Five More Monologues (Religious Monologues with Music and Soundscapes)

In the last five monologues we heard about a man who keeps seeing a set of instructions whenever he's on the brink of orgasm; 
a strange episode in a pizzeria involving a dwarf, an angel, and an old recently retired father who hasn't moved from the back office in a whole month; 
a scary party thrust upon a miserable university student; 
a priest who becomes trapped in his confessional; 
and an unpublished novelist with a dark secret.

This time:

We hear about...

1) A man whose mother has just died who visits a scary-looking rollercoaster in search of revitalisation.

2) A woman at dinner with a shy man who tells her right off the bat that he's an alcoholic. But all is not as it seems.

3) A bizarre voice message: the unnamed caller shares with the unknown recipient a gross little vignette about his nipples.

4) A woman and a fellow jogger called Arthur. A simple routine involving morning jogging and breakfast quickly unravels in unexpected ways.

5) The Room 3 tenant whom nobody in the shared house has ever seen finally comes out. 

    


Music List (including tracks of which only very brief samples are taken):

Poor Mum- Molly Drake
A Coral Room- Kate Bush
The Protecting Veil- John Taverner
Devil In Disguise- Elvis Presley
Livre du Saint Sacrament- Olivier Messiaen
Des Canyons aux Etoiles- Olivier Messiaen
Dona Nobis Pacem- Vaughn Williams
Requiem- Maurice Durufle
(Opening Improvisation, Introit, and Pater Noster taken from 12.00 Pentecost Sunday Mass, 2024, Westminster Cathedral, London)
Holly Holy- Neil Diamond
Saint Francois d'Assise- Olivier Messiaen
Magnificat- Herbert Howells
The Rite of Spring- Stravinsky

Featuring also the voices of Father Stephen Morrison, Anthony Perkins, Harold Bloom, Klaus Kinski

Three Sketches for Two Clarinets- Charlie Price
Concerto for Strings, Winds, Percussion, and Solo Cello- Charlie Price












Content Warning:
Horror, Language, Sex References

Transcript

I

            After mother’s death, I succumbed to a deep depression which, for a week or so, utterly paralysed me. For a dejected, dark, dreary succession of days, I rose, hungover, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, bought a bottle of gin, knocked myself out (with any luck) by about two thirty in the morning, rose hungover at about three o’clock the following afternoon, and so on. Dreadful times. The morning, green in the fluttering hush of the limes, poisoned me. I was capable of little more than my own anaesthetisation. For the most part I lay, curled up in bed, in my silent room, trying to make of myself a sleeper no less silent than the prehistoric silence that had lived there before me, slumped somewhere half-way between stasis and sleep. The hours flickered by at mysterious and not readily comprehensible speeds. I tendered a strange kind of quasi-awareness, a vague sleepy consciousness of the hours. Astral bodies came and went with a feeling of killing irrelevance. Oh, moon. Oh, sun. Oh, a shooting star. Oh, a million stars. Oh, the earth. Oh, who gives a..  

            Sometimes I would hear, only in hallucination but not utterly unreal, one of those characteristic howls my late mother would regularly let sound through the house. How she’d arch her back! like a great, aged sea monster, desiccated by the air and close to succumbing to the ravages of dry land, the dried red flesh as ruffled as the bed sheets beneath her rump and frothing, general, about her crinkled person, and through the bruise of that toothless black orifice, how she would roar such syllables as my name “Mike!” (with considerable elongation visited upon the middle vowel), and “Stiiiiiick”, a monosyllable whose function can, not unjustifiably, be called all-purpose. How mother adored Stick. She would have used him for walking if ever she had found it within herself to rise from her bed, if ever circumstance had required her to walk anywhere- (she did not even attend the funeral of her sister)- but in her sedentary, predominantly supine life, Stick served mostly as an admonishing agent, a prop she could add to the fearsome spectacle of her first seconds of consciousness, or to any of the general writhing agonies that plagued her throughout a typical day. Her buttocks and legs were invariably purple with bedsores, and stiff as furniture, but her arms were surprisingly agile. They flailed and wobbled like long tentacles. She was like a little flamey whirlpool of pangs and pains in the red desert sand, a quicksand of flesh, with that wrinkled tortoise old-man mouth of hers very often the only sign of life, in the way it twitched open and closed, and open again, as if to receive something, but unable to express any preference as to what it received. Her eyes very rarely opened, especially at the end, even when she was conscious. 

