Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

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Another late night insomnia driven delve into the unpublished, and possibly unpublishable stories stacked in boxes under my bed. I now present the latest installment of my Slush Pile Bonanza. This piece was written in 2016, and although I performed it a few times, it never felt quite finished. Having said that, I notice it has a word count of 666 words, so at some point I must have worked pretty hard on it to achieve such a deliberate number .

Her Feet, Her Blessed Feet

The fact is I can smell her feet from here, a hundred full paces away, I swear I can still smell her feet. And she’s up there, oblivious, waiting for me, outside the cinema. She’s schmoozing and cruising, hob-nobbing with the other celebrities on the red carpet. In tailored red-sex dress and Jimmy Choos she is a papparazzi wet dream, but she is waving only to me, directly to me.

Pathologically photogenic, especially in the pyrotechnics of a media storm, she is majestic! I should be up there beside her but I’m dawdling by a magazine kiosk watching, because I am enveloped in billows of her foot odour, even by this Newsstand, I can still smell her feet.

I’m cooling my heels and curling my toes, and I’m thinking and I’m thinking, should I turn and run? but how could I? Look! Look at her! Beautiful, flawless, intelligent, witty, sometimes wild, mostly amusing. A movie-star girl-next-door goddess-lover.

If only she’d wash her putrid feet once in a while.

This is our first date actually, I’m her guest at a launch party for a blockbuster film she stars in. Although I call it our first date, I’ve been working closely with her for six weeks now, but she approached me and quite assertively insisted it was me that accompany her here alone tonight. Just the two of us, at a movie star gala bash where she’s the resident princess of the show and I am her Podiatrist. Actually I’m on overtime this evening, I’m being paid double-time, just to be here.

Officially my brief is to assist her in breaking in a new pair of “catwalk shoes”. We’ve been working with moleskin and surgical spirit immersions all week. I hoped the spirit would harden the cushions of her sole and so reduce chances of blisters. I had also hoped the alcohol spirit would kill off fungi and dampen her aura-like reek. Futile. Tonight she smells like a passed out wino, one that forgot to wash her feet.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. Or I’m over-sensitive, being her clinical chiropodist, personal pedicurist, Reflexology Master and Consultant on Cobblers, her feet are my professional responsibility, it says so on my contract.

Although I do wonder about the legal situation with my work contract if I do decide to sleep with her. Do I still have to do her feet, or can I delegate?

She’s waving right at me now, unmistakably, I have to go to her, for the sake of my career I have to join her in the locker room stench of her bloody red carpet. Am I just a Pet Podiatrist?

Shit! This is our first date. To me, this feels like the first day of my life.

And aside from the foot odour, I am so in love with her. I so want, I so want…

Then again, I daren’t imagine what it’d be like if we did get intimate. What would I do if, while cosily settling down curled up with coffee on her Zen-White sex-sofa, she nonchalantly kicked off her Manolo Blahnik’s? Oh Lord! What if she then peeled off her sheer black tights?

I can’t! you know! Nylon panty-hose is a breeding ground for obscure and rancid bacterias, everyone knows that. Why do women do this thing with the panty-hose tights?

It isn’t only destructive of natural fauna, it isn’t only physically damaging to the whole lower regions of the female body, it also constricts the base chakra and engorges the meridians with stagnant Chi. Sex would be a psychic impossibility.

Oh! But here she comes, beaming out to me, over the heads of the flashbulbs popping, her angelic face haloed in the gold of her blonde curls, cherub-like. And her smile, hold me while I swoon, like an all-encompassing sun-rising heart-leap, that very very nearly cleanses away my retching knowledge of her corn-encrusted feet stinking.

I so want, I so want, but I really don’t know if I can stand her feet, her blessed feet….

June 2016 Word count 666

One More Cup of Coffee For The Road

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Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.
Self-portrait 2017. photo by Bella Basura.

It seemed never to be quiet, at that time. We were on the move for sure, from cafe to cafe to bar to hostal to cafe around and around, radios playing loud in every place. Noise and radios, chatter and clatter and noise and songs on the radio. For some reason we had gotten superstitious about Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World”. It was on the radio a lot at that time, and everytime it came on we fell into a weird ritual heralding departure. First we had to listen in silence to the song all the way through. When it was over we would immediately stand and leave. That song was our cue to get back on the move. Once we were back out on the street we were guided by whatever we found out there. Most times we found nothing much and so bought a newspaper and sat in a park. But if we saw a red car we went to the next bar, if we saw a telephone box we had to look for a hostal. If we saw a junkie, we scored, if we saw a copper, we fled the town. And so it was that we found ourselves in Andalucia, by the side of the road, hitching down to Morrocco, we told ourselves. That was the plan, I think.

