Terms and Conditions

Called to arms, the two parties had agreed to the following terms:

Firstly the parameters were not to be strictly obeyed even if they had by other means to define a connection.

Secondly, if the connection could not be defined, they had to continue to look for the thread.

Thirdly, if the thread could not be found, they had to guarantee a line.

Fourthly the line did not have to be particularly thick, but just enough to hang by a thread.

Lastly, all the above could be happily ignored as long as there was something interesting in the delay and the ball was kept in play.

The Assassin

He appeared one day – out of the blue.

Introducing himself as Professor Black, he placed the board game on the table and laid out the pieces with his question.

Where is the murder weapon?

Insisting she was not drunk she asked him about the people in his life – but he just smiled and turned to the picture on the wall of the flyer.

The story seemed to elude her recollection until in a whispering voice he told her about the box; she could not understand how he knew. Where did you hear about that?

She was indignant!

Struggling to recall what he looked like, she settled on thin, angular features and a goatee, which seemed to accentuate his incisive mind…

She remembered his wine breath - her mind racing with strange, crowded thoughts… And when she awoke in the morning – there was blood on the sheets…

You are talking, people said around the quad. We thought you were - pace the Trappist - a quiet girl.

Smiling to herself; she walked proudly in the knowledge she had tripped the switch. It was only a long time after that she realised it was a deception. He – the devious fellow had tricked her into surrender.

The Aesthetic Society

The meetings, which took place every last Thursday of the month included, among its guest speakers, a philosopher from Cambridge, a poet from Northern Ireland, a feminist from Hamburg… Perhaps it was humbug, but O was in seventh heaven. These parties in her professor’s rooms where everyone talked loud – everyone was brilliant and sophisticated. - They drank cheap red wine. She too became brilliant and sophisticated, and drank cheap read wine. Even if it was only in her head they flocked round. – Intrigued. – But she never made friends outside that room

The Old Man of the Mountain

One day, in homage to these adventures, she sat down and wrote it out on a full-scrap notebook that she stole from T’s stationery cupboard.

O was playing on the riverbank when the pirates came up the river and captured her. They took her away on their ship to Africa, put her in chains and sold her on the market.

After many adventures at the hands of cruel masters and shrill mistresses, she was sold to another caravan.

Blindfolded, O is led to the old man of the mountain. In the palace of the old man she is given a pipe and put to sleep in a bed of satin sheets.

Later she learns she has been pledged to the contract of the assassins.


She put the story away in a drawer, and forgot all about it…

A knight there was

It was not on the shelves with the other children’s books, but in the in-tray – a hardback with a plastic dust jacket and the image of knight and castle suggesting what she little remembered of the book that played innocently with tired literary themes.

Girl, disguised as boy,
Goes off on Crusade.
His/her caravan attacked
by Saladin’s men,
Made prisoner.
Rescued by mysterious knights,
She flees with the king.
The king does not know she is a girl – just a boy…
And, even as the girl falls in love,
She pledges fealty to her king.

The Library

It was something of a consolation. Her mind - in the quest for other like minds, not the minds of her shallow “Brideshead” contemporaries – slipped – so to speak - into the hidden corners, niches of books.

Books.

When did it start? - Her feeling about the books. Her intimates, friends!

As a child she would make her way up the street past the delicatessen and the launderette. With a growing sense of responsibility she crosses the road at the lights… She enters via the rampart.

Her eyes go wide
Shut
Old gentlemen
Rustling newspaper
Solemn ladies
Shuffling index forms

Only Sleeping

She recognised it with the fading music - the sense something was just eluding her, and coming up against the boxed up – clamed up version of herself. Her dilemma when she sat down to write - knowing there were things that she wanted to say but could not (Where was the assassin?). The answer always seemed to slip outside language into silence.

Perhaps it was always thus – lulled by the wee comforts of self-pleasure (‘tis no accident that is called O); the days merge into each other until she forgets when the holiday ends and the term begins. Later it seemed nothing more than an extension of her silent folly. As if there was something lazy - almost dull in her nature, just like that fellow in the song watching the world go by his window.

Trappist

At school, too, she was known as a quiet girl until, one day, Mister Thatcher, the history teacher hit on the precise definition. When they found out what that meant, the other girls laughed all the more at the afflicted Nunn.

The story of O

O liked to think of it as a metaphor – her mother holding her head as if expecting one of her frightful migraines, frets about that girl of mine who never speaks – forever holds her tongue. Her daughter, meanwhile, waits on the moment when she turns to admonish acid Trevor over the wine.

Don’t give her that. You’ll only get her drunk.

Why ever not? Says Trevor. – It will loosen her tongue.

Her Gift

She had forgotten all about it. – And in her excitement when she bent down to look in her bag, the top of the towel slipped. He still had the dirty look on his face as she placed the box into his open palms. Inside, he found a little wooden horse in folds of ink-filled tissue paper. - I thought you were a donkey fan.

I liked this horse too. It’s made of cedar.

And the horseman? He said. Is he made of cedar, or alabaster?

Ignoring his joke, she pointed to the folds of tissue paper. You must read it, she said quickly – almost impatiently. I have to know what you think.

12 Flavours

The items listed in the fridge
were as follows:
4 Becks
2 Carlsberg
3 cokes/ I diet
A fanta
2 Schwepps tonics
and 12 flavours
of Haagen Das
including chilli coated chocolate.

