FACE, a novella

`There are two conditions in which art appears in man like a force of nature and disposes of him whether he will or no. -

1, As a compulsion to have visions.

2, As a compulsion to an orgiastic state.

Both conditions are rehearsed in ordinary life too, but weaker;-

1, In dream.

2, In intoxication.

Both states release artistic powers in us, the dream those of vision, association, poetry: intoxication those of gesture, passion, song and dance.'

sec 798, The Will to Power as Art. Nietzsche.

`Three elements principally reflect an infusion of transfiguration and fullness into things; sexuality, intoxication and cruelty. All belong to the oldest festal joys of mankind, all also preponderate in the early artist.


When we encounter things that display this transfiguration and fullness, the animal responds with an excitation of these spheres in which all these pleasurable states are situated. A blending of these many delicate nuances of animal wellbeing and desires constitute the aesthetic state.' From the Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche.





CHAPTER ONE



PART ONE

INTOXICATION

That was it. The look on her face, and the words just dying to be released from his lips. I had been waiting a long time for it to happen, I suppose that it was inevitable from the first.

We had met at night in the crowd. Sweaty misfits rubbed against us. There was nowhere to turn. I kept looking at myself as the people looked at me. The eyelash make-up syndrome of young men wanting to be noticed, could have brought out the foreigner in me. Instead I began to slide underground like a pornographic daffodil smeared in butter. A band played in the distance, beating a primitive, inconclusive rhythm, it could not hold my attention. I was watching the youngsters in the room.

I talked with my friend amorously about the display of humanity assembled. Showman, took a leaf from concubine adverts that dribble into our minds. A friend of the coal mining aristocrats, he could spin any tale from a height along a ledge. A good liar is often a better enemy than a friend, Showman was redeemed by his youthful looks and incomparable happiness when connecting with women.

We brushed together, in the manner of discreet lovers. We were spying about for others to incorporate into the pot. I noticed a likely accomplice quickly. A small large-eyed prawn had swum into view. She shifted on her hips effortlessly. She had colour, it poured from her with magnetism.

Being others. The crowd were parading their individuality before us without restraint. However, they were all the same. The sexual attitude of wanting and denying shone strongly. I languished into memories.

Showman had been bragging about communal memory. He said he had the memory of an Aztec, by which, whenever he came across Aztec relics or literature, he had an immense feeling of re-discovery. I had studied his face and distorted it into the form of an Aztec.

Watch yourself. Memories and faces come out at you. Every physiological remnant of ancestors, twisted into the soul, is hidden there. These are the frequencies of death.

We had no time to lose. Showman and I left the pub and tramped to a night club. The prawn had already gone, in her absence, we had been joined by a sparrow and a thrush. The Sparrow was called Mirandella, the thrush Evela.

I talked to Mirandella as she chirped along the street in the direction of the club. We recollected our childhoods, and all the other clubs we had ever been to. I laughed at her tartan dress and the way she said naked, `naarked', approaches her pronunciation. Outside the venue, we met the prawn, she was with friends this time.

Showman was somewhere else. Spinning a harlequin tale of deceit and long days spent in alcohol and cannabis, with undefined partners, relishing and laughing. He could tell his stories to virtually anyone, they would end up his best friends, or never talk to him again.

I was standing at the edge of the dance-floor. I seemed to spend hours watching the dancers. For example, a sikh, a red-haired boy slightly younger than myself, dressed in a pullover and thick corduroy trousers, an Asian girl clothed in the uniform of the West, all prowled around the floor. They swayed to the beat. I crossed through the crowd and pressed against the prawn.

She came up to just below my chest. She looked up at me with huge outlined eyes and said that her name was Carmella.

"I`ve been with many men. It always ends up the same, one of has to end things. Men end up violent when they have been with me. I give myself completely to them first of all, I do everything, I make it perfect, I am the perfect woman for them. After this, I`ve given everything, and I have them, I do not want them anymore."

Feeling excited rather than daunted, I hung around. We spoke of various sexually related topics. Lesbianism, infidelity, lies and bravery. It seemed to be evading the issue, going round the point. Deliberately nebulous, inconclusive, descriptive rather than emotional.