We got picked up by an inter-continental mega-truck just outside Cordoba, and we pounded the freeway like kings, high in the cab of this mighty ride. The road rose and fell for dozens upon dozens of miles through foothills and moorlands until after a few hours the road reared up and topped out at a roadside bar, and that’s where the trucker left us. Lorry drivers and travellers and holiday makers meandered in the wide carpark. I guess it was some vista viewing point across the mountain range. We sat in the bar drinking tap water until Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio.

That’s how we hooked up with a man in a red Mondeo, shirt sleeves and tie, suit jacket hanging inside the passenger door. He was clearly a business man or travelling salesman, he seemed grateful for our company. In fact he spoke incessantly, speaking over the sound of the car radio, except when a good song came on, then he would listen and do drums on the steering wheel. As I zoned him out, gazing at the grassy hillsides and wild mountains, I wondered what we were doing, where it would end, this compulsive running to the sea. And that is when I first heard Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” on the radio, although it would be many years more before I was able to name it. The road curved down around a peak, sweeping in down flowing loops, the huge rocky scree pebbled slopes of the mountain looming above us as the road bottomed out into the wide green-carpet of river basin. Bob Dylan and EmmyLou Harris sang on “One more cup of coffee for the road, One more cup of coffee before I go, To the valley below”. It was a message, an omen. We were tumbling down into the valley below, we were running free now, onto the sea, and the straits, to Morrocco.

Inevitably, as we approached Malaga Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold The World” came on the radio. We listened in silence all the way through the song, and then we asked Shirt-Guy to drop us off anywhere here. We landed by the big circular wall of La Malagueta. We watched the red Mondeo weave off into the early evening traffic and superstitiously headed for the next bar.

The Eye of Alice the Leper

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First, they took the newly- identified Leper to the burial ground and laid them in an empty grave, a Priest performed a Requiem Mass and earth was thrown onto the Leper’s head.

Then the whole Parish processed the Leper to her new home, where this Mass of Separation, spoken by a priest, was performed at the site of the leper’s hut.

 “I forbid you to ever enter a church, a monastery, a fair, a mill, a market or an assembly of people.

I forbid you ever to leave your house without your leper’s dress, and also shod.

I forbid you to wash your hands or to launder anything or to drink at any stream or fountain, unless using your own barrel or dipper.

I forbid you to touch anything you buy or barter for, until it becomes your own.

I forbid you to enter any tavern; and if you wish for wine, whether you buy it or it is given to you, have it funneled into your keg.

I forbid you to share house with any woman but your wife.

I command you, if accosted by anyone while travelling on a road, to set yourself down-wind of them before you answer.

I forbid you to enter any narrow passage, lest a passerby might catch the affliction from you.

I forbid you, wherever you go, to touch the rim or the rope of a well without donning your gloves.

I forbid you to touch any child or give them anything.

I forbid you to eat or drink from any dishes but your own.

I forbid you to eat or drink in company, unless with lepers.”

*****

I look out the open door of my hut at the grey morning rise. There is no sunrise, just grey.

I look out the door of my hut, open doors are good for dispelling miasma. Though I am charged to close my door if anyone comes near, and I must stay downwind, on account of the movement of miasma. I must ring my bell.

I am alone here, and that’s fine. It is hard to be alone, but easier than shuffling downwind or giving them leprosy. Giving them leprosy is the worst, even if it’s only the fear of leprosy.

I am alone here, Alice in her leper hut. Do I have a cat? Yes, I have a cat. Greymalkin, I call her.

And she isn’t afraid of lepers, no cats are. Lepers have rats and scraps, just like anyone. Why would a wise cat fear a leper.

I did not join the lepers in the Lazar House, I do not live in company in the Spital. I prefer it out here, beyond the fields of the Leper Hospital. Alone I watch from my leper hut, as the lepers work the strips of the Spital Fields.

There is a Leper Chapel at the side of the Spital, where the good lepers hear the mass. And there is a Lychnoscope, a Hagioscope, a Squint in the wall, where guilt-ridden towns people, leaving alms for the allieviation of the suffering of lepers, cross themselves and cross back into town.

