Gavin Corbett - Green Glowing Skull

Some time again then after the war, when Jean was a grown-up schoolgirl, a creature known as Petticoat Loose went about the district and surrounds taking medical paraphernalia off children. Twelve boys had their calipers taken. One day Jean was walking home along a lane with a friend when the friend was grabbed by Petticoat Loose and spun around in a bush. In the course of it the friend’s electrical hearing aid was removed. In the end anyhow Petticoat Loose was banished by unseen forces to the mouth of the Red Sea where she spent her time overturning ships.

Later again, thinking back on it all, with the information gained, Jean thought: The fairies have progressed with us from the wheel through the aeroplane engine and the electrical hearing aid.

Denny Kennedy-Logan stirred from a deep afternoon sleep. For one phantastic moment he thought he was on a foreign holiday, before a dull but disoriented wakefulness settled in him. He lifted his arms either side, studying them, blinking … He was in a chair, not a bed. The chair was in a windowless room; designed with only function in mind. The walls were of rough brick, painted a stark white, with a violet tint. In front of him was a mirror, with no softening bulbs around it (though there were flowers on the table — lots of lilies).

He leaned forward to his reflection. He looked ghastly, gaslit. His eyes were seeping sea anemones, and from them his face dripped in ghoulish green phosphorescent rings. He leaned closer. His chair zipped back on its castors an inch from under him, making him gasp and grasp the table. The smell of lilies almost choked him, and their cold rubbery touch caused him to shiver.

‘Where am I?’ he shouted, slapping the wall.

How did he get here?

He had been embraced and swept in one movement from some point he could not remember with any … great deal of sharpness.

Who embraced him?

Where were the others?

His shirt was damp through.

Why was his shirt damp through?

‘Where is my jacket?! Where is my cummerbund?! You cannot take a man’s dignity like this!’

Bit!

Let me change this light bulb, he said. But how am I meant to safely pull this off? The chair was on castors. He reached in his trouser pockets. And where am I meant to get a bulb? But that ghastly light from that ghastly tube! No, there has to be a way to do it. And if I were to hold my nerve so that the poles of the tube did not touch any metal along the way. Poles of a tube! A riddle: how can a tube have poles? When it is a light bulb. Or a telescope. And how many tenors does it take to change a light bulb? But I still do not have this light bulb. And that chair is still on castors. How am I meant to do this? I only care so much for puzzles, you know!

A door opened. A woman entered. Red haired, with ringlets, and a burst of red spices for a mouth.

‘Bored yet?’ she said. ‘When do your friends arrive?’

She poured from a jug and handed him a huge glass of water. He took a sip, gingerly, keeping his eyes on her. Thimbles of ice and slices of cucumber piled up at his nose, and his throat and heart and lungs contracted in pain.

‘I believe we’re both going the same way home later. We should share a cab. You’ll enjoy the people on before you. The show-tunes girl is a darling. Can you wait a few more minutes? I have a little more housekeeping to do.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said after the closed door. ‘Where are the others? Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I am a man and I have my dignity! I said, I am a man! And I have my dignity!’

He stood in silence for some moments.

Then he took another gulp of the ice-cold water and slowly sat back in his seat.

***

‘Well now, Clive. Did you envisage, when I proposed the idea for the White-Headed Boys, dressing rooms such as this?’

‘Oh I did.’

‘As large as this?’

‘Oh I did.’

‘With a picture of Franklin W Roosevelt on the wall?’

‘With a picture of Franklin D Roosevelt on the wall.’

‘Is that FDR?’ said Rickard, getting up from his seat, and peering closely at the framed newspaper clipping.

‘A great man for second chances,’ said Denny. ‘And now …’

He cupped his ear to the closed door.

‘Oh, she’s good, she’s good,’ he said, about the soprano who was on the bill before them.

‘What are these words again to the second verse of “Letters from France”?’ said Clive. ‘Do we agree to go as far as the second verse?’

Denny pulled his chair out from under the table.

‘Who’s been smoking shag tobacco?’ he said, brushing his elbows.

Rickard was carefully reading the framed newspaper clipping. Jeremiah was playing Grieg in quacking tones on his machine.

‘“The Hall of the Mountain King” is right. Damn freezing in here.’

‘You shouldn’t have removed your cummerbund,’ said Clive.

‘What I need is a fur hat … Do you remember how the pigeons had a taste for Sweet Afton?’

‘Which pigeons?’

‘“Which pigeons?”! The pigeons in old Dovelin! But only the blue ones round Beggar’s Bush, mind you.’

Then he began shadow-boxing, throwing left-hand jabs and right-hand uppercuts millimetres from Clive’s face.

Pit! A left-hand jab connected with Clive’s face.

‘Agh! Gotcha!’

Clive coughed out a laugh, but his eyes brimmed with tears.

‘And that’s my weaker hand too! Should have got ’em to build you a bigger chin, old girl!’

He turned to Rickard and Jeremiah, absorbed in their own activities.

‘They should have used his hip bone instead of his ear bone!’

***

Now they stood before the curtain. Denny in the middle, Clive and Rickard to the left and right. Cummerbund in place; it was lined with canvas, and compressed his abdomen, pushing his diaphragm into his chest space.

Jeremiah secreted.

In the wings, the goblin man wiped his hand on his trouser leg. With the same hand, he rubbed the machine’s cladding.

Denny gave him ‘the thumbs up’.

In Denny’s mouth, the taste of blood, pus, and something similar to sparking flint. A more pronounced sensation of clutter than he had experienced before from the sound sampler. A sensation like the one he had had as a child when he contracted brucellosis from watercress and he tried to put every marble he owned in his ‘pucus’, or ‘buccus’, as his mother corrected.

The device cut into the bracket that rooted his tongue. Something made enquiries at the back of his nose. The fronds? What were the fronds doing at the back of his nose?

Saliva overflowed from the corners of his lips. He drew his sleeve across his mouth.

A hush descended the other side of the curtain. Outbreaks of ‘Shhhh’. The curtains fluttered at the split.

‘Thank you, everybody,’ came the voice of the woman with the spicy mouth. ‘Yes, thank you, please. Didn’t our soprano Miss Herschel sing like an angel for you?’

Static panning in and out: applause.

‘And so we’ve come to our final performance tonight, our last act. I feel I’ve known these men — these wonderful Irish tenors, the Whiteboys — all my life. I’ve never met them before. I’ve never set foot in Ireland either, but when I listen to these men sing I feel like I’ve been transported on a rainbow to a great pine forest and that I’ve drunk from the cleanest Irish spring. And when you hear them too, I think you’ll say to me, “Aye, lass, ’tis true.” Harh, harh, me hearties, are you ready, boys? I think that they are. Curtain, please!’

A rattle and a whoosh and a wind on his face. And then … And then …

He stood, squinting.

Lights and darkness. The one and the other.

Mostly lights. Hot, burning lights.