            She liked to fall asleep beside Stick, liked me to lodge Stick into the bed along her…dubious length. Her length was dubious in the sense that length was not something she really possessed anymore, not as such: she was so folded in on herself and so bowed with decrepitude and longevity and lethargy that she was little more than a curled, fat squiggle. 

She was bald by the end. I even forgot what colour her eyes were for a time, until I pried open the dead lids and looked within: blue. A death blue. 

            In my depressed days, postmortem matern…I can’t remember am, an, ae, I heard not only her howling but the clattering of Stick that inevitably came after it. Having brandished Stick, she would often pitch Stick across the room where its ends banged against the wall and the floor, or even, in its destructive path, occasionally upset something else standing in the room. She took her antipsychotics in gin, and I suppose that is why gin was and is my drink of choice, the only spirit in my drinking repertoire.

            After her death, sometimes, in the days ensuing, entered her room and looked out of its windows at the garden. Her room was upstairs. For the best part of a decade she had been held, by the floors of our house, airborne, had grown quite singularly unacquainted with ground level. At last she was back there again. On one particular occasion, I saw a woman in an apron with her back to the house, in a chair. There mother was, right again, all that had been wrong about her bloated, terrible person, corrected, remedied. There she sat. There she sat, Stick a servant, not a master, held in her skinny paw, alongside her sedentary form. It was autumn, I think. No, it couldn’t have been. The larches…the limes were green, autumn is when they shed their leaves, they crinkle, they crimson. Chanterelles come up in the sodden and mottled mush where the treeroots make creases. No, this was summer. Not autumn, not that diabolical season, that diabolic russet end to things, and beginning of blobs. It was…after the apple blossom. June perhaps.

            At any rate, after a while I grew weary of the way things were. Mother had no need of me anymore, being a corpse. At last. It was time to finally get more out of my life, to at least begin to do so, at my sixty-seven years of age. I left mother, and the house, and Stick. Left them all to their own devices, in the garden.

            What called to me, I found, was a vast triangular structure that called itself The Upper Room. This looked, to me, satisfactory. There was also Babel and Jacob’s Ladder. There was even The Crucifier. All rollercoasters, some more tortuous than others, some a winding neural network, punctuated along the way with loop-the-loops. But none was so self-evidently formidable as The Upper Room, in its perilous simplicity. The track rose in an astonishing, lethal leap that became vertical almost instantly. The gleaming, steel track shot up to a dizzying zenith, at which point the same sheer vertical that had taken the shuttle up took it down again. A symmetrical seven seconds of terror, one kind on the way up, one kind on the way down. And I just knew in my heart that this terrifying attraction would be the one, among the earth’s surprisingly slight arsenal, to bring me out of myself.

            I queued for hours. At an advanced age like my own, I was not entirely surprised by the looks I received. A mixture of revulsion and admiration. That is to say, one or the other, not some venomous amalgamation of the two: some eyes were folded away, brows knit by a peculiar disgust; other eyes widened and seemed to commend- even venerate-, my bravery. There were a good deal of young women around, women of summery shining shoulders and soft luminous heads of hair. Decades tightly packed between myself and them, and, in fact, chastened what dialogues I attempted with the more weighty specimens. The slender is palpably not for me. Nor is the beautiful, really. Only in the presence of the quite ugly do I ever find myself authentically animated, and attracted.

            They were all so young, and longed, while it lay so supposedly far off, to inconsequentially know the thrill of death. While the rollercoaster (which I was genuinely looking forward to) remained an hour or so off (so many were drawn to its promises of exhilaration) I could not help taking the shoulder before me, and looming towards its red, freckled little face, her lashes lined in a layer of ink I suppose she considered marginally seductive, whereupon, in an incomplete flash of teeth, I growled:

            “Mummy’s in the garden. Mummy’s in the garden.”

            She was thrilled, as were her friends. They were terrified. Waves of panic, spasms of wariness rippled through the crowd about me. Someone was called to escort me away, some man with a hat. A keeper of the peace, an officer of the law. I’ve always believed in devoting one’s energies to the service of others. 

            

II

            “I’m an alcoholic,” he said, in answer to my question about wine. “I do not drink”. 

            I believed him when he said this. I felt that his honesty was worthy of some kind of commendation: so I made a nice smile at him, and sent him a soft, pleasant look with my eyes. I do have excellent eyes, I can do optically what so many girls do with their breasts. I have no bosoms to speak of.

