Belle de Fou Rire

Belle de Fou Rire. Tortured franchises of confessional love, the grave-robber set upon his task, that found him moving in above of all that went this way before. In dreaming Medussa as she was, once, we become aware of the little princess I attempt to know. Her hair was the most beautiful part of her hair and her laugh the venerable constituent of her psyche. I loved that laugh, it tinkled my lips like bells of frost on candied whips. I loved her smile her grace her charm; it was not up to me to be with her, that came
through the date and the collision of our extended bodies.

The sound of raindrops left the ears of Jonathan as the restaurant door dropped into place behind him. He was now in a different world shaped by the decor and the warmth of his evening venue.
"Hiya," came Janet's voice, and Jonathan sat at the table with her. Fourteen more were to come, and would do soon, but for now it was just an intimate world of two.
Jonathan spoke, "will this New Year be any different with you?"
"No, I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I mean, unless you're a follower of Christ, what significance has it? I'm not, so I'll just get arsed as per norm."
Jonathan left his mouth open ready for speech as Lucy, Graham and Marice appeared at the coat-rack. "Last Christmas of ninety-nine!" - Lucy.
"Last Christmas dinner," corrects Graham.
"I've got really cold nipples" announces Marice, and the group erupt into laughter. Marice was a very attractive girl, slightly chubby, with a smile and a disturbed sense of humour. Everyone fancied her.
When all sixteen members of the friendship had gathered and ordered their drinks Jonathan sat back in his chair and looked around. There were
jewels glistening in the russet spirals of Janet's hair, these caught his eyes, his attention was not on the cotton-wool of his thoughts but he now saw that Marice's breasts were well defined through her soft ribbed-cotton jumper, and he was remembering last year's Christmas dinner, and he noticed that Graham was laughing at something that Dan had said, and the group roared with a torrent of laughter, and Jonathan had still not heard what was going on because he looked into the gaze of Lucy's eyes and he was happy and he knew content.
The dinners were arriving as Lucy swapped lagers with Janet. The waitress was Czech, as were all the staff, and had a vague grasp of this
country's language. It was this that woke Jonathan from his Christmas warmth for Dan was telling the waitress that he wouldn't eat the roast beef platter he'd been passed - "No...No - I was turkey casserole."
"You don't want that?"
"I don't eat beef."
"That is what you ordered?"
"No, no - I don't eat beef."
"Oh, I am sorry, I thought you were ask for the beef."
"No...I don't eat beef."
"Look, will you take that back," said Keith, giving back Dan's dish. "And bring him the turkey casserole."
Marice squeezed past the table and went to the toilets where she stuck her fingers down her throat and threw up her hastily gobbled starter before popping two brufen onto her tongue and leaning her head down to the cold tap. Some of the cold water fell on her hair which, when she wiped it off with her right palm, made her feel horny, so she slipped the lock closed behind her and finished herself off in front of the mirror.
Janet had a bit of a headache buzzing from her freckled collarbone to her glittery forehead and sat the rest of the night sipping on a glass of water.
Dan ate his turkey while looking into Lucy's flirtatious eyes every few heartbeats. Lucy was returning the looks in like kind as she knew she had found another boring encounter with one of her friends. It was not on Dan's mind that his wife would protest: because she was the one he loved, it was simply that he was a man and men need to spread theirselves around somewhat, that was only Nature.
Jonathan paid for his portion of the cheque and left to go and read a book. At present he was halfway through a compelling account of the life of Hunter, that pioneer of modern surgery. He liked his friends yet found their company en masse to be somewhat forced as what kept them together was the links between individuals. Although, small world that it is, the sixteen of them combined almost certainly knew most of the intelligentsia in the city. Jonathan felt more at ease in his own space with no world to observe...keeping his feet on the ground he went the whole forty minute
journey home in the warm Christmas drizzle.

The twenty-fifth came, the twenty-fifth went. Jonathan struck up a new kind of friendship with Janet; it was nice, very comfortable. Though unlike previous girlfriends it was not exciting and uplifting, it was more something that had to happen and would let him sleep now at night. A party had been arranged for seven on Hogmanay and Jonathan would be going there with Janet - this is when the others would find out.

In missing out Dan we would be missing out a life-form, to me. From the instant I saw him as cool, on the credit, to when I knew him more as the stable boy he is, we were lost in the same motorway of interplay. We no longer dally playing at trees in the college luncheon canteen, but then we do not speak as often as those in arboreal caverns where the hush of the similitude extended our relation to the not-so kind.

The year four-thousand arrived and nothing changed. Jonathan began to write his history project up - the department had granted him a five month sabbatical for this very purpose - and he found inspiration in the increasingly sparse periods of solitude he liked to grab.
Walking in the forested parks that simulated countryside next to the kernel of the city Jonathan saw brightness in his life. How could one be unhappy when one is alone, in the open, subject to creation. He sat down one day in an alcove within a remote copse and decided to invent a game: For each one of his closest friends - Lucy, Janet and Marice - he would take a conker, which he would then attempt to juggle with.