She held her belly and said, "it hurts". She had a small, thin, colourful pair of culottes over thick black stockings. She kept luring my attention to the lower part of her body. It curved in a delicately prawn-like manner. She was all excited and controlled. Consummately there, playing with me. I took on the aspect of an outsider. She was performing a dance, I was watching, observing it.

Showman wafted over from his dark retreat. Two performers together, him and the prawn struck up a casual conversation. As she talked to him, she stroked my hair and stood alongside me. I could feel the caress on my head and the gentle touch of pelvis meeting pelvis, side by side.

Showman was bragging again. This time he was saying that life was meaningful due to his collision of similar worlds theory. In it, everything is united by the inevitable urge to self-destruct. Even the most ambitious, powerful and content human being is so out of the need and desire to blow themselves up. This drive, being suicidal and dormant in most of us, is our only link between life and death. We can either use it to its full, and expand until death by continually destroying previous pictures of ourselves, or we can let its energy be repressed and coil inside of us like a trapped snake. Such a consequence giving anger and dissipated drives their ultimate harmony.

The prawn was more absorbed by keeping me on a leash than indulging in the Showman's deceptively nihilistic ways. Psychological theory wasn't to her taste it seemed, she had a strong intuitive grasp on things. She related experience directly to explanation of behaviour, she didn't need to theorize. Sex and amusement were consuming her more precisely.

I went to the bar. Returning with drinks, I discovered that Showman had gone off with Carmella. Standing there with three drinks, I could have felt like a chump. Instead, I noticed Mirandella standing alone next to a painted pillar. She turned round innocently to me, and I drifted to her like a puppet to his master.

Mirandella was less complicated than Carmella. More optimistic, less excited, she was looking for a good man. Her contentment had not been shaken about by so many failed love affairs, or dreams of men gone sour. She was slower, less proud, opinionated for sure, but she held her ideas underneath a taut umbrella which didn't allow rain nor sunlight to penetrate. Also, her English was not good, I found myself falling too easily into ridicule.

I looked about the darkness and spotted Carmella in the corner with a small, ugly Greek-looking man. They did not seem to be together, so I left the Sparrow and resumed my water sports. As I had suspected, there was not a passionate liaison between my intended prey and Socrates. He was desperately trying to make conversation, as she did her best to look bored, listless, and at every man who walked past.

As I reached them, I handed the pint of lager over the remains of a half-burnt candle and recent drinking associates. The corner was choking from Ducados cigarettes and stifled conversation. I squeezed the arm of Carmella and led her from one dialogue to another. I asked her if she was the prey of every man in the room. "What sort of question is that to ask someone?" she replied.

I had alerted her indignation. She strutted rather than merely walked. I was behind her, thinking furiously about some way of resolving the rift that had developed. Instead of consolation, I wore a conceited look. Distance became arrogance. I stood taller, was more dismissive, pretended that nothing had happened, I was untouched, independent. This character trait has its function, along with the rest. It isn't always a good idea to be cute.

It worked. She was trying and interested again. We resumed the heavily laced set of lies that we had been spinning before. I suggested that we leave, we went into the street.

She still needed to flirt. Even without an audience, the game of lie counter lie continued. What of the truth? What of emotion and honesty? What of intelligent, observed conversation?

Such considerations had no place between us. We kept our sensual net close to seriousness. She whipped down her tights and peed round a corner, so I had to stand and watch, or turn away in some sort of embarrassed gesture.

She said," You are not going to fuck with me tonight", and wagged her finger quite demonstratively. I laughed and replied that she was mistaken.

At her flat we sat at the kitchen table. She rolled a joint and made coffee. We were soon joined by a large Continental man. He wore a big grin and talked with a low rumbling, reassuring but sarcastic lilt.

"The club was not as busy as usual tonight. I liked the way some of them were dressed as if it was summer. It made me feel rather at home and able to view them better than if they had been all covered up."

The doorbell rang, Carmella stiffened noticeably.

"It's probably my boyfriend. I'm sure he wants to kill me."

A good looking man in his middle twenties came in. He looked worried and sat opposite to me. He also started to roll a joint. He spoke in staccato fashion, there was something wrong in his voice, a doubt, he wavered.

"You can be sure I'll be over again. It's really not going to work, is it? The things we've talked about before, don't they count anymore? I just want everything to be the same. I suppose I will have to go."

