The Blue Books Restored: Fragments 1A to 70 (part 1 of 4)

some of the best stuff was just things we’d caught in passing

 

Her name was ‘Diane’. A name I have preserved in my fiction for over thirty-five years. Whenever I wish to depict a fantasy woman, who is also all-too-human, I picture her.

 

Strike a pose for nihilism
Dress up straight in your anti-fashion
Make your statement for the 1980s
You say you don’t care what your ultimate fate is
Because you’ve seen it all before
And you’ve heard it all before...

 

I was there, that summer, when Arthur pulled the sword from the stone and was declared King of England.

 

This is but a warm spell at the start
of a new Ice Age. Soon, we will skate
across the frozen Thames once again.

 

The first card is the significator. It represents the querent, showing who and where I am now. The Ace of Wands depicts a strong hand holding a roughly hewn wooden club, which still has living branches and foliage growing from it. An obvious symbol of potency. The suit of Wands is associated with creativity and ambition. The Ace is number one, so indicates a new beginning or opportunity to be grasped. Quite simply, it indicates that I am at the start of a new creative venture and it is up to me to seize the moment and make the most of its potential.

 

a different, home-grown kind of ethnological forgery

 

     The way she kept looking at me. Swift glances between giggling with her friends. Her eyes bright and clear as marbles, with a swirl of jade green at their centres. The way her hair moved with its own independent life, in flicks and cascades, like an advert for Harmony hairspray.

 

I need something new
I need to escape from you
I need the truth to stop me
I need the lie to hold me
I tightrope walk on the line that you sold me...

 

I arrived at the Department of Employment ten minutes earlier than usual in an attempt to avoid the queue which had been growing longer with each passing week. But there was already a baker’s dozen of young down-and-outs arranged in a ragged file. I stood on the tail of the crocodile (I knew no fear; it had long since lost its teeth) and faked a sigh.

 

so many hours in your car, just going from place to place

 

     I was seeing her anew. Only six months ago, her hair had been long, straight and mousey, her eyes hidden behind an unkempt fringe.

 

Diane, you were fierce when I fucked you
with the handle of your looking glass...

 

     Of course, it wasn’t a real sword. It was a wooden stake that formed part of a row of fencing. The wire holding the fence together had broken at the top and had been bent into a shape that resembled a sword’s hilt.

 

There are experts who state each cow fart
does such damage that our only fate
is death and the only question: when?

 

The second card is what crosses me. The influences that are hindering my progress. The Seven of Wands shows a figure atop a hill, holding a quarterstaff in a defensive gesture. Below him, six other figures brandish their staffs and look like an angry, threatening mob. This is about getting my creative voice heard above so many other competing voices. I need to have more confidence in my ability; that I have something distinctive to say and the right to assert my words.

 

the urban stew of the city itself

 

     In the same six months, Jonathan had also undergone something of a transformation. Where Diane’s hair was shorter, his was longer and he had grown an impressive set of sideburns. His acne had mostly cleared up and he kidded himself that he looked like David Cassidy. A rough edged Essex version with a singing voice more like Alice Cooper.

 

What do I care about numbers?
One seeks itself to become two.
(Ignore the problem of zero
and the negative zone beyond.)
The first two primes combined make three.
After three comes pi: the endless
string of decimals that describes...

 

     The girl in front of me had a trim figure but was rather plain. She had long brown hair and dandruff. We began to dance. A soft shoe shuffle, rather disorganised and leisurely. People joined on behind is if it were a conga.

 

There was no war in Vietnam.
John & Marilyn eloped to Europe,
following his second term.

 

When the aliens arrived, it took quite a while to recognise their presence. In hindsight, their approach was heralded by obvious signs. The most evident was the interference with television and radio signals. Images became increasingly distorted and broke down into random, abstract waves of colour. Sounds became bursts of white noise that hinted at some postmodern musical cadence. Many people continued to watch and listen. Particularly the young, who referred to it as ‘Martian Opera’.

 

Diane stood at the busy street corner in what she believed to be a nonchalant attitude. To the average passerby, she appeared tired and dispirited. Her face lacked any kind of animation, except for when she stifled a yawn. Even then, she did little more than raise her eyebrows. I watched her do this a couple of times, until I began to feel a sympathetic ennui – like a vulture settling on my own mind.

 

check how the band left space for the screams

 

     I had dropped out of school half way through A-levels, although no-one had really noticed yet. When I left at the end of summer term, I never bothered going back. Now, it was the last day before Xmas break and everyone from the sixth form had piled into the ‘Dick Turpin’. A seedy little pub far enough away from school that we were unlikely to encounter teachers. And where the bar staff were willing to tolerate underage drinkers, so long as we kept spending money and didn’t make trouble.

 

     Also, it wasn’t embedded in stone. It was merely held fast at the bottom by the heavy clay soil and by another twist of wire.

 

cold...
        cold...
ice flows
          white blood
across the wounded landscape

 

But all their talk of ‘global warming’
has now been replaced by ‘climate change’
as the data does not back their claims.

 

This is the room where I was born. I have a vague memory of being a baby, alone in my cot. I had ceased crying, because there had been no response. Hot. My face tingling with tears as they dried. In blank, desperate boredom and anger, gazing up at the crack in the ceiling. Always the same. Every day. Over and over again. The black line, which never resembled anything else.

