Upon Mansion Roofs

I flew in from the darker reaches of the night sky and settled on a roof.

In my home nest, they taught me things I should know on my journey to Earth and they taught me what I should do when I arrived there.

They said I would look like this … and I was shown a vision of a beaked dragon-like bird with snakes for limbs, new moons for claws and a devil’s bedding for wings. If attacked, I would attack first. But they furnished me not with weapons, for I looked too strong to fight. I would do this … was shown the “bird” that was me alighting on the roof of a mansion when night had relinquished all memory of the previous day and all hope of the next, and lowering my proboscis into the chimney to tease out any tasty flue-grubs. And I would sense this … was shown human beings in their beds, like beached baby whales, dreaming of creatures on the roof. And I would see this … was shown others like me, as far as my eyes could reach, roof-roosting contemplatively against a backdrop of stars. And, finally, I would dread this … was shown many bigger versions of myself flapping in, swooping across the sky, like giant vulture marquees, here to ensure the alert rapt attention of us sentries and enforcing the subtle curfew of the night.

There would come a time when they themselves would arrive, one solid pack of beings like myself in physical communion with every limb and feeler of each other, all previously dead things but by an interactive mutuality sparking off supreme faith in its own life-force.

=

There came a time when I needed more than just my own company during the interminable period before dawn. I had recited my prayers, counted the slates on my own particular roof-tree for the umpteenth time and re-learnt the consecration of the mansion. One word haunted my brain, one no doubt implanted by those others who are now a single entity. This was a strange echoey word, throwing up images of what humans called Heaven. My prayers were to what this word represented and even its sound (although it was different upon my tongue) brought a tingle to parts of my body. My limbs lengthened and turned stringy, my lower torso became loose chamois leathers ill-sewn together, and I wrapped the mansion into a parcel. 

But then I knew something that I had not been taught. This special word could not possibly represent the immortality amid the stars which had been pledged following my tour of duty on Earth. It  could not possibly be the sweet agony welling up along my winding extruding tentacles. It could not possibly be the key prayer to be passed from beak to beak, from roof to roof, in the lonelinesses of Earth’s dark side.

But it was shown to be the reason I and the others had been sent out weaponless into the unknown. Never shipped even a hand-spike…

Our naive strength had resided somewhere in that word, our primitive cowing in the face of the cruel mindless cosmos.

Then it dawned on what was left of me. The word in fact represented another human being! One of those human beings who, we had been taught, were as insignificant as the dreams they dreamt.

With that, I folded up my wing tents, cleared up the foot-thick stains I had deposited on the roof which were even now dangling into the gutter, straightened up the TV aerial, gave the chimney an affectionate adieu and, telling my companion roof-creatures that we should all stick together, I led them off in my wake into the realms of non-existence where we would perhaps feel more at home.

But not before joining up our loose ends into an unbounded ecstasy, eventually forming a weave of stars and poultry flesh which, for all I know, still wheels across the limitless wastes of a better mind than mine.

=

There were twelve terraced houses around a circular back-alley courtyard and each house had its own characteristics. The numbering system was quite straightforward, one to twelve with odd and even rubbing conjoined shoulders.

And unto these mansions there came signs which told mainly of mutancy and insanity. And upon the roofs of these came bodies none of which seemed human.

We crawled round an apparently circular loft area, with no dividing walls between; how long we had been travelling on hands and knees across the dusty beams was now unknown. We mis-recall entering, we mis-recall even if the direction was clockwise or anti-. We expected to meet others on the way, but maybe their direction was timed and spaced so that we would never meet.

We are twin brothers – and we had to be parted at birth, as if our love for each other was far too strong for our own good.

We had, they said, emerged side by side into the world … having been pulled from the tangled skein of strands that still wore the flesh of our mother. She it was who had to split down the middle with our lumbering arrival and, whilst we had to be unsewn and unpicked, she had to be re-aligned by the tireless darning and hemming of treadling seamster-surgeons.