            He struck me as a sad, withdrawn, slightly ill-at-ease individual, introverted but not quite appealingly so. Despite these less than endearing qualities, his face was beautiful, astonishingly beautiful, almost saintly. He had managed to ask me out on a date (the question could have been put to me under more awkward circumstances) and I accepted. An act of mercy in a way, my good deed for the year. Free of the risk of very much attraction, free of that feeling of impending seriousness, it was easier not harder to accept. I had started to date again after a fairly extended period of celibacy, following Peter’s accident.  

            That the man opposite me was an alcoholic made sense. It explained the lines in his face, the slightly weathered redness of his temples, and the darkness beneath his eyes. Perhaps it explained his nature too, a certain hesitancy, a certain privacy, a certain reluctance. A certain insecurity. 

            Though I pitied him he was surprisingly light work. By which I mean that the conversation, principally, was not hard work. He didn’t talk about work, at all, he made that clear from the start in a strange, surprising burst of authority, of superiority, he didn’t want to talk about work. Fair enough, I thought. He came out with strange non-sequiturs sometimes, usually about animals. Feints, mimicries, deceptions that, for example, particular species of beetle are known inflict upon their fellow beetle.

            “Have you ever seen a violin mantis? They trick crickets into their mouths by blending into their environment.” I had not. 

            He used the word “tricked” a lot, in perfect tense. “Misled” as well. I supposed that perhaps he’d been betrayed.

            “You go ahead. You go ahead,” he said, to the matter of the wine. I exactly remember the way he repeated the three words, slower, more emphatic, more staccato the second time. The big glass of the house white, which prior to pouring I had tasted and whose notes I had pretended to judiciously consider (though I know nothing whatever about wine), was received very welcomely, as was the encouragement to partake. I asked for the bottle. 

            “My sister’s staying with me, I’ll take the rest back with me to share with her,” I said.

            He nodded. We talked about relationships; I did wonder if all the women he mentioned weren’t made up. We ate, the food was decent. French. I had cassoulet. And mushrooms. He said he hated mushrooms, said his favourite aunt was killed by a mushroom. Actually I can’t remember whether he said a mushroom (singular) or mushrooms (plural) which could mean something else…

            I drank my wine all the while, a very respectable grassy Sauvignon. I had knowingly refilled my glass a number of times but I was surprised to discover upon taking note of the liquid’s level, towards the end of my main course, that I had drunk about three quarters of the bottle.

            “There won’t be very much left for your sister…” he said, with a queer, little smile.

            “No I suppose there won’t be…” I answered. I changed the subject. “Shall we share a desert?” and then I quickly added: “I don’t expect you to pay for all this you know, I’m quite happy to go halves”.

            “Nah, don’t worry about it, I’ll get it…” he said.

            “Are you sure?” (Here I employed my eyes to marvellous effect).

            “Quite sure,” he confirmed. Yes! Free meal. I felt quite giddy, jolly, jubilant. Wine and gooey substance and the richness in which it all was soaked descended within me and settled, making my tummy feel ever so nice. And he had brightened a great deal from the slightly mopey character we all took him to be at work.

            It was just as I was starting to feel good about the whole affair, about life in general in fact, that things started to go wrong. I remember the very words he used, the words with which he sounded out the evening’s strange turn. 

            “God, I could use a drink though. That wine…that wine looks…really good”. He stammered with desire, a clouding lust for liquid. 

            I remember a taxi sidling furtively by and coming to a standstill. The figure in the driver’s seat was anonymous and hollow. He was irrelevant, and the vehicle was irrelevant, it progressed on its way a few moments later: there had been nobody inside. But I remember noticing it, them, him, the vehicle.

            I tried to make light of it, assuming that he was making light of his own…“disease” as they call it. I smiled nervously, my cheeks full as a hamster’s and my mind gently beginning to swim with wine. The cold, subtly citric path of it lay all around the inside of my mouth, on my gums, and down my gullet’s steep inner incline. The remnant taste, the lingering impression of it turned unpleasant, even a little rancid, as he said quite earnestly, darkly:

            “I’m not even kidding, I am really craving a drink.”

            He’d been drinking blood-orange limonata all evening. The blood-orange on the can looked strange, too fleshy, the bloody juice looked too much like blood. And the round grapefruitish image of the rind had a nail sticking out of it.

            “Yeah?” I ventured, uncertainly. I was beginning to feel awkward, and scared, and embarrassed. 

            “I think I’m going to have some of that wine. Pour me a little,” he said.