I sat quite perplexed for a while, then decided to leave after the forlorn stranger. Carmella caught me before I could take off. She deftly directed me into the room. I remember a low light and a mattress on the floor.



CHAPTER TWO

I was inside of myself. Beyond a fanciful philosophy about love or the outside world. Something more serious, more profound, something anxious but serene, a feeling akin to floating, yet troubled, calm, but not at rest. Here is a part of consciousness where opposites are perfectly joined. Here direction is difficult, motivation such as sexuality impossible. Polarity is hard to come by. It is a darkened place, somewhere obvious, weak, like a cave but darker, colder, full of atmosphere.

Through it, we find ourselves on a train. This train is heading out of the West, and to the North. I was on a journey with Showman to the land of our forefathers, strange rocky platform that it is. We rumbled through cracked, stained landscapes of brickwork profusion. England, that shattered dream, lay before us in the rain. The streets and settlements and ambling armies swayed to a rhythm that was drowned by the clatter of railway sleepers stroked by eighty dark metal wheels going north.

Showman was in full waistcoat flow, from the ornamental watch to the spittle between his teeth. He glinted a salesman's dignity, a rocked joke of spangled deliberation, the Australian, the American, eccentric and indecent.

"Did I tell you of Africa? That black heart of hers was mine as well. I slipped into her arms like a snake charmed through some Arabic hypnotism. We danced like lovers, in alcohol filled nights.

There were witch-doctors and magicians and young women coming to me, they would press their bodies against mine as we danced together, merging into the heavy beat. They would whisper into my ear, lets go, lets go outside, lets go now white man. One would follow another, with their physical sweat-lined forms just visible against the bar backdrop. They swept long fingers through my hair, knotted ribbons around my arms, legs. I felt them come and go, warm pointed blood sisters, looking to join me in some kind of open-air orgy.

Then I was outside, in the car racing away. Just visible in hours of drinking and smoking; the low slung blocks of houses, other beat up cars, intermittent road signs hanging onto their purposes with corrosion and knotted plants. I stopped at a junction. Out of a gap in the bric-a-brac collection came a man with a gun. His brown, body length coat scrapped behind him as he came at me shouting abuse, `Slough out your yellowman, look hardy yon, tit for tat, tit for tat. Slough it out, give mine.'

I drove on as quickly as Budweiser would allow. I got back in time to herald the dawn and sleep, bliss, another African day."

We arrived at a small Scottish railway station and telephoned the centre where we were to stay. It was going to be three-quarters of an hour before being picked up, so we took food from an open truck kebab house and headed for the pub.

The Black Grouse swaddled in tudor beam, rested her old head at the corner of the street. Inside groups of men and groups women of were kept apart. Showman and myself positioned ourselves between the opposing throng. The women, adorned in tight black skirts, white shirts and gold jewellery, looked at us and giggled. The men were playing darts, each at the 'ocky' separately, shouting, screaming, slapping each other in turn then going back to the scrum. Thick aggressive voices from small black-haired men, two city cats at the bar, squirming maids on the chairs.

An older man sat at the end of the room and talked to the barmaid about fixing gardening implements and the price of a drink. The pub had been the same for two hundred years, as the groups showed and the atmosphere revered.

We left the pub and climbed into our taxi to take us to the centre. I sat next to a middle aged woman with long brown hair, she was called Abbey.

"I've been at the centre for five years now. To start with I lived in a hut that was built for me by one of the people there, then I built my own with a friend. I do sculpture there you know, the temple is full of sculpture and paintings, all produced by artists working at the centre. We all help each other and join in with prayers and the work and the cooking you know. The countryside is beautiful, don't you think?"

She was right, bleak moors embraced lines of trees and distant mountain tops. Showman was beginning to get edgy in the back of the car, and shifted about tapping the roof and windows.

We soon came to the centre. Coloured flags lined the road into the place, Abbey told us that they were to send messages of peace and good will to the outside world. They had a decorative quality beyond the metaphysical one, there were also small coned objects arranged on what looked like planks. We were dropped off at a large Victorian house. Abbey told us that the fare was $12, "if you've got it," and showed us to our rooms.