I too have a squint, by the side of my door, I take alms in exchange for visions. I am a leper, and so closer to death, for me the veil is thin, I can see those who will die within a year, and those who are already dead.

In the autumn when the lepers have brought in the leper harvest, and the fields are bare, the town set up a fair on the Spital Fields, trading and gaming and whoring, late into the nights.

And they queue at my closed door, when the fair is in the Spital Field, Parish people wait in turn at my Squint. They pay me alms for visions, to spy out the dead and soon to die, I see them all with my leper eye.

In those autumnal nights when the raucous crowds are thronging, out there I see you, Dodie Disease-Monger and Lizzie Leper-Maker, drunk on sack, skirts hitched high, dancing in the stubble. I see you, I know you and your works. You eyed me, now I eyeball you.

Return the evil to the evil-doer.

You are in the leper’s vision, now I see you with my leper eye.

There is a chapel hardby the Spital where the good lepers hear mass. But I stay away, I am a leper and worse, for I am a leper with visions. I see my own demon gods in the dark of my leper hut.

I am an outcast, even among Lepers.

Unexpected in October

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Recent recording of a piece I first posted a year ago.

Unexpected in October – recorded reprise – Eulogy for Scott

If I can make a landscape for a dream, let it be this place. Some day soon the winter will fall, but this afternoon in this garden the sky is still clear and brazen blue, the wind still rustles in the leaves not yet turned and birds chatter on in deep greenery, insects still flutter in dappled shade. The sun still warms my face, the grass still growing under my feet, a squirrel climbs to the highest waving branches where glossy green ivy leaves entwine, waiting for the year to pass on. I close my eyes, a tranquil moment for the dead and dying, held in trance-like waiting, the sun still calls my eyes to the sky. I don’t want to lose this moment, I don’t want to go indoors, but the chill air rising creeps up my spine, a flying crow caws overhead, the wonder is breaking, broken by a growling jet that cuts the sky in two. Some day soon the winter will fall again, but now, today, this afternoon in this garden, summer still lingers on, and hope is still strong. If I can make a landscape for a dream, let it be this place.

Word of That Week

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“Metastasised” They said.

That week it was a new word for me. I had to google it.  It means the spread of cancer to distant parts of the body. I’d never heard it before.

And now, I’ve heard it three times in a week.

I sat down in the kitchen, paused the washing up, poured myself a glass of tequila. Tried to understand why the interviewed novelist on the BBC Radio 4 arts show had chosen to use that word, that big awful stupid bloody word, to describe her creative process.

I mean, writers do understand the impact of words, writers do grasp how to use the esoteric power of words, that’s the magic of spelling.

I wondered what self-defeating disgust she was expressing against her own art.

“Metatasised” she said “the characters simply metatasised into the internal drive of the narrative arc…”

I switched the radio off, gulped at the tequila, trying to drown the word in drunkeness.

I’m familiar with “frequency bias”, I’ve heard of “selective attention”, I’ve wikipediaed “confirmation bias”. Over and over again.

The second time that week that I heard the word “Metatasised” was from some second-rate TV celebrity. He was making a pre-emptive denial on YouTube, in advance of channel 4 running a damning exposē of his misogynistic abuse of his co-workers. “Metatasised” he said, “the media metatasised my open promiscuity into very agregious accusations…” he blustered in vain. The channel 4 documentary cut him down anyway, in spite of his invocation of cancer.

“Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – a cognitive bias refering to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time” As if Red Army Faction hijacking, kidnapping, bombing and assasination, as if violent delusions of terrorist revolution, was simply a psychological repetition of a re-repetition. Over and over again. As if a terminal diagnosis could be just clever hyperbole.

“Metatasised” He said.

Earlier that week I had sat with my friend in the clinic at Addenbrookes. That’s the first time I ever heard the word in my life.

“Metatasised” the oncologist said. He said my friend’s cancer had Metatasised.

=============

Bin Day

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It vaguely caught my eye a couple of times and I thought it was one of tribe of black crows with white-flecked wings that inhabit my street. But it wasn’t, it was just a discarded black bin bag enjoying a bit of freedom in the Bin Day afternoon.

I think the crows are naturally black, but are developing white flecks on their wings. The crows are turning white, feather by feather. This colour change is possibly due to vitamin and mineral deficiencies, leading to loss of the melatonin in the feathers. Of course the creatures are malnourished, they are urban crows, they are surviving on trash, eating from bin bags. Left over ultra processed ready meal gobets and soiled cat litter pickings a plenty.

