked on the genius of the American artist Charles M Schultz in the way that he made the little bird Woodstock talk to his pal Snoopy in a series of minuscule, vertical penstrokes.

“Talk is cheep,” observed Keats.

________________________

Keats was trying to listen to the Test Match on the radio one day, but was disturbed by Chapman, who was roaming from room to room in their shared apartment, overturning stuff, opening drawers, and cursing loudly. It became too much to bear when Chapman burst into the lounge where Keats was sitting and started to ransack the place. Keats sighed, switched off the radio, and asked Chapman what the divvil he thought he was playing at.

Chapman said, “I’ve been looking for my copy of Homer. It’s nowhere to be found. A mystery! In my opinion it’s been stolen!”

“I’ll look into it,” said Keats.

_______________________

Keats was a gracious man, and would never turn down an invitation to this meeting or that soiree or the other book-signing. Chapman wondered at his goodwill as much as at his stamina. One day Keats received a polite letter from a literary society based in a small town in the West of Ireland.

“I know these people well,” said Chapman to him. “I’ve given a talk there once, as have many of my friends – and yours I think.”

“I don’t know them,” said Keats. “What like are they?”

“They’re decent folk,” replied Chapman. “And they’ll be delighted to see you. But there’s one thing I ought to warn you about. There is one surname that is so common in that area that almost everyone bears it. They consider themselves to be a clan as much as a town. It seems that anyone who isn’t a Murphy there is an O’Murphy or as MacMurphy; even the local Punjabi shopkeeper named his eldest “Murphy” in their honour. What you have to watch out for is this: they have heard every possible joke about the name, every bon mot about potatoes, every quip about one chap called Murphy two hundred years ago who must have travelled round on a bike and, as Dryden put it, scattered his Maker’s image through the land. Say what you want, but just don’t mention that name!”

“I’ll mind that,” said Keats.

The pair travelled to the West of Ireland, to the little town, and were put up in the temperance hotel where the literary society were to hold the reception in his honour. Came the evening and they went down to the function suite where they were greeted with applause. Chapman, who was of course already known to them, introduced Keats as they circulated, and many a hand was shaken.

The formalities of the evening went ahead. Keats of course gave a reading of some of his own poetry, which was received with a reverent hush and a standing ovation at the end of it all. The rest of the evening was taken up by several items, which included:

“A tale or two of Finn MacCool” presented by the society’s shanachee Mr Eamon Murphy,

A solo upon the uilleann pipes by Mr James Murphy,

A recitation “On the visit to us of Mr John Keats” by the society’s Bard Mr Brian Murphy,

A song by Miss Kathleen Murphy, accompanied on the piano by her sister Miss Niamh Murphy,

A slide-show on the delights of Murphyville, Georgia USA, presented by Mr Hiram J Murphy III,

A blessing upon the gathering given by Father Liam Murphy,

A vote of thanks to Keats and to everyone involved proposed by the society’s Hon Sec Mr Brendan Murphy, and seconded by the society’s Hon Treas Mrs Deridre Murphy, and

A closing address given by the society’s Chairman Mr Arthur Wellesly Murphy.

That was not, however, the end of proceedings, as there was one final item on the agenda – the presentation to Keats of a cut-glass Waterford decanter, specially engraved to mark the occasion, paid for out of society funds. This was handed to Keats, with the thanks of all present, by the society’s President-for-Life Mr Aloysius Murphy.

Keats appeared overwhelmed, lost for words, and responded in his poor French.

“Murphy beaucoup!”

Chapman tore at his beard.

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September 28, 2011

‘A Woman on the Edge’ – workshop project of prose and poetry, part 3

The moosh-moosh

In the marginal lands between city and countryside there lives a type of rare hominid known as the ‘moosh-moosh’. The name appears to be of Romany origin and until recently these shy creatures would only reveal themselves to travelling folk. In fact so secretive and shy are they that most settled folk continue to deny their existence.

Their natural habitat is, or was according to anthropological speculation, the cave. However since intensive agriculture has decimated the wild places of Britain in the south, and deforestation and sheep-farming has done the same in the north, the moosh-moosh have moved into the new wilderness that humans have created, the wilderness that is neither urban nor rural but which is found on the margin between the two.

In build they resemble humans almost exactly, except for their apparent superior muscle tone. They are stocky but not fat. Their skin is pale but is hardly visible except on the face, the rest of their heads and bodies being covered in a light, reddish-brown fur. Their faces are large and broad but not un-handsome. Some observers believe them to be descended from the last remnants of the Neanderthalers, but this is mere speculation. They go naked but appear to be totally without any sense of shame. Deprived of their natural habitat, they have occupied such spaces as unwanted cargo containers. A small group was discovered living in an old Nissen hut on what was a WW2 airfield but upon which a new housing estate was encroaching, and it was this extended family that became the first moosh-moosh to encounter its homo sapiens cousins, or at least the settled and civilised branch of our species, with more regularity than before, gaining a certain controversial fame in academic circles and becoming a minor tourist attraction, especially for a few savvy if brash Americans.