Showman lounged on the bottom bunk, I laid back on the top. We both thought that this might not have been such a good idea simultaneously. A man in a furry jumper walked in and introduced himself as Mike. Mike gave us a little information about the centre, in a nervous, apologetic manner. Then he scratched his chin and left.

Downstairs, in the kitchen there was a queue for the tea. A young man sat casually looking at Showman. He had a large nose, baggy clothing, a woollen hat and was always chewing something.

"People call me horse. I've been here for nearly a year now and its cool. We do prayers and things. You can join in if you want, there isn't much else to do though, here watch out for the girls."

Showman perked up at this. However, the girls were soon revealed. Both were bland council estate turnstiles, thirteen or fourteen, with those vacant faces, attached to blotchy bodies, harbouring non thoughts. They asked us our star signs, where we came from, what we were doing here, if we had any cigarettes or a car. That night, I was torn between resting and being alert, shifting in fluid sound proof wave patterns.

My patterns were disturbed by a gong and a rustling. To the end of the room, I could just make out a figure flickering over the bed of Mike. It moved up and down, like an amateur film from the early days of cinema. It looked like Mike, but definitely wasn't him. It was too quick, too insubstantial, too much of a ghoul.

We slept through breakfast and went straight to lunch. Lunch consisted of several types of salad, soup and bread. Food at the centre was always vegetarian. After lunch we asked a monk if there was anything to do. The shaven headed monk replied that this was a place for rest and spiritual rejuvenation, somewhere you go on retreat. Showman nearly started an argument about coping with the modern world, which in his opinion was not difficult. Lots of people have spiritual problems though; the psychologically affected, the lonely, the over sensitive ones, the searchers, the Westerners turning to the East and finding nothingness.

The temple was impressive. Tibetan style, big and red. There was all over decoration, golden buddhas, prayer wheels, paintings of bodhisatvas, demons, musical instruments, a large decorated container holding micro-film of the Tibetan holy texts themselves. Shrines were brought out with water, flowers, pictures, offerings from the converted, the quiet ones. Such was the place I sat and meditated in. I could focus my consciousness so it became a tunnel, then shifts of light and dark, then, as the golden buddhas merged into focal streams spiralling off into infinity, I would become part of the stream itself, floating and beyond, circling through, without movement.

More vegetarian food and more disquiet from Showman. He was centred in his social, floral life of the West. An Anglo-Saxon or a disaffected a Celt, an alcoholic refugee that could not grasp the ascetic appeal of metaphysical illusion. He was sitting in the boiler room, with two others smoking roll-ups. In the corner was a man smoking a pipe, he had the clasped left-hand of somebody who had recently suffered a stroke. The smoke exhaling from his pipe was scented and sweet, he made a gurgling sound as he brought fumes into his lungs.

"What sort of noise is that? You sound like you are sucking on the wrong end of a sewer, and that smell, what is that pansy perfume? What has it got to do with smoking and a pipe? Christ its disgusting being near to you, its like being next to a Frenchman with a broken respirator. Why don't you go and slurp somewhere else? By the way, how is your mother?"

"She's O.K."

I had once been present at a lecture by a man who had had a stroke on the way to the talk. As he spoke of higher rationality, he slurred his words as if drunk, saliva dribbled down his shirt, and he noticeably shook. During the coffee-break, after the talk, he had to be helped when holding the cup and his biscuits just didn't go down right. Now the German who had suffered the same fate, smiled strangely through his thick beard and mauve headband. His confident was a smaller man, with a cockney accent and a story to tell. He possessed huge hands and large glasses.

" I was a jeweller on the South-Coast. I work with gold and silver mainly, I produce the moulds to order, then create the pieces, anything you want if you've got the money. Working for the cocaine set on the Coast, took me to parties, on yachts, in mansions, all over the shop.

They wanted containers for their snout, cockerels, testicles, the cruder the better. The man with the cockerel would go up to women at parties and say, `Do you want to suck my cock?' If they agreed, they would get a line of coke, if they refused, well that's life isn't it?

I made thousands, thousands as a personal jeweller to the rich, I set up on Crete after a while, moved the whole operation to Crete, all the moulds, everything. I got fat on expensive restaurants and handmade suits, me and the wife were living a great life, but we were homesick for England.

