Strange Reflections IV
“Well blow me over with a hanky,” thought Karen, “I can’t believe how hard it was to get a straight line…”
As she tried to concentrate beads of perspiration formed on her forehead. The beautiful, enigmatic maybe-victim had hardly touched his ploughmans.
“Coax me out of my misery and get me closer to the spirit world.”
Sofia was suspicious of Vincent’s fascination with Crypto-Genealogy and Urban Alchemy, for her it was all pseudo-scientific pastiche and sci-fi whizzbangery. But the call was all in a day’s work.
Father Alt cited as proof of the girl’s subjection to The Devil her ability to respond correctly to languages she did not know, and her accurate forecast of the theft of consecrated wafers from the local church. In this line of business demons crop up every day, falling in love with the very thought of her.
Few tourists make it to Slab City. There are no hotels, no transport and no shops. The people are poor and eccentric. Newcomers register and receive an ad hoc address. Brandy and coke slopped onto the table as I slammed down my glass. These dispossessed are called ‘Trailer Trash’. They are all afraid, surrounded by pushy beggars, aggressive drunks and people throwing up. It’s not at all nice. My weight dropped by a stone. There were dark circles under my eyes.
In the distance I saw Laszlo the Hungarian Dog-Boy, now a resident of Slab City, known by several local CB ‘handles’ such as Beach Bum, Fireball, Smokey Joe, Cosmic Duck, Wizadora Nosseck and Otis Snapp. He will soon learn to turn tricks in front of the camera like the rest of us.
Meanwhile, still completely naked, Sister Marie was locked in a dark booth in Charlotte Street with pixilated spook John Thomas. She put down her binoculars. The cheese-grater was enough to make anyone jump. It combines a whole range of modes to suit every shot. She hoped for the perfect storybook ending. My boyfriend, who’s here with me, was appalled by the idea. He was wearing Ralph Lauren ‘Safari’.
The door burst open, the room flooded with light.
“Hard luck,” she said swiftly, looking at the gang of superannuated hoodlums wearing Doc Marten boots, lounging about the bar and eroding her civil liberties. Camp body-builders displaying neo-Punk piercings, grotesque pantomime dames wrapped in voile jackets, corseted, laced and fishnetted in stretch-suits, cloves of garlic and seven-league boots. Laughter filtered through the open window.
She thought: “There are a million transactions in the naked city. You have to haul your own water, dig your own hole for sewage.” Some kids, retrieving a football, stumbled on five guys shooting up behind a wall. The trailer trash closed in. She succumbed to a Liquid Cosh and went out like the proverbial light, Chinese Lanterns exploding against the dark backdrop of her mind. The process was not a benign one.
Suddenly John vanished, leaving the grinning canary saying “Da…Da…Da…”, which she knew meant “Yes…Yes…Yes…” in Russian or was it ?
The dream was the old disciplinarian one: in fact twenty-two are due to close by the end of the century. Gone are the days of rusty chastity belts, ‘swishy’ canes and daunting views of the Surrey countryside. No more creeping around gardens, getting drunk on your own in pubs, being a phone pest. No time to lurk in bushes. Now it’s hobble skirts, Tyrolean girls in spiky bondage garb, waiflike sixties dollies and an out-of-work speech therapist zipping the hips of a vampiric concierge. Marie fiddles with her cardigan, her legs scratched and aching. Happiness is fleeting. Now it’s gone.
John Thomas, wearing his black Quaker hat and child-size Ninja Turtle slippers communicated in a sort of telepathic psycho-speak, in an eccentric dialect.
“I dunno why I stayed – free television, meals an’ a nice cuppa tea, I suppose…“
The doctor will get the wrong impression. Remember, if you die in your flat your body won’t be found for years, even with £60 in your pocket and a scream dying in your throat. Think electric that was the answer.
“Ooh, keep talking,” whispered the spaced-out spook, extruding a snake pit of wires from his abdominal region. After a few weeks she trusted him enough to give him her home number. The minutes flew by. She went out and came back in, cold and wet.
A voice in her mind said:
“I’m from The Lake District originally…I don’t intend to kill you now or later …you’ve developed an obsession…you have to learn to let go…”
The gasman clicked the new meter into place as the officer, Inspector Flapper of the Yard, explained the Mental Health Act of 1959. They arranged for an engineer to come out the following Friday: it was as though Nature – something he loved – doesn’t want us to forget him.
“Is it fixed?” she asked nervously.
My heart lurched; I fired off an angry letter and broke the news. It looked like…sort of fetishistic archaeology of artifice and apparel.
Paris is the capital of my fixations. I think of The Sphinx Hotel. A strange letter appeared on the bedside table. There was a vision of a salmon pink banana. A year on she still needs an oxygen cylinder.
Karen reached for a beige suedette jacket and matching skirt.
Perhaps she died in his arms. Perhaps he died in hers.
Few will mourn their passing.
A C Evans
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