Excerpt 144:

I Hear the Waves, I See the Waves

A gently undulating path wound through surfaces, purposefully infiltrated by uniformed and disciplined grass patches, and around and about stout, freshly tended flowerbeds festooned with uncoordinated handbag-riots of colour and fashion. The scenario’s outlying parameters were elaborated by realistic enough dog-walkers and couples, administratively, off in the middle distance, negotiating their business with faintly conducive industriality.

I walked in determined aimlessness; waiting for my predetermined target to evolve; knowing a decision had been made elsewhere as to my destination. Cresting a rise, the path wended downward towards a seafront and beyond that the sea, and beyond that, even… ours is not to question… And there she was, I thought, my point of departure to the next chapter. A bus shelter stood alone, unnoticed, perhaps, by others, but pregnant with meaning I had yet to decipher, for me. It sat there, unable to make it to a more sanitary place for the delivery. Relatively new, probably last cleaned at the time of the flower bed tending, populated with only a few small spiders who could have been real. The double sided shelter was open to the road that ran parallel to the shoreline as far as the eye could see both ways; The other faced the sea, where you could hear the crashing of the waves and see them roll in with the precision of a badly synced foreign movie. A discrepancy I felt like I needed to speak to someone about. Imagining, also, that on a perfectly stormy day a fine spray of ocean-misted sea-spit could gale-force intrusion; slobbering like a sea-dog all over the exposed sitee, who would be left unprotected by the shelter. 

I sat and waited for confirmation of my suspicion that I was in the optimal position transitionwise; next-episodewise.

The promenade walkway was rough and unevenly surfaced, neither a skater’s nor boarder’s friend. An odd cyclist drifted past unconcerned, bike-parts rattling, teeth chattering; two joggers astern, walking, running, jogging in varying displays of athletic unattainable athleticism. A lone child, a ghost, limbs missing, saying, ‘don’t forget the genocide,’ followed by the silent screaming agonies of tens of thousands of siblings, left for dead, left to wander the promenade of broken dreams in perpetuity. I doffed my ill-fitting, pretend cap to the children of inhumanity, while the sea air did a number on my wayward eye-moisture…

I watched. I waited.

I wanted to progress to the next level badly enough to whimper caninely in frustration at the gnawing anticipation.

All the basic scene-setting stuff was ridden through with a lacklustreness that was presumably supposed to indicate quotidian mundanity; convincing…yet without real immersive properties, until a voice that rang with recognition like a favourite old ringtone being brought back for a novelty listen.

‘Tony, Tony, my old monkey…how the hellcats are you, my great, dear, dead, long lost friend? Sorry…You may have noticed, I am just a recording from a past…I hope you aren’t really dead, not yet…that can only guess at what really needs to be said. Pertinence cannot be assured. But this speech, although on a scale from useless to counterproductive one end; helpful to crucial, the other, is unavoidable. It is imperative you act upon elements that are here revealed to you before you progress.’

The sound was muffled until I swapped from the road-facing area to the sea-facing area where the speakers were fully functioning and of a better quality.

‘Ignore me if I am waffling on a grill with no heat,’ a collection of sounds implicating the source voice to be K., said. Then there was a long, long gap in which I thought the recording had prematurely ended. My thoughts turned to the sea and the incompetently synchronised mess of it all.

‘Hey ways!’ the voice said, startling the waves out to sea, ‘You made it this far…only one small vaginal push left. You must make the final adjustments.’

‘Adjustments? Vaginal push? Hey ways?’ I heard myself saying embarrassingly loudly, despite the recording not having the technology to listen.

‘Look behind you, across the street at the building fourth along, at the upper windows…I mean, there could be no one there, it is a long shot…of pea-to-moon proportions, if I’m honest, but if you let honesty stand in the way…where does that lead you to, by the nose?’

‘The Truth…’

I stood up and looked to where I’d been prompted; the last person, or at least one of the last, I expected to see waving from a window above a pub was….ta-da: … I won’t tell you yet, I’ll save it for later… Okay, I’ll tell you now, it was Jeff, animated in a wave of detectable hopelessness that was transitioning to hopefulness with every wag; that had been piling on the hope like a dead battery plugged in to a super charger ever-since he’d seen me crossing the road. And I kind of picked up on that feeling…started booking venues on the strength of it. As I approached, the waving doubled; what looked like a more than passing resemblance of Una joining in the celebratory nonchalance-abandonment. They perceived an incoming of friendly narrative; their lost chapter surfacing; their story-buffer unblocking the way for history to get a better deal for the human element of the Life complex. 

I was emotionally salivating, like a dog making the biscuit/mouth, arrival/biscuit, biscuit/heaven, biscuit/biscuit interface connection that all, normally operational, dogs do. But I wasn’t a dog was I. Was I a dog? Did I have dog in me? A concoction of strange-weirdnesses begins to boil… I place it on the back-burner…smelting the bottom of the pan…simmering the film that separates air from water… Strangeness has its place, weirdness wanders the ramparts, but strange-weirdness is too much…too much for anyone, in their own strange and weird way.