            “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

            “I’m paying for everything. Pour me a little glass of my wine.”

            “I don’t think I should,” I remember saying.

            His affect had completely changed. The tone of the conversation turned a few heads, the assertive, newly argumentative tenor of it over the soft murmur of cordiality in the dimly lighted restaurant caught people’s attention. I was upset and angry at this sudden shifting of parameters. This was my bottle, for me: now it was ours. I felt very strongly the urge to cling onto it, to keep it in my possession, to protest my right to it. But I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t stand between him and the bottle, I couldn’t legitimately do much or even say much to dissuade him. The alcoholic’s sobriety must be self-imposed. When his willpower fails, like a fallen fence, it is up to him to re-erect it.

            “Oh my…oh yes…oh baby…” I had a horrible crushing feeling in my stomach, great twinges of trepidation as he took his first relapsing gulp of the wine, and he crooned his sensuous approval as it made its cold, succulent assault on his inner self.      

            Letting me finish the first, he ordered a second bottle of the house white and received it gleefully. The waiter opened it and poured him a glass, which he drank sort of dutifully, not at all ebulliently. I was watching all of this in a sickened horror, waiting for some angry paroxysm of addiction and rage and need and false cheer and deception and queasy honest to erupt…whatever alcoholism is: that pandora’s box of pain unlocked by ambrosial drink, the supposed healer which becomes a deepener, an opener, an…exacerbant. But though I feared it, though I anticipated some relatively spectacular eruption, nothing like that happened, not at all. He resealed the bottle and pushed it in my direction.

            “I’m only joking,” he said. “I’m not really an alcoholic. You’re face! Go and share that with your sister. Thanks for a lovely time, darling.” He slapped a little over a hundred pounds in notes upon the table. Then he got up and said: “See you later!” and he marched, cheerily, across the restaurant floor and out the door, leaving me alone at the table.

            I hadn’t noticed it return, but the taxi was there, waiting for him, at the raised margin of the curb. He got into it and I could have sworn that his face wasn’t obscured at all by the darkness within the vehicle, but his pallor actually began to glow like a moon, and a terrible grin bloomed like a death-lily upon his face, and his eyes sparkled like jewels, fierce with fire. And around his central kingly complexion in the Stygian darkness, his hellish majesty, littler, ruled-over, multitudinous, fearful faces danced in swirling rings and circlets: faces of the damned and blasphemous, trapped saints, and gagged women and children in the trunks of cars, and hostages and husks. He looked directly at me one last time with that terrible face, and his two terrible eyes, did, optically, that awful thing that all the violence and hatred of men amassed could do. And the driver! The driver was Peter! Peter! Darling! I knew it was a mistake! I knew he wasn’t dead, hadn’t gone through with it successfully. But before I could rush out, with the bottle of wine under my arm, the two shadows, the two male visitants, each deceptively real though hallucinatory, one in the driver’s seat and one in the deep, diabolical back, drove off into the noisy night and I was left alone with the bottle.

            I went home to my empty house, and I drank it, alone. Every last droplet. Then I had just a few glasses of vodka. I was ready to sleep by then. In my gay, soaked abandon, everything felt forgotten for a time. And that is my understanding of mercy.       