When we came back, things had changed, and not for the better. People had been talking about me, and the jealous ones had set about to bring me down. It was a set-up job, a frame-up, which started with the usual sorts of lies, money not accounted for, a crime I didn't commit.

I began to be in and out of the nick like a yo-yo. Well, I said to myself that this would not do. I couldn't stand it anymore, the police barking at my heels, the wife unhappy, phone calls in the middle of the night, the men always sitting outside the house. My business contacts became suspicious, I was a known figure, somebody people didn't trust. So I got out, brought my workshop here and hid. Been here six months now, working on and off, made the lama some silver chucks for his belt, loved them he did."

Wondering. I was wondering what this set-up was all about. Sitting on the top of a mountain in the land of my fathers. Religion? Below, a group of Westerners were working for displaced Tibetans. Most of them had suffered some sort of upheaval, or had consciously decided to live an alternative lifestyle. Was I on the same path?

A boy had talked to me about karma and re-incarnation. He had expressed the idea that we have all met before in former lives, that nothing is coincidence. So we were all `meant' to be at the centre. Showman had then asked him about his girlfriend, and thrown off the discussion, but I was intrigued by the idea.

Did he have any evidence? Massive and continual déjà vu perhaps. If were true, then it would also probably be true that the souls which we meet in this lifetime are the same souls which we have met before, they are just inhabiting different bodies. Do we always marry the same partner? Do we always have the same school teachers? We are all living the same lifetime for eternity, only the scenery ever changes.



More prayers and vegetarian food and reading and Showman visibly splitting up at the edges. His eyes had become reddened, he paced up and down, he spent hours in the boiler room, nervously smoking roll-ups. A Danish woman mentioned to me that she could sense that there were barriers between us. She also said that we were not integrating into the centre fully. I agreed, and replied that there are some barriers which are worth keeping.

I met a large man at dinner. He had a prominent forehead and called himself `Shiva'. He showed me a book which told you how to read someone's character from the texture of their iris. A woman sitting nearby offered to give me a reading.

She came into my room. In front of her she laid a piece of paper with `yes' and `no', written in large letters on either side of the paper. If I answered yes, she would tap the corresponding area, and conversely if I answered no.

"I can tell that you have had problems in childhood. Tears, tears. I can see tears during childhood. Pain also here (she tapped the back of her neck), something you must come to terms with, an emotional problem, from your father, you will be vulnerable because of it. I can recommend two drops of pine solution per week for four months. Scribbling, you shall be scribbling for a living, (she began to move her hand furiously in the air)."



Days dragged. Showman and I dug a trench to help to strengthen the entrance road. I talked to the lama about a hotch-potch of spiritual matters, the issue of desire figured prominently. Christians try to bury the passions in the soul of Jesus Christ, Buddhists don't annihilate them, but transform them through vegetarianism and meditation.

I thought that many Westerners were not ready for this transformation. He agreed, saying that it took many years and lots of cheerfulness. I left him with the distinct impression of a jolly man. He laughed and clapped throughout the talk we had, he did have an abundance, an innocence, a sparkle beyond the ordinary.

However, Showman and I were both itching to return. I was open to the ideas, but had another life to lead, back to the ordinary.





CHAPTER THREE



In the city we had a date with Mirandella and Evela. It was Evela's birthday. She welcomed us into the basement of the house where they had been decorating and arranging the furniture. There was food, music and woman, a dark seductive atmosphere.

The girls put paper bracelets on us and we all danced in the middle of the room. Spanish dancing, men and woman. Those, `I want you' looks, followed by ritual turning away, then dancing with the next figure in the circle. It was couple dancing, laughing at and with each other, feeling the force of your partner pushing and pulling you in and out of the circle, then onto the next dancer and more of the same.

My favourite was Mirandella. I had already come close to sharing a night with her, and now as the dance quickened, the physical contact increased and the laughing became deeper. I waited to be with as I went round the circle. I looked into her eyes as she danced towards and away from me. As she came round the next time, I went to kiss her just as she began to turn away. I caught her hair instead, and was left chewing a mouthful of her black foliage.

A man with a large toothy grin had entered the scene. Behind him a young girl looked shyly into the table. The man at once joined the dancing in a drunken, stumbling approach to the Spanish girls. He exaggerated and lampooned his way through the set dance, a can of lager in one hand, a cigarette in the other. His girlfriend looked sheepishly at the spectacle from her distant table setting. He was performing despite himself, a reaction to something in the past, his fragile love, the boredom of his life.