We mis-recall the home in which we all lived. It was down a turnimg which led from blind alleys and double-ended culdesacs and, if we directed you there today, you would become lost in the world of dreams you had so desperately wanted to avoid.

We once knew a larger mansion, called Olive Villa, which stood close to the coast where a little boy who must have something to do with us once lived with a matriarch or two. He may have been one of us, he may not, but we did play in the villa’s garden on the clumsy swing, waiting for faces that did not please us to pop up and to reveal their long trifurcating tongues.

“Let’s play Corners … come on, do!” said one of us twins in the garden of that same Olive Villa, but now down beyond the alleys and culdesacs far from any sea or pier or naze…

“Don’t want to!”

And we skipped like the wings of a pastel-dusted butterfly amid the cabbage patches, towards a matronly figure reclining on the daisied lawn.

“He won’t play at Corners,” complained a bitter twin. “It’s so boring!”

The matronly figure unfolded as if it had been a sculpture with vibrant curves and angles that an artist had spent a lifetime formulating but was now sliding into a shape which was more human, if not completely finished.

She would point to certain things that no others could see. Up on the roofs, she said, were the wingy, stringy residue of creatures that once used the slates as sloping beds and the gutters as receptacles of their night soil. She would also tell us of a rogue creature who had stayed behind when all the others had gone back to where they originated. It cared not whether it be day or night: it did not honour the openness and candour of sunlight … and it would sit, wide-eyed and brown, so close to the tall chimney stack that one had to look twice to see it there at all. The slimy slivers of cuckoo-spit from its rear tuft of wings coiled down the slates toward the skewed guttering and must have given it away to the likes of our mother.

Giving us the nod, one day, she indicated that if we did not take the opportunity and look at it immediately and study its intricate plumage, its tangled cat’s cradle of tentacles, its postbox mouth and its underskirted collection hatch … then we may never have another chance to be among those very very few to see one of them. A chance of a lifetime.

But it flapped off, before we could even raise our pair of eyes.

She undergrunted, on other occasions, the names which only she knew or, if I mis-recall, was it that she was the only one who dared even to think such names? She told of two warring, but loving, “gods”, for want of a better expression. Both, apparently, wanted to rule the roost as far as the archetypal fears of general mankind were concerned. It was all very well, sending out cohorts of clucking wing-critters to scare the nineteen-fifties skin off houses and mansions. It was all very well, to breed, inbreed and cross-breed with chimney stacks, giving birth to clusters of TV aerials that would hand-spike the future skies. It was all very well, to formulate melting dreams which would sud the minds of future men. It was all very well…

But, one day, she said there would be a fight between the two reluctant protagonists. We twins would be the ones called to umpire and ensure their elbows remained on the table of the cosmos, as they strained and pushed, pulled and spluttered, like two giant vertical earthquakes. That’s what she said, anyway. We did not believe her. And, now, I even do not believe in her at all.

One night, she crawled out of our lives. Up the nursery chimney she went like a scrawny sweep. She had been starving herself for weeks in preparation. The waggling feet were the last things I saw of her, the soot in black snowfalls into the empty grate. Her voice lingered on for some little while as she continued to wriggle towards the roof, pleading for the two “gods” to lower their tentacle ladders to assist her ascendant sign…

I gained the impression from her last overgrunts that these two “gods” were in fact joined at the elbow. The words eventually died out somewhere mid-chimney.

Within this mansion of alleys, now, we listen to the interminable dual shuffling and shambling in the shuttered loft, around and around in ever-decreasing circles. But it may be the more distant scratching of claws on the slates … or the tugging out of aerials as tooth-picks … or, more likely, the scraping across the night sky of the hidden sun which never enters this our mansion of the stars.

Destiny is a core unto itself and we shall only be able to spend the rest of our lives elbow-fighting…

= 

THE ELBOW FIGHT: a play in one short Act.
 Scene a shuttered Olive Villa.