In a laboratory a certain was conducting an experiment. It had taken weeks to fill in the paperwork for this one, but the government would be satisfied that no experiments, tests or activity were happening here this Thursday.
Dan - a bright young medical researcher with world-connected-to-head difficulties - was a saprophytic tart. He had originally begun researching fungi for legitimate pharmaceutical trials. His wife - a culinary advisor for
television shows - had asked him acquire some more exotic mushrooms for her own saucy experiments. Dan, loving the impractical joke, had slipped
her a few psychotropics which May unwittingly had included on that night's dinner menu. Dan was so impressed that his grilled turbot turned out to be
the concerto violinist of God that he arrested his interest in medicine and took every opportunity to run secret trials in his own discretely darkened
field of research.

It was raining outside Lucy's living room. Lucy was not in so it was dark, but the watchful viewer would still be able to make out the shapes of statuettes on the mantelpiece, the comfortable suite that somehow evaded engulfing the room, and the spiky modern lamps that could undress this
shroud at any time. Surprisingly the room was cold, though it felt warm in the dark. A key turned somewhere in the night. A door opened, closed, the latch turned. Somebody out in the hallway. It sounded like a coat coming off. A lighter shadow sprang through the half-closed door, a large brushed-pine door, as a light somewhere else was switched. There was a jumbled
pause till quite soon steady, rhythmic breathing could definitely be heard. She was asleep.

Twenty men stood in file in the nderground, white, room. The round lights gave off an appalling white glare and glean with the only things to break the room's basic contour were twenty cuboids in white that might be cupboards. These stood in front of each motionless scientist. Upon each white edifice was a stainless steel kidney-shaped bowl and a kit for 'shooting up': Needle, syringe, vial of fluid, and a tourniquet.
Dan, standing at number seventeen - four from the reader - gave a cough and the figures leaned forward and collected their instruments. Each making sure the tuning was just perfect they sliced off the blood that leaves
the left arm and poised with dripping bows.
With a final toss of his Wagnerian mop Dan conducted the ascent. Twenty rods plunged into twenty shaking arms, plungers screaming;
instantaneously ten men fell, dead. These men were the blind control - the shaper of the remaining ten's experience. For the ten survivors were
embarking on a trip equivalent to juggling the planets, and in five minutes would begin to do so with their colleague's corpses littered amongst them, and with the shock and adrenaline and relief of the roulette still present in their brains.
Dan was the first to laugh, he knew he was bloody lucky - he hoped - to have survived stage one of his experiment. Dan whooped like a kid as he prepared for cloud city.

Swans have an ugly past, and in the town of Boleskine grew a particularly beautiful example. She ruffled in the breeze, frail as moistened
down floating with Atlantic swells, yet not so dull as the tatters of her broken wing would give imagination feel. I loved her as she was my living
suicide.
I'd known her since I saw her brown-bobbed hair, the princess to my fog and the chanteuse to my soul. "Jonny," she would giggle. "Jonny, let me
be - this laugh's giving me an awful headache...tee-hee-hee-hee-hee,
hee-hee-hee, ooh hoo, hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo...gsurphtsch." And on and on till we were both cackling, joined at the eyes as I squashed her lightly on her bed and the world did not exist for the rapture she was giving me.

God! Alack for entire life. I had been forever within the crumbling mask. This could continue till he headed off down that small but
uncomfortable mode of living where I didn't need to trust him anymore. Then, searching, I could find myself lost in the woods, alone in a cool, vast, obscuring space.
But I am not alone, Dan is here, invading on my space that I hold dear. Janet left me to be with him, but he, singularly, did not care for her. He set her up in Glasgow and we Southerners never heard no more. I only spoke to Dan through necessity from then: For he and I were in the same line of experience.
But Lucy need not have happened.

It was a dark winter's eve, a long time hence. Jonathan sat in the laboratory tapping away on the computer. He had almost lost it today, but
the encryption was fading fast now. He glanced at his watch - twelve thirty - almost time to go get the train. He sat at the terminal and sipped his coffee while the program beefed up the counting process.
With a final stop the visual dial slammed shut and the file opened - Dan's illegal work unveiled. There was in here enough poison to have him done by a lynch-mob of Buddhists...It was bad. With a point, a click, a drag and a release of the mouse the informatting was relayed to a hundred
different public addresses: Government; media; chat-groups; colleagues - the whole public domain. The information tainted him, Jonathan, too. But
he liked that, it freed him up, it gave him a sense of release and a taste for revenge.
The train would have arrived now. He picked his telephone from the shelf and dialled emergency. 9. 9. 9. The ringer was answered, "casualty. Police and ambulance needed. Caprier Medical Institute, Southwark," he said. And the 'phone was down.
The light in the lift moved up the floors. Jonathan poised himself like an animal. Almost done, almost 'there'. The lift bell rang, the doors slid apart, and Dan was confronted with the old man impaled on a paperknife, landing at his feet in a cool, silent office with no lights and with nothing doing.