Showman on the other side was in fuller control. He took to the floor alone and danced to a rhapsody all of his own. He was soon together with another of the girls. They swayed and pranced backwards and forwards, used a chair as a prop, gave physical existence to the sexual power of dance. She was in a small black dress zipped at the back. Showman was running his fingers up and down the zip, nearly taking the metal runner with him, as they shifted still further. Then he placed his hands on her delicate waist to swirl around the room even faster.

While this exhibition was taking place, I took my time before being wrapped in the arms of Mirandella.

"You are the most beautiful woman here. Let me take you home with me. All I can think about is you, since I entered the room there has only been you. You are a delicious cake, you shine like the moon, I want to be covered in your eminence, swathed in your camouflage, born from your carriage like a chariot riding the sun."

We shared a moment, drank from the cup of joy, went on our separate ways.



I was caught out again in the middle of the night. Alone, and in a crowd, drinking, searching for something. At the top of the stairs, I chanced upon the Continental man whom I had met at Carmella's flat. He reacted in a warm, reassuring manner, which stemmed from his deep voice and large, positive frame -

"Speak to me of the Ancient Greeks. The world of Thucicydes, Sophocles and Plato. Speak to me of a nobler, more manly world than that of our own. Speak to me of the timelessness of heroism, the invention of society, the development of an Empire.

Where are such immortals now? Among the politicians? Are they the inheritors of the ancient creed which speaks to us through centuries of revolution? Or are the new elite the businessmen? They are crawling across the planet in their suits, poking their dirty hands into everything already untouched in case it reveals a secret or an opportunity to make a profit. Or what about the intellectuals? They sit aloof in palaces of the mind, formulating and discussing in ever diminishing arenas, their problems of existence would probably be better left to the Gods.

Or what about the theologians? Are they the inheritors of the Greek ideals, which were brought up again during the Renaissance. Are they the keepers of the hidden codes which unlock the doors to corridors of understanding where Pascal and Goethe both have stood?

No, my friend, a truly noble class is currently lacking. None of these groups, or the landed aristocrats, represent that rare blend of humanity, intellect and cruelty. I look over the world today and I see only herds of cattle, grazing on mediocre ideals of equality. They are impossibly bounded by the momentary nature of their thoughts.

We are in need of greater fathers than these. Ones who can wrestle with the universal tangle of human thought, yet retain warmth and feeling for their actions. We need fathers who know what man is, and more importantly, `what we will become.'"

His rhetorical style was dampened by an easy, story-telling method of presentation. Also a rumbling sense of humour pushed his words along. Everything he said was almost tongue-in-cheek, totally without anxiety. We were at the top of the stairs, people kept squashing past us, we arranged to meet later in the week, he said that Carmella would be there too.



I was with Mirandella, Evela, Showman and some others in the night. We were drinking and flirting in the accustomed manner of the young ones. Showman the cad, with brazen chest and inflated ego, brought in the entertainment. A hundred lost lovers behind him, perhaps children, woman crying into their handkerchiefs, wondering why they felt so empty, why the colour had gone out of their lives.

Evela and Mirandella were happily chirping around us. Mirandella looked at me innocently, prettily, she held out her hand, we began to dance.

I felt my left leg hooked from behind. As I turned around and left Mirandella, I could sense the excited form of Carmella. She was jumping up and down, laughing, protesting, she kept looking from one side to another.

"I have been away. I want to the Coast and to a party. There were many men there, and when I went to them they all thought that they had found a new girlfriend. Then we drove back through the night, me and a friend, we kept getting so lost, we were thinking where the road signs were and which side of the road to drive.

Yesterday, I went with some people to an artificial ski-slope. I was absolutely stoned and kept falling over, it was awful, we just kept laughing and laughing at each other. What amusing stories do you have? Go on tell me what you have been doing?"

"Well, I've been to a temple."

"That isn't very amusing."

At this junction, she strode off in the opposite direction and lost herself in the crowd. I had a choice then, either to go back to Mirandella, or to follow the new intimate. I chose, and went into the crowd, noticed a friend that I had not seen around for a long time, and we passed pleasantries between us.