 

The third card is what crowns me. The surface thoughts and events that occupy my conscious mind. The World is an abstract image of a dancing youth, encircled by a garlanded ouroboros. At the corners of the picture, there are avatars of the four Apostles. It is the last card of the Major Arcana and indicates that a major cycle of my life is drawing to a conclusion. Certainly, most of my thoughts currently revolve around planning for an early retirement. I am in the process of down-sizing and finding more time to develop my writing.

 

Yes, I know that darkness is the absence
of light; that nothing inhabits shadow
but what is plainly seen by day. And yet...

 

the screes of atonal noise

 

‘The cuckoos have escaped their clocks
and Jack is right out of his box.’

 

Girl in a red dress, playing a guitar
Sometimes, things are no more than what they are
Muse of music, from a bygone era
Form caught on YouTube, not an amphora
Hair of Spanish gold, lips of sangria
Eyelashes dance a dark tarantella

 

cold...
        cold...
I skate
        thin ice
across the person -
                 -person interface

 

     We reached the desk. She left her autograph and split. I also signed my name with a defiant flourish and made an exit of considerable panache, of a certain je ne sais quoi, to a life of grand delusion...

 

Poets are bigger than rock stars.
I played the first gig at New Wembley,
underneath the golden arches.

 

the wide-eyed wonder of suburban boys

 

One of my earliest memories is apparently false:

 

A radio was furniture
to be polished with a yellow duster
and a daub of cherry blossom.
Its cabinet was handsome...

 

     And the boy’s name wasn’t Arthur. He was my friend, Jonathan, who lived in the same block of flats as me.

 

When I switch off the bedroom light,
the child in me still wants to race
against the dark, to jump in  bed
and pull cold sheets over my head.

 

Why do other people’s houses smell so strange?
And where do they buy their stuff?
Do they journey to IKEA on a Sunday
just to hold shrill arguments
and to brutalise their children on the way?
And to despair – my god,
what brings them back?
Surely not the Sunday roast?

 

Some years later, the room was different. It was my uncle’s bedroom. He was a teenager, tired of me: the little girl who kept annoying him in the little ways that children know instinctively have the most effect. In the end, he would lose his temper. Throw me onto his bed and tickle me until I was screaming. Helpless. Half mad with this torture. And yet, when he finally released me, I would begin again with some barbed remark. Courting his revenge for some masochistic thrill.

 

To think is to sculpt:
carved stones displace air between
pure forms boxed in bone

 

The fourth card is what lies beneath. The murky realm of the unconscious and deeper motives. On the Six of Wands, the mob we saw on the Seven is now flying flags from their raised staffs and making a merry procession through the streets. This is the card of victory and celebration; but it also tells me that fame is fleeting and I will have far to go before I can truly rest on my laurels. Though I receive praise for my writing, I find it difficult to value something so ephemeral. I am only as good as my last poem. I am both spurred to do better and discouraged by a sense of futility.

 

     After it was realised that aliens were responsible, there was some speculation about whether it was an attempt at communication. While there was still a scientific and academic community to speak of, there were many projects devoted to decoding the supposed messages. But none came close to succeeding.

 

... I fear the night has physical presence:
it blindfolds both my eyes, chills the marrow
of my bones, captures silence in its net...

 

the misfortunes that had befallen his city

 

I am two years old and sitting on my mother’s lap. We are in the living room. To my right is the doorway to the small kitchen or ‘scullery’ as it was called. I know it is painted green and creamy yellow. There is a bread bin, from which I once stole a crust. It was too hard and dry, so I put it back partially nibbled. Mum soon found out, but wasn’t angry. She said I should have asked if I was hungry.

 

And her dreaming face is like a shovel
seen from space, through the wrong end of Hubble,
where constellations bring consternation
to burning fields of stubble – and trouble
says its middle name is Norman, just like
the Conquest, like Robbie robot’s Tempest,
while monsters from the id take her IQ
for a hike – and you never see the cups
to match the saucers, do you? – though the girl
politely sips with one crooked finger stuffed
in Offa’s Dyke, absurdly chuffed although
she muffed her chances of some easy dough,
posing for tourist photographs, forging
autographs, pissing off the hoi polloi...

 

I know that ghost still walk by day,
that curtains do not hide a face,
that beasts much worse than bogeymen
are shown as real on News At Ten.

 

I sense a sudden increase in the level of tension. The atmosphere is charged, as if a thunderstorm is about to break. The people on the train are anxious to disembark. They push past me impatiently, their eyes glazed with the look of long term prisoners granted unexpected release. No matter where I stand, I seem to be directly in their path. However, the people behind me are equally anxious to get aboard. It is like being stalked by a pack of hunting animals, awaiting the slightest sign of weakness on my part so that they can pounce.

 

The miners broke the government.
With Smith at Number 10,
there was no such word as ‘yuppies’.

 

As I sat on a bench at Greenford station, waiting for the Central line into the city, I looked up at the evening sky and saw another of my ‘visions’ coming true. Just as I had expected, a single star appeared, shining brightly through the dense covering of cloud that otherwise obscured even the light of the moon. It shone so clearly that it reminded me of the Star of Bethlehem, as depicted on Christmas cards.