III

            I (male) don’t understand my nipples. Nipples in general: the male sort I mean. I have heard them called aesthetic. But mine are certainly not. They seem a waste of all the things they are composed of: their pale, rose colour, their disc shape, the soft, fuzzy, nipply material, the little dot in the middle of them. I decided I’d had enough of them one day. So I took a scalpel and slid them off. It didn’t hurt…them, or me. There was no blood. I held them in my hand, two little pink coins of flesh. And I felt satisfied as I looked in the mirror at my bare, pale chest, my white breastplate. This seemed a mutilation waiting to happen, ever since the dawn of us, mankind, nippled mankind, when he barged his way into natural history, and made nature his empire. All that there was left to deal with, and to master was nipples. And I had done it. I put my nipples in a little purse, having picked the clingy black hairs out of them, and went out into the town for a pasty, and a cup of coffee, to celebrate. I stopped at the Farmer’s Union pub actually and, as I didn’t have plastic, and not enough cash for a Stowford, offered the barman one of my nipples to pay for a drink. A drunk, unsteady on his pins, veered in the direction of the bar, slurrily demanding a rum and coke or something: into me he crashed. I dropped the nipple- that I had just elicited from my coat pocket with such aplomb-, into a glass of…Glenfairn on the counter (the barman had only just finished pouring- I noticed the brand of the bottle and was able to recognise and pronounce it). In the glass- not the glass itself (a benign capacity I am quite sure)- but the whiskey in the glass, the nipple sort of fizzed, sizzled, and shrivelled and burst simultaneously. It expired, beyond any doubt, in the glass. They were all furious with me, the bad drinker, the good drinker, and the barman. The latter told me to get out, and declared that I was barred. I strolled past a beggar outside the pub who asked me if I had any spare change on me. But I had nothing of any help to him on my person. A good nipple was wasted on a vagabond like that. As luck would have it, a child clattered into me and fell over: I helped him up. It is, I know, considered taboo in our society to say this, but my intentions were only good, so I went ahead and said it: Would you like a sweet? I said. The child- a boy- nodded, tearful at falling over and having been so gauche amidst other bodies on the street. Open up then, pal. Perhaps I didn’t say that aloud, maybe I only thought it…his parents were nowhere to be seen in the crowd. The boy opened his mouth, wide. His little white chops yawned open, a rose-coloured flush rushed joyfully into his cheeks, and I placed upon his tongue, like a priest giving out the host at first communion, what he knew as a deliciously sweet red sweet, and what I knew as my nipple. He ate it, seemed to enjoy it, then said it was a bit chewy. I called him an ingrate. His dad caught up with him, talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette. He saw me discussing what had just occurred with his boy. He called me a nonce and walked off. I had no reason to stay, my mission, as they say, accomplished. It had been a mission and it was, in its own odd way, accomplished. After all, who wants a good nipple going to waste?                         

IV

            It was a very pleasant morning. By the time I’d jogged up Dingham and back down Pederake, I was very much in the mood for breakfast, Arthur too. Arthur was a friend, a fellow jogger. Somehow we always coincided on our morning jog. That morning, we decided to have breakfast together, sort of like a date, but not quite. I only jog when I’m single. It’s actually not a bad way to meet people, get to know people, if one slows one’s jog down to an equitable pace, one can quite happily, if a little breathily, converse. And one can always accelerate one’s jog, quite seamlessly turn it into a quick flight, a sprint, and run away without seeming rude, if one’s jogging partner disappoints. At that time, I had broken up fairly recently with a boyfriend, and was just glad of the exercise and the reason to rise early. The sunrise can be so beautiful that time of year, particularly from high vantage points, like the top of Dingham…hills and coniferous trees, densely packed against the east, smudges of water-coloured peach. I love to look at it.   

            Aside from the intent gaze which had a tendency to linger upon my arse, nothing about Arthur repelled me, his manner was pleasant, polite. He was relatively handsome, slim, toned. Nice jawline shaded in five o’clock shadow. He was only a little funny. It was almost in desperation that I kept laughing at only marginally amusing utterances of his, as if I was trying to will something comedic out of him that wasn’t there. He was quite keen, I remember feeling, for it to work out between us. He sub-verbally declared his interest, and in like fashion I was able to register it. He noted and took my hints of receptiveness. Jogging as an act engenders proximity, and suggestibility. Sex is somehow adjacent to exercise. Sweat sings in me with a strange song of appeal. I have a secret, seldom-declared love of sweat, I take a guilty pleasure in it, my own, or another’s, another woman’s, another man’s. 

            Anyway, breakfast. The Tailor is at the top of a hill, a very pleasant grass hill planted with oak trees and apple trees (in blossom, white with their May, ahead of fruit). In some places sparsely planted hyacinths are blue, in others snowdrops are white, whiter than the apple blossom. The Tailor doesn’t begin serving booze until twelve, traditional opening time, but it does offer cheap breakfasts from eight-thirty. Until opening time proper, that is. On that occasion, The Tailor was Arthur’s suggestion and I acquiesced willingly. He guided me across the threshold of entrance and I hardly noticed how significant it was to traverse the outer boundary of the place. 

            He ordered muesli (I think he did that to appear dainty and frugal and ungreedy- I clocked a certain disappointment sigh through the order’s vowels as he pronounced them in his delicate, little voice, its oo and its ee: Muesli). I ordered eggs benedict. I was quite hungry and I was tempted to order the traditional fry, but I wasn’t willing to undo all the work I had done that morning. It’s far easier to put on weight than to lose it, the ghost of my former fat fourteen-year old self was always walking with me, sobbing behind my shoulder, a shadow. It is always walking with me, sobbing behind me, behind my shoulder: a shadow.