I left the old friend and found Carmella amongst a group of large men including the Continental male. She was laughing and joking, playing to the men. I was suddenly gripped by a strange apprehension. What was I doing? What on earth could I say now?

The game she wanted to play was the lovers dance. Coming together, getting angry, going away, reconciling, then starting the circle all over again.

I was in the dance now. I had to go on into it, I had to drink to the bottom of the cup. On one side of me, an innocent, on the other something altogether more alluring, painful and destructive. I could call myself an idiot for choosing the difficult choice, but life is about experience, and only a fool discusses his fate.



Amid growing rumours and speculation, I could not conceal the facts from my friends. I told them of my latest obsession, they dismissed it as another one of my poor excuses to be fully carnivorous `on the scene'.

There was a dinner party. Arranged by a visiting professor from the 'fatherland', I sat at the table and waited obediently for the food to arrive.

A German man sat next to me and opposite to me. Next to the man in front of me, sat the professor, pipe in hand, talking amicably about the movement of the Occident. To the left of the German sat a friend of Carmella's, Ambela was sat besides her and next to Carmella sat our Continental male, Thasminos.

Carmella was cooking. A deep Spanish smell of paella wafted from the kitchen. She came in bearing a large frying pan. The table applauded and she glowed happily. We all tucked heartily into the chicken and mussels and rice and tomato and onions and garlic.

"I think I will open a restaurant."

"Unfortunately, the only two items on the menu would be tortilla and paella."

On the wall behind Carmella was a sailor. He was held up by the arms and legs. Thasminos read the instructions to make the sailor rise up the string. One could achieve the elevation by grasping the two balls on the end of the string. The sailor would then be completely under your control.

Carmella stood on her chair. She looked at me and started to sing a Spanish song, she danced up and down. She laughed deeply and stamped about, soon she mounted the table. By this time the room had begun to clap, the professor was the most vigorous, as he looked approvingly and longingly at Carmella.

Ambela sung with Carmella. Stretching her legs, Carmella began to dance on the table. She started to kick the remains of the dinner onto the floor. The cutlery and the food and the glasses and the drinks. Still she continued, faster and faster. The room became a whirl of broken china, drink and smeared food. Laughing and clapping, we promptly met Carmella on the table. I jumped off holding her. We rolled onto the floor then beneath the table. She found a fork, showed it to my hysterical face, then pressed it firmly into the inside of my leg.

"Now you are mine," she whispered.







CHAPTER FOUR



Within a couple of days, I found myself thinking about Carmella. She had said that there was going to be a party in her flat at the end of the week. It would be a polite affair, so I decided to arrive late, perhaps by that time it would have got going.

I went to the pub with Showman and a man called Devon. Devon was a heavy drinker, he rocked heavily in his wired, pitchfork shape. He possessed a toad-like mouth and small reptilian eyes.

Next to him sat Kim. I had known Kim for a long time, and she was a good friend. I had made advances towards her, but had been rejected. She liked the fact that I had gone for her, and wished to retain the friendship.

"How are you and Carmella? Is it all going well between you? What is she like in bed?"

"Its all going very well at the moment. I know myself, and I am beginning to get to know her, it is a relationship not destined to last."

"You look so stylish, happy, yet not clinging to each other when you are together."

"Yes, it is good, we both have our own friends and our own lives, so we remain independent."

"It sounds such an adult affair, most of the males I meet are just boys."

"You'll meet someone. You are attractive, intelligent and you have a great personality as well."

"Keep pouring it on, I'll start to regret having given you up."



Kim and I kept talking, mostly in a frivolous way, as we walked to the party with Showman. There was however something else between us. A connection, a movement, an easiness, a lightness of contact in a world torn apart by wind, fire and rain.

We sat in the far end of the room and continued to chat closely to one another. The flat was littered with European youth, all seemingly locked in communication. An older Scottish woman, whose hair was noticeably thin and grey, stood out from the clandestine herd, who gathered in formations without obvious distinction.

Carmella was the brightest of them. She swayed and joked around the whole group. She stopped at every junction, swirled about, showed off her tight body and open smile until everyone was full of her. Time passed quickly as the superficial, unhidden flirtation between myself and Kim continued unabashed. I felt like meeting a few of the others briefly, so circulated amongst them before returning to my pre-destined spot. Kim had not lifted herself from the chair, she seemed perfectly happy to reside and survey, rather than make any effort to join in.

