Night Read Free

the handlebars in the thrall of the night. Not known. So many of our encounters are. Even the gut ones. Especially the gut ones. The seed of my father I reach out to you, as you once did to me, pitifully, passionately, idiotically, to small avail. What caused us to embark on such a maraud? Her buttocks, flaunched and ordinary, the slit, the slit of absurdity into which we chose to pass. The nearest we ever were. You and I? You or I? Only you, not yet I? Already I, no longer you? A trinity of yobs. In occidental damp and murk. What gave rise to your spasming? A full moon, a half moon, no moon at all, a touch of the madman’s wisp, duty, reconciliation, thirst? Anything? The crab delights in soft and unguent places. Bucking maybe and pronouncing fiendish words such as bollocks or jackass or Oirre, upon her. Grunting. I wouldn’t put it past you. You shaman you. Already I, with some cursed inkling, some predilection towards shame and calamity and stupor, already liturgicalised before entering that dark, damp, deep seasous place. No choice in the matter.
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    And still such a long way to go in between stopping and starting and eating Brussels sprouts.

Christmas is not long gone…
    Christmas is not long gone. It went by without too much event. I did not partake of the sacraments. I received three presents, a nightdress that will be perfect for my lascivious nights, a frothy affair; a casket, and ateacloth which has scripted in it my character according to my astrological sign. If I am well-placed, I am magnanimous, faithful, bashful, aspiring in an honourable way at high matters, a lover of fair dealings, of sweet and affable conversation, wonderfully indulgent, reverencing aged men and full of charity and godliness. If the stars are ill-placed, then I shall waste my patrimony, suffer everyone to cozen me, am hypocritical and stiffe in maintaining false tenets, am ignorant, careless, gross, of dull capacity and schismatical.
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    If again I come to love a member of the opposite sex or even a member of my own sex, I shall try not to gabble. It won’t be easy for me, brought up as I was among hens and bullocks and buckets and winds and clotheslines and people, all gabbling themselves to distraction. But even if I default in that I shall spend my spirit in other things, spirit is spirit the way gut is gut and limestone, limestone.
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To see a door close and know that the very last person has gone out…
    To see a door close and know that the very last person has gone out, that is a most unsettling thing. No one to call to, no one to cling to, no one. Not even Humpty Dumpty or Old King Cole. I reach out and grip the fur, the grey fur of the ample quilt. Armenian goat as far as I can tell from my desultory knowledge of wild life. A blow. The hairs of this quilt are not nearly sturdy enough to bask in, to tug at, to wallow. They give way. They come off in the fingers as mere tufts. I touch the wall behind the sateen headboard. Knock knock. It is not knife-edged as I feared. Something is.Something goes whirr whirr, like the Duke’s lawn-mower; and snip snip like blind Dr Rath clipping the stitches. Big ungainly stitches in those days, when Lil gave birth. Black herringbone stitches made out of catgut, same substance, got from sheep as in the strings of a fiddle. I resemble her, except in one particular. She had a little green floating spot on the white of an eye, a purty little spot it was, and if I am to develop any new characteristics I shall plump for one, one that moves slightly according to the curvature and gaze of the eye. Not a bright green, more or less misted. I think I perceived the bottles of syrup as being shaken while I was still in her, in her chambers. I wrote and asked if she had any inkling, any hunch, about the exact colour of her innards, my earliest known abode. I thought it was very likely she would come up with suggestions, being as she had such a talent for colour schemes in the