            At any rate, we sat down at a table before a pair of big, uncurtained windows. The interior was dark, the beams of wood black, and the ceiling and floor both a deep mahogany. So, the light of the windows came through in strangely beautiful blasts. The morning lay there in the windows, the world lay there the other side of the glasspanes. Light always tends toward a bluish tinge in dark places like that pub, licensed premises, not yet selling the substance for the sale of which they were licensed. I sat there, looking past Arthur, out at those steep contours I had thoroughly explored, those gradients up which I had run, or seemed to run so many times. Arthur wasn’t much more than a bluish outline really, just an ink-blue idea of a personality, deceptive, digital-looking, nebulous, vapour.

            “Arthur?” I said. “Where have you gone”.

            My voice boomed a little. The acoustic was resonant, church-like, not dry and wooded as I had expected. I knocked on a wall with a knuckle. It was like knocking on a sonorous, metallic dome: hollow. The light through the windows had a strong flavour of holiness to it. Feeling quite alone, I could not help but sense a great sacred significance all around me, a deep sense of saturating meaning and beauty in the mundane.         

            “Here you are, madame,” a very young waitress said.

            A large traditional English breakfast descended armlessly, like a floating saucer, to the table before me.

            “I didn’t order that,” I protested.

            But she was gone.

            I looked down at my plate. Not only had it not been requested, but it seemed odd and profane in the chapel-like interior into which The Tailor, with disarming suddenness, had started to evolve.

            I want my muesli, Arthur said. The dark shape quivered a little, but I could discern no lips.

            “Come back! His… ” I remembered my eggs benedict. “What about my…” But no-one was listening. 

The plate before me made to me an irresistible appeal. Yet in the irreal spectacle of the tomatoes, and the piled hashbrowns like rock formations or slabs of limestone pavement, the phallic sausage and flat fried mammary egg and red wings of bacon (with pink hints), that oasis of glistening beans, something seemed wrong.

I upset the little lake of orange at the egg’s centre with a sharp shard of toast. As though it were a catastrophic rupture of far more significance, yolk dripped noisily from the toastpiece. It was a primordial noise, a noise that recalled the dawn of life, like the resonant plop of an enormous globule of spittle from a pair of giant jaws in a silent cave. A small splash of yolk lay dashed upon the dark floor. 

“Help…” I uttered, vaguely.  

I went in for more yolk and slurped it down, on the toast. The toast was just a piece of edible cloth really, to mop up and offer to my tongue the wet realness of that blobby lifeform’s ambrosial centre. But it was good. It was good, I couldn’t deny. I began at the bacon, adding some mustard which had been provided and consuming most of it quickly), I devoured the sausage (with daddy sauce) in a giffee, I sandwiched the egg between the hash browns, I stained the bread in tomato juice and punctured the two tomatoes, their bodies like two kidneys, with my fork and ate those for good measure, I practically inhaled the beans. Still the figure opposite me, just a flickering man-shaped darkness in the light, spectated mutely as I gave in to my appetites, occasionally gesturing in my direction a spectral nod, and even more infrequently sounding a small vague moan of protest: I’m hungry. But I could do nothing to remedy his hunger. Something told me it was dog eat dog, every man for himself in this place, this hall of jackals.

            “Is everything alright with your breakfast?” the waitress asked, returning airily. Her voice sounded like it was trapped inside a hoover bag.  

            “What’s happening?” I asked. “Please listen to me. What’s happening? I thought I knew, but I don’t. What’s happening to me?”

            “Not a lot,” the waitress said. And she walked away, leaving me alone again.

            “Where’s Arthur?” I cried out. I could rely on no-one to locate him so I addressed him myself. “Arthur?”

            I’m here, the abstraction said. It spoke by telepathy, buzzing like a projection. Its voice was not much more than a hum that sympathetically…or do I mean synthetically- sounded in my mind. It wasn’t much more real than if my mind had created it. It had no sweat, it had no lingering eye. And the plate before me lay not empty, not empty at all…a massacre.

V

            Summer, and a storm-rumbles where I cannot see it. The air is humid, heavy with May, though the sky is crowded colourlessly with clouds and looks like any time of the English year. That was when I saw him for the first time. In every student residence, there is a, so called, Invisible Man. It can be a woman but it is usually a man. One who never uses the kitchen, who avoids his other flatmates if he possibly can: who sneaks out of the house before they’re up and only comes back when they’re all asleep. Or just lies low for an entire day, silently, in his room, part of his room, as though at the back of a wardrobe, among the winter coats. But, on the day of the summer storm- as though it summoned him-, I saw him. At least, I thought I did.