"The party not to your liking?"

"No, not at all, I'm enjoying myself."

"What are you doing just sitting here then?"

"O.K, let's dance."

At that she changed the tape and replaced it with a livelier mixture. We wiggled around for a while, the others in the room half-heartedly dancing too. A large German presently turned the music down and said that the neighbours would be complaining. We rejoined our seats, and I rejoined a large unfinished whisky. I had hardly said anything to Carmella all evening, I watched her as she circled around the gathering of sapiens. Kim asked where the lavatory was situated, I said out of the door, up the stairs, it was at the end of the hall. She seemed not to understand. I led her out of the door and pointed up the stairs, she set off in the correct direction.



The door closed behind me. As I turned around I could smell Carmella's perfume. She stood outlined by the door with her hands firmly on her hips.

"What do you think you are doing?"

"I was showing Kim to the toilet."

"Then you were going to fuck her, weren't you?"

"You know I only want you."

At this the contents of her drink showered onto me and the wall. I began to laugh.

In her bedroom the salvo continued. I was still drawn inexcusably to laughter, she was still simmering.

"Well you know that you are not the only one who can be unfaithful. I can too you know. I have a man who lives on the Coast. I could go and see him tomorrow if I wanted. I can be with other people as well, so watch out mister, you are playing with someone who knows how to play the game."

"This I have never doubted, but the fact was and the fact remains that Kim and I were only talking, and talking freely in front of you. If I wanted to have Kim, would I flaunt it so obviously? Your jealous reaction is extreme, and I take it as a compliment. However, don't let the reaction blur your vision, so that you see things as you want to see them rather than as they really are."

I left the bedroom and returned to mingling with the guests and alcohol and Kim. We danced some more, avoided the Germans and the neighbours and Kim had to go, escorted by the ever chivalrous Showman. Carmella sat on my lap as the last guest went home.





A few days later at school, I was feeling exhausted. A series of close calls with pupils, too much shouting, too little attention. The remedy called for was a rendez-vous with a fellow philosopher, and somebody to drink with.

My friend was decorating the stage at the Art College. We went to a small pub at the end of a street of closely terraced houses. I noticed an atmosphere of dread there, a warning perhaps. Quiet screams seemed to be wafting invisibly through the air, filling my soul with blackness and a levelling.

Mauss sat with his long hair streaming down his back, his petulant fingers grasping a pint of bitter.

"The question that deludes and goes completely beyond the art world is the question of the object. The object is something to be explored, experimented with, asked questions about. Something to be seen from different angles, to be given perspectives. It is something to be hidden, so we doubt the difference between the real and the illusionary."

"Isn't that the main point of conceptual art anyway?"

"No, conceptual art dealt with concepts. I am proposing something more akin to object art. Art of the concept is still too ideal. The ideal put forward beneath its banner is that of the idea. Through the idea we approach reality, so the reality that we are approaching is that of the concept, the unreal, the devised.

Focusing on that we lose the notion of the object, and the thing which the artist is actually playing with."

"What is the difference? Even an object has to be conceived in the mind of the artist, it must be a concept to begin with."

"But making the concept the object of the art form rather than the object, surely blurs the clarity of the thinking. Its like saying that the point of a book is the ideas it portrays rather than the book itself."

"Both the object and the concept are equally as interesting. But don't you think that such exploration of human thought takes us too far away from nature and perceived reality?"

"I am not empirically minded. My first wish is to expose the psychology of man with art. Let the scientists uproot the universe, but not tend to their own gardens."



At this Carmella and Thasminos entered the pub. They looked like a couple from a Buñuel film. She with paste green furred coat, heavy make-up, jet black hair; him with stylish leather jacket, the gesture of a courtier. Carmella sat firmly between Mauss and myself. The conversation would not have been to her approval, she would have to change the subject.

She steered the words onto the more flirtatious solicitation she was adept at weaving. Mauss scrumpled his face at the change in content and partners. Then he kept shrugging his shoulders as Carmella did her best to keep up the excited, covert interaction.

Thasminos stroked my hair kindly as I