Below the windows containing Jeff and Una and their half-crazed, wave-interspersed gesticulations, was a Public House; curtains drawn, ‘closed’ signs apologising for the thirsty walk to dryness. The establishment was called The Lord Duncan Bisquitz. The sign had a faded original oil painting of the local Lord-owner and Land-grabber, Lord Duncan of Bisquitz, a Bavarian Baron, known in Bavaria for his baroning; hats much doffed in his baron like face. He came on a reverse Grand Tour here in the mid seventeen-hundreds and died while drinking the local gin in what was then called the King’s Ears, rumoured to have been landlorded by an Eighteenth Century courtly-gang-member whose descendants were said to have gone on, in later centuries, to form such agencies as the CIA.

I knocked on the pub door ‘closed’ sign (which read: We are closed for good, or bad. Please go away!) and with each knock the door moved a jar until no more knocking was required to gain entrance. And I edged in…the walls leading me to the foot of the stairs, who were creaking before I had even begun my climb. Each step was a cacophony-of-creak; a veritable celebration of the opulent extremes of the world of creaking. Depths and breadths of creakiness, shout-murmuring in timbres far-fetched, shared with each other a wild abandon as one step handed over to the next in a creaking chain of elevation to the landing, where, with their door-shield primed, Jeff and Una less than half exposed themselves to the approaching potential half-threat. Three steps in and most of the hallway’s shadows began to relax; the flicking lights maintained a precise perfectuity, and the stale odour freshened and blossomed into olfactory positivity and congeniality…the door swayed open, well-oiled, creakiness not repeating the same life mistakes the stairs had fallen for. Jeff and Una stood back, a welcome of sorts, still fraught as they were with the remnants of liquid chemical fright-inducing suspicion, ‘Would you like a biscuit?’ said Jeff, ‘or three,’ added Una. They’d been in the ‘hellish here-and-now’ too long, they’d become vaguely frenzied with biscuitmania; a kind of biscuit-orchestrated logic-paralysis; biscophobia, as it were…

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘An episode of extreme biscuitry would be as apt now as it ever could be,’ and came across as meaning it; laying the foundation stone for building an empire.

‘We are out of tea, would you like an extra biscuit to make up for it?’ The answer would have; should have been, no, but wasn’t.

‘Yes, I don’t mind if I do, ‘ I said, loading my hod with bricks and mixing the mortar, metaphorically, while metaphorphically playing the vicar-at-tea role: no building work to be seen here, take your theodolite back to the rentals place.

Words rattled and sentences ripped up the ambience, leaving data-clops and info-shreds…Crazy-paving led me into the World-of-Understanding, that, in turn, yellow-brick-roaded me on a route out of there that led back to where memories awaited collection.

…’We are essentially a sleeper cell here and what we do day to day, night to night, is, essentially, sleep…there is, literally, nothing else to do. So your arrival is significant. If it isn’t?… If it isn’t…’

‘If it isn’t…’ Jeff aligned himself with Una’s concern; matching her output. Then, rising mid-thought, ‘…ah…more biscuits…I’ll roll out the biscuit-barrel.’

It is important to note that I never really believed this Una and Jeff were in anyway related to the Una and Jeff who were the resistance core, but I had enough of a belief to go along with it just in case my belief systems were not as accurate as I’d hoped.

Then, out of the blue, and into the red, Una shouted, ‘let’s get our ears fucked,’ which made no sense at first cognisance.

The ensuing, ‘excuse for music’, was so loud my audio loops were drunk with sound; audio pools, a rabbit in the headlights of the car I was swerving down the centreline in; trying to miss a rabbit. I read, first Una’s lips, as she reeled off a weighty monologue and then Jeff’s as he mopped up oversights and understatements and tied up the ribbons of completion before Una retied the bow until satisfaction patted her on the back and she parked up her input mania machine.

I did not really fall for it and on reflection I was aware that it was no more than an outdated instruction manual.

But it was all I had to go on.

The main thing was that the controllers of the whole show did not know about this outdated manual.

The chimps are in the gods looking down on the stageplay. But it is all a stageplay; life is a stage on which we play… (paraphrasing the speare.)

‘The sea,’ I finally said, voice faltering; wrestling with the  unfaltering that amounted to a hill of pepper and salt that needed sorting and sizing, ‘the sea…’

Could I pull out. I could’ve pulled out…but didn’t

‘…the sea…the waves…the waves in the sea, and the sound of the sea, the waves don’t fully sync…with the sound.’

‘You get used to it.’ Jeff, blurted, becoming aggravatedly blurtatious

‘Yeah, man, just give a while…sheesh!’ Una blurted, with a blurtatiousness that rankled, with unconfuseable intention.

A peculiar form of awkwardness mixed with a swirling will to counter it blended together in a cupful of successive moments that came, attempted agitation, and then left without having done anything. Like a cat that crept into the crypt and couldn’t crap…

My mouth and auxiliary components were dry which made me make unintended tea-sipping noises. To all intents and purposes it represented a back-rankling, and I didn’t know whether I should be getting a visit from the captain of the good ship shame and made to walk the plank of shame, or, whether to congratulate myself for a marvellous piece of passive aggression.

I walked a line between the two and moved on.

We all did.