From my window I have watched the crows dunking cigarette butts into puddles to rid them of their paper skin, then gobble down the puddle soaked filters like a delicacy.

Then it catches my eye again. The free range black bin bag in the street shudders across the road, like a flurry of ferrets, back and forth in the wind.

And again, contorting into a hunched half torso straddling the white line down the middle of the tarmac.

Wet grey rainy bin day, twilight afternoon midwinter, the crows warily eye a stray black plastic bin bag waddle to the kerb, finally settling down in the form of a metalic grey arrow headed dragon child, curled in the shade of next doors toyota, his squamous wings and gills rhymically fluttering in his sleep.

The Passing Tale of Rimmer and Moomy

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His nickname was Rimmer, sometimes just Rim. I don’t know why he was called that, thankfully I only met him a couple of times.

The first time was when his girlfriend invited me out for a coffee. The girlfriend’s nickname was Moomy, I only went the once. I only went the once because Moomy simply couldn’t stop talking, speaking loudly and rapidly, barely comprehensible in her non-native English. I don’t know what was wrong with her to be so aggravatingly and pointlessly vocal, some said it was an undiagnosed mental illness, I think it was cocaine. To be honest, she did look like a cokehead, and she was self-absorbed, overbearing and boring enough to be on cocaine.

Anyway, Moomy invited me out for a coffee through the friend of a friend, and she brought Rimmer along because he couldn’t be left on his own at home, I don’t know why. Moomy was relentless, rambling, arse-achingly dull. Every once in a while Rimmer, whose voice was booming and plonky, would start pontificating himself, like when one disturbed barking farm-dog sets off all the others aroundabouts. Moomy would indulge Rimmer a little, allowing him to run his mouth for a few minutes, then she would shut him down “No minding if him, he just autistico” she would shout and continue with her own tediously incoherent monologuing.

I never went for coffee with them again, between them they made me feel socially violated.

It took me a week to wash them out of my head.

The only other time I spent with Rim Rimmer was when Moomy had flown home to have her anal glands expressed, I think that’s what she said. She said “I cannot NHS fucking stupid. In my country dentist make all anal glands for sixty euro. In this fucking country NHS you wait five years on list for down there is same relief. I no fucking wait for NHS. I go my own country is better than fucking England.”

So Moomy was away for a month or so and she was furiously messaging my friend to visit Rimmer, have drinks with him and check he was okay. The friend, horrified at the thought of spending a whole evening alone with Rim had insisted I come along too.

We arrived at Rimmer and Moomy’s flat as late as politely possible, he showed us to the sofa, and quickly poured us what he called “cocktails” pink gin and tonic in full pint glasses, it looked like he was going to really stretch the evening out. “There’s more where that came from, plenty of drinking here” He shouted as he sat himself down at his computer desk, his chair back facing us. The interesting thing about Rim was, that without the controlling influence of Moomy’s constant verbalising, he himself was an insufferable monologing bore. For two hours, which is when we finally managed to get away, Rimmer spoke incessantly into his computer screen, although I think he thought he was talking to us. The first thing he said was “Back in the day we would make proper cocktails, we made molotovs and let them off in bus shelters”. My mind was boggling, I wish now that I’d been recording him on my phone, then I could be sure of what he actually said. Anyway, here is my undoubtedly unreliable recounting of his speech.

Back in Barn Hill where he grew up, a village outside the city, the teenage Rimmer and his school chums regularly raided a disused factory where there were abandoned explosives. They would drain jam jars full from pierced steel drums of unspecified flammable fluids, priming them with readily available noxious household poisons. They would combine and mix and prime and refine these little glass bombs, then they would take them to bus shelters at night and put a match to them. Rimmer’s friends would crouch in safety behind the bus shelter glass, while he would boldly ignite the jam jars and run. Sometimes the explosions were terrific, shaking the bus shelter to it foundations, sometimes the young men were deafened, ears ringing and leaking blood for days, sometimes he barely got behind the safety glass before the detonation. And sometimes nothing at all happened, and they would walk back home, despondant, leaving the dangerous jam jars behind in the bus shelter for children and dogs to find the next day.

And that is The Passing Tale of Rimmer and Moomy, and why I hope to never see them again.