Communicating with moosh-moosh is problematical. Folklore tells us that they and the Romany people once made themselves understood by a system of mutual hand-signs and by a few syllables of human speech, but if that folklore is based on truth it is a tenuous truth and the faculty has long-since evaporated. The interface between us and the moosh-moosh is akin to that between an adult and an autistic child, except that they will meet our eye with a steady gaze. There is no hint of comprehension in that gaze, with the exception that if you hurt one of them their expression hints at puzzlement and sadness. They seem to be asking silently “Why?” Violence is alien to them.

Their own speech sounds like a cross between the cooing of doves and a human whistle. It is quiet speech and they use it sparingly, spending long periods in communal silence. I have tried to imitate their sounds whenever I have been amongst the ‘Nissen Family’, as this particular group has come to be known, and whenever I have done so they have turned a softened gaze upon me as if to say that they appreciate my attempts. The only time I have ever seen a definite communication between moosh-moosh and homo sapiens was when I arrived at the same time as a knot of transatlantic tourists. The moosh-moosh were about to eat, which they do communally, and a female came behind us making insistent, shepherding gestures, urging us to sit down with them.

Moosh-moosh food is simple, consisting of a kind of cake made from the seeds of wild grasses sweetened with honey or with whatever berries are in season, or flavoured with hedgerow herbs. They share their food evenly between all who are present, even with homo sapiens, although the latter sometimes find it hard to digest. I am always conscious that they have scarcely enough to spare. In winter they are, if anything, less semi-visible than they are at other times of the year; it was thought that they hibernate – the Romany always said so – but in fact they spend most of this time when little sustenance is available huddled together for warmth in foraged straw and under salvaged tarpaulins.

Their groups and extended families are without hierarchy and are highly co-operative. If two or more discrete groups should meet there is no competition, but rather all direct themselves towards mutual benefit. Their delight is in each other, and it is a full and complete delight.

They make no art, no music, and of course no literature, but their appreciation of the natural world appears to be total. It is an appreciation apparently not born of awe or of anything mystical but rather seems to be one of immersion, joy, participation. It is a happy state free of the twin mental yokes of religion and science, a state which proves that mutuality rather than competition is the highest law of evolution.

The last time I sat down with the ‘Nissen Family’ of moosh-moosh I felt their hands gently resting on my shoulders and arms. Their gaze had softened and seemed to express some kind of sympathy. I realised that I had been crying. I tried to smile, and indeed their caresses were comforting, but this display of empathy, this acceptance of myself almost as one of them was so poignant that my tears continued. There was so much I wanted to say to them.

Oh, my dear Nissen Family, as dear to me as my own family! My dear, precious, innocent moosh-moosh! If only you knew my true nature and the nature of all of my brothers and sisters, the homo sapiens. If only you knew the depth and height of our jealousy, our insecurity, our vainglory. If only you knew how cruel we are. You, I know, are no children except inasmuch as you have preserved the innocence of childhood. You are no distant cousin, no Neanderthal throwback. You are of the same root and stock as we are, you are people, but you are people who took the decision long ago to follow the path of pure wisdom, to seek nothing but that which was good, nothing but what you actually needed. You are wise beyond our capacity to be wise. Yet in that wisdom you are as foolish as saints. What are fences and hedges to you? What are the divisions and boundaries that we set up in the face of nature to you? What are the frowns on the faces of farmers and householders to you when you forage their barley and their chives? What is our folly to you, the folly that points to something and says “Mine”?

If only I could convey this to you before it is too late, before you become nothing more than a dwindling number of anthropological or zoological specimens, a theme park, ‘Moosh-Moosh-Land’, an insignificant detail of history, a small entry in Wikipedia, a cuddly toy. If only you would realise this before we come for you, before we take you away, before we make you our playthings, before we study, catalogue, abuse, dissect, and destroy you, before we turn upon its head your evolutionary success and make a lie out of it. We are monsters, my dear family, monsters. We are ugly in our complexity, ogres, madmen!

You sit here in utter patience, lambs of the God you do not know, every one. Why do you not start up, why do you not run? Why do you not find all your tribes and families and hide in what remains of the forest? Why do you not go deep into our abandoned mines and conceal yourselves? Why do you not remove yourselves from our sight and memory before we remove you entirely from the world? Why do you sit so patiently, witnesses to all that is good, a light that will soon be put out? Are you somehow driven to prove to us what brutes we are?

We are your brothers and sisters but we are also your executioners. We hold your death warrant in our hands.

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Tag: fiction