Voice: You say life is futile, don’t you?

Old man: No. It is futile to call life futile, for it is. 

Voice: Your parents, did they give you a lot of love?

Old man: Yes, for that I am grateful.  The rest is fiction.

Voice: Fiction as truth has always been my motto, especially when it makes a good story to suit a universal gestalt.

Old man: Yes, indeed. The Synchronised Shards of Random Truth and Fiction as the Nemonicon has it. The nemo versus id and ego. Indeed, amongst such ‘shards’, my mother used to mop up the night soil from under my bed. She used kerchiefs and muckenders to sop out the messes. Nearly every night it was but she received thanksgiving from her god…

Voice (V): How could you have let her do it … and then to leave her alone with what you considered to be her deceitful god?

Old Man (Om): I couldn’t sleep. I thought night-critters or such were clambering over the roof, trying to get at me.

V: Oh, we’re going back to them, now, are we? Where did such ideas come from? Did you think the things on the roof had minds?

Om: They either came from my own mind and, if so, even a Shakespeare or a Mozart may have had them … or they were from others’ minds, let loose to hound and hassle me. When I was younger I had dreamed of sweeter things, flowers and such, cuddle-me-to-you’s, herbs-of-grace, lady’s-fingers, love-in-a- mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots … but stuck out in their midst was  an ox- pith, pointing to future dreams emerging from the gathering clouds and dipping sun of puberty. Sorry, old age makes me wordy…

V: Yes, you mumble on so. You told me earlier, did you not, that the night-critters were not of your mother’s god or even a paradoxical version of the otherwise hard-to-believe Trinity, but things that were born from a greater god called… what? ‘Tis enough to bend any mind. Hear its violins, flutes and drums?

Om: Too true. And night-eaters fed off my doings that I’d shovelled under the bed. Great jaws champing at the merds of my adolescent loins.

V: Perhaps your so-called roof creatures got into the room to scrabble and play under your bed?

Om: You’re oh so clinical, medical, in your questioning. 

V: Sorry, I’ll try to keep quiet. Tell me what you have to.

Om: I kept a wooden contraption above my bed – ill-made perhaps – teetering and creaking in rhythm to my fitful tossing. Bit it did keep them at bay. You see, the roof had gaps… And now, you’re actually telling me that they may have been the things under the bed all the time. It’s coming back to me now….

V: Blame not another for your own mind’s leaning.

Om: I’ll be straightforward, or as much so as seeping senility allows. I lived a long time in that groaning house. There were gaps above me that literally let in the moonlight. My mother cared for me and preached of her god, meaning nothing to me and pitch-kettling the Hanseatic-league of my wooden bed defences. Yes, I must keep it simple, none of that stuff and nonsense about night-snaps, larrikins and lop-eared macaroons. I’m nought but a goose-cap on Lady-day in Harvest, sailing a moon-sheered craft from imaginary mordant Venice to the plague-sores of Toulon…

V: Simple, you said

Om: She fed my night’s doings to the tank outside. Her one time lover, the lavatory man, stole it away in his stink cart under cover of day. ‘Tothers thought it compost he lugged…

V: To the point, old man..

Om: Undoubtedly to the point that there was no point. The next I recall was the funeral. I covered her coffin with cuddle-me-to- you’s, herbs-of-grace, lady’s-fingers, love-in-the-mists, soft hobmadonnas, none-so-pretties, forget-me-knots as well as all her used sops and muckenders.  

V: I must go now, nice talkin to you and thanks for the drink.[exit]

Om: I’ve been pondering here for some time, but I’ve only stared at the beer and had crazy pub talk with myself. Ego and Id, Id and Ego, I don’t know. Nemo, perhaps. Time to go home, Andy and Teddy are waving goodbye. Maybe the mansion knew something about it. I think I will dream tonight of times long ago when Darkness was an Edge, for today it’s nought but a Shroud.

V (off stage): And he never even shipped a hand-spike.