Hotel Room (2)

He for his part
was going to ask her to step into the light
but on second thoughts
and not wanting to spoil the moment
sat back to enjoy the view

Hotel Room (1)

On entering the hotel room,
she seized the dress
(purchased on his plastic
at the airport boutique)
and slipped with surprising
nonchalance
into the bathroom

When she turned to face herself
in the bathroom mirror,
she knew,
however,
she would have to practice
a degree of deception.

A Wonder of Modern Technology

The key to the hotel room was like a swipe card with a barcode to be read by the all-knowing computer. The receptionist claimed they were working on voice controlled commands. Very soon, she said, we’ll all have our own personal commands… just like Ali Baba with his Open sesame.

Bags to India

In his mind’s eye he had thought of a hundred different things to say. But when he saw her stepping out of arrivals, he was lost for words. Her face - and finally her nose! No longer hidden in trails of hair. In his moment of inadequacy, however, he was abetted by the fact that her luggage had been mislaid. It must have gone to India, he said.

The Planes

Eventually he had agreed to meet her at the airport. She was to be on a connecting flight, but the plane was delayed by an hour. During the wait, he felt almost sluggish from nerves. A residual fear perhaps of his proximity to the planes – and their beady heads that rose into the sky with unfailing regularity.

Hijacker in Fright

His explanation, when it came, was as convoluted as his mind.

I have put objections for our meeting that would fly in the face of the rational and that would lead you to think as you do. Facetiousness justified, injury compounded. I hope now you will understand. I cannot fly. It is impossible. No plane will take me. I am like a hijacker who on the point of action takes fright. He blocks the cockpit until the captain does as he’s told and the plane descends.

Lover's cloud

A crossword clue hangs in the air
The Sudoku will not reveal itself.

Will he ever catch the plane? She wondered. Not knowing.

In a lover’s cloud.
A cloud of unknowing.

Geography Exercise

With each suggestion he seemed to raise an objection until it became a futile exercise in geography to which she appended the following list:

Why not the South Pole?
Tierre del Fuego?
The end of Middle Earth?
The Bottom of the Sea?
The final abyss?

- And yes, I am being facetious. - The truth is you do not want to meet.

Spain

What about Spain, she wrote, I have always wanted to go to Spain. – I remember, as a child, my granny brought me back a little donkey. It had a place of honour, among all my precious objects. I used to picture the donkey walking through the country lanes I saw in our school textbook. It must have been the donkey that inspired me to read that book. What was it called? About the boy who leaves home and goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

He wrote back:

Spain gave me diarrhoea. My skin came up in blotches. I spent the holiday in the toilet of a hacienda disco.

Then you did not like Spain?

I loved it. Just Spain didn’t love me.

Muse

With the secret burgeoning inside them (and the excitement that it brought) he wrote:


Last night I dreamt you were here in my flat. – There were few details. You were part of a general impression. - I could not really see your face or what you were wearing! When you spoke, your lips curled up at me in depreciation. I thought – understand this was still in the dream:

Does the muse always do this?
Is cruelty forever a part of her writ?

This dream I confess has put me in a strange mood. I am oddly, bizarrely afraid, whether it is of your depreciation, and its flip side. I begin to feel that a vast irritation is awaiting us…

Uno Nessuno e Centomila

My nose sticks out
Bends slightly
To the left

So my wife says

When I look in the mirror
I cannot see. It is not my nose,
Not even my best pose

My wife laughs and combs her hair
It’s slipped, she says. That’s right,
I say. Gone off to market. My wife
Does not understand. It is not my nose,
Not even my best pose

Now when I look in the mirror,
My nose begins to flatten
Into an old man
Plugging the ring of Saturn

Mirror

M had a job at Macafee’s whose latest campaign was to sell duck soup to afternoon viewers. When his boss had stuck a photo of his nextdoor neighbour on the power point and invited questions, something jarred in his mind. – The following day, standing in front of the mirror, he turned to his wife and asked the fifty million dollar question. His wife, who had just heard the phone, did not even bother to turn round. When she left the bathroom, M continued to stare at his reflection. For he was convinced of the opposite.

Mirror Mirror

After much coaxing, for she claimed she was not photogenic, he had sent a photo of himself accompanied by a self-depreciating note to show that he did not like it either. The photo he received back left him none the wiser, since her hair fell strategically down over her face. He wondered – quite innocently - if it had anything to do with her nose.

Correspondence

They began to write to each other in earnest. This was in part due to a shared perception. By a small coincidence they discovered that they had both lived in the same city; their pasts seemed to cross and diverge at points that were both interesting and curious to them. Their correspondence grew out of a certain compulsion; the pleasure of it became all consuming. When they had pause to reflect, they began to understand it had captured something of themselves that was not expressed in their lives as now lived, but what had been lost – irredeemably.

Prophet of Obscurity

It was in a dream… Or rather one of those waking dreams. Though not being an early riser, the recollection of it filled me with urgency. When I got up I knew I had to put it down.

And you are in the habit of putting down your dreams.

Only when it seems connected. And this case it was connected.

Because you saw the box?

I only saw the cover.

Which means?

It means… that it is connected to a design that is as yet obscure to me.

(Laughing) So that’s what you are then! – A prophet of obscurity!