            The weighty quiver of the boom sounds where I cannot see: far away enough to instil a sense of distance, a sense of lumbering, apprehensive quietness, but with a shudder long, low, and penetrating enough that its vastness is obvious, as is its promise of violence. The threat mounts, rain sheets on the windows and the roof, the thunder moves closer.

            We are all in the kitchen having a drink. Apart from The Invisible Man that is. His name is Harvey, we know that from the occupancy list taped to the kitchen wall, but it doesn’t even provide a surname, or a middle name, and we have never seen him. That two-syllable first name has about it a feeling of ominous cavity, of insufficient vagueness. Who is Harvey? What does he look like? His room is opposite my room. Sometimes I have remained awake for hours, just hoping to hear the sound of his door open- should he exit to use the toilet. The squeak of the unoiled handle, the squelch of the door’s foamy border leaving the frame. My scheme is to come out as soon as he does, pretending to need the bathroom, collide with him on the landing. But he seems to know when he is being hunted, has a preternatural intuition, ever alert, which senses us, not only our physical presence but our intents. We have never knocked on his door. It seems like a violation of his sanctuary. He has the right not to know us. But curiosity rages, we sometimes discuss him, at length, what he looks like, the reason for his solitary ways.  

            The closest I came to seeing Harvey was one night when I was up late. I wasn’t able to sleep: unusually intense period pain kept me awake. I was making some Horlicks for my anxious stomach and to soothe my generally unlevel spirits, when I heard the door open and Harvey’s curious, heavy steps in the corridor of entrance. That night was a rainy one: the blueblack night and a few orange streetlamps lay pixellated in all the raindrops on the windowpanes. I heard the shaking of an umbrella, and then a sort of low, bestial sound of complaint, or irritation. Then his steps began to ascend, up the helical stairway. I bolted from the kitchen. But the sound of the door scared him: I was just about able to catch a dark movement, a shadowed form scampering away into his room, in two quick strides. That was the closest I ever came.

            On the summer day of the storm, we are all having a drink when the others decide to go out and experience the storm directly, the thunder, the shower. They tipsily decide to unencumber themselves. Visible lightening seems like a fairly probable possibility. But though they all fly into the elements, I remain because I have received something rather important, the night before: …a note under my door.

            Make them leave and I’ll come out, it says.

            The others haven’t decided to go out, I have encouraged them out. Go on, go out! I urge. I can’t because of my stomach, and my period pain (neither of which exist- I am in the pink as it happens of quite a different state), I need to rest, recuperate. And when James, Winston, Phyllis, and Siobhan have all gone gallivanting off in cagoules and boots (they are surprisingly well equipped for the adverse weather conditions), slow, slouching steps begin dragging on the floor 1 landing. Something exits Room 3, where Harvey lives. He doesn’t need to be summoned. 

I am so excited. The tread is heavy and horrendous. On the stairs the loudening steps pound as he sluggishly descends. The rest of the distance is, at last, covered. It doesn’t take more than fifteen seconds but each of those fifteen feels eternal. Finally, he reaches the bottom and the kitchen door begins to creak open.

            I gasp at what presents itself. The figure is enormous, it is amazing the agility with which I have heard and sensed him move, not directly prior to this appearance, but other times. It is hard to describe Harvey. Harvey is…not quite human, not quite human-seeming. The bitter, wasp-like face is not evident at first. His head is inside him, part of the abominable bulge of his entirety. He is hump-backed, with a long swishing rat-like tail of rubbery pink. His shoes are armoured boots, and they are earthy, wormy. Yet somehow they never leave a mark upon any of the floors. In places he is externally skeletal, the black matter, the congealed slime that is the substance of which he is made is in places contained within- locked behind rather than supported by the skeleton. He breathes in baleful wheezes and I can see the beating, the pumping engine of his inwardness.

            “Harvey!” I gasp.

            His face dawns on me, as he lifts his downcast gaze. Flat features, weird inanimate diamond eyes and a triangle mouth lie like the markings on cards from a card-deck upon the yellow-pale complexion.

            The encounter is so intense, my body so hungry and receptive with ovulatory desire, that it is with a kind of magnetic inevitability that we are drawn towards one another. I am tiny among the dinosaur-like tower and breadth of him, and seek furiously for his penis. He has succumbed to my spell so readily, he groans with what sounds like agony but what I intuitively know is pleasure as he stares into the mesmeric crevice of my breasts, globed almost spherically with my fertility. His nose, a vegetal lump, pulses with a sensual expertise: he can smell my fertility. 

            “Harvey!” I gasp happily again, in rapture at the tiny penis which wriggles about before me, like an eel. By any scale, by any standard his penis is tiny, it is not only tiny against his vast form, it is tiny against any form. But in amongst the fearful turbulence of his black body, blacker even than mine, the miraculous miniaturisation constitutes penile magnificence of an utterly new and most unusual kind. 

            He is a sensitive, if not very verbal, lover, and we make love, thusly. 

            He flashes me a strange, crocodilian smile. Then he turns, beginning his retreat, back to the silence and anonymity of his room. I see his back. It is a like a tortoise shell, hunchbacked, rough like a knuckle-shaped mountain. And in the clayey texture the colour of the earth, the forms of strange, dismayed, wailing faces, like wax seals, are stamped. He disappears and I am breathless with sensation. He is gone, having come. Having splashed into reality with great, strange muscularity, he retires, back the way he came, to improbability, and the solace of the upper room where no-one may enter, and he may not be known. At last I collapse and I sleep.

            When the others return they remark upon an unusual fragrance in the kitchen. They bark questions at me, what happened here, what is that strange smell…what have you been doing, Sam? It is a truth of such wild wonder that I cannot keep it to myself. It seems almost like a dream, but I am heavy and moist with its aftermath. My body knows it to be true. So, I exclaim: 

            “I fucked Harvey!”

             They look at me sideways, cast me suspicious, sidelong glances. They judge me, find me culpable, guilty of some great indiscretion. 

            I should be pregnant. I am pregnant. But the baby never arrives. No change occurs within my womb, there is no nausea, not a single menstrual absence. Nine months pass. Harvey keeps himself to himself, as do I. 

The others cannot help but look at me askance, cannot help but visit upon me the penance due to one who has crossed whatever line it is that I have crossed. I learn something of Harvey’s solitude, find that I am not as suited to it as he is.

            People come and people go, the others go away for the holidays and then return. But I may never go. And they shun me all the while… 

            …until there is nothing left of me, and there is nothing left of Harvey. I saw him one last time before I ceased, before I was no more, before their shunning made me disappear, before the will of the others became the universe’s will, and I fade, and he fade. Such creatures fade. Me, Harvey, the marks of sorrow and joy and passion that we left, fade like footprints in saltmarsh, like the marks the lapwings and the plovers leave. Where are they going?

            My voice I relinquish. I hand it over, willingly.

            Their consummation knit them: a soul drew a soul into its precincts. And though Sam’s womb never filled, their labours, hers and Harvey’s, in the kitchen, that afternoon of the storm, did bear fruit. At last there was a baby. Harvey was a white man and he gave the child blue eyes and a lightness of skin tone and a white man’s nose. Other traces of him may be found in the child’s appearance, physiology, and character. And Sam was a black woman and she gave the child black Afro-textured hair and a darkness of skin tone and her very own smile. Other traces of her may be found in the child’s appearance, physiology, and character. The others, James, Winston, Phyllis, and Siobhan, two of whom are black, and two of whom are white, hear crying from Harvey’s room. It is a crying they cannot ignore, what sounds like a baby, and they venture within. In the immaculate interior, upon the made bed, a naked infant boy sits. He weeps and weeps. “Sam?” they cry, and move to look into her room. But it is locked. No-one is there. Harvey is certainly not there, they know that, though they never saw him. The only one of them who ever did is no more. She looked upon him and was struck by so great a revelation of beauty that she could hardly bear it, and having succumbed to its spell, disappeared. The others who live in that little house could not bear that she had seen it and they had not. All that remains of the fervour and the fright, the passions and the joy, and the trembling and the  sadness, is a baby. With his wet eyes, he regards the four young people. He wails. He wails. They scarcely know what to do but fall down before him. They fall before him, all. For they see that Love was victorious. Out of the mire and decay, out of the random and diabolical clay beneath their feet, beneath the foundations of this house, out of the wriggling foams and the plasm and the bones of dead men and women, Love won. And in room 3, in Harvey’s old room, by him and by Sam, with the gift of her love, and the helping gift of her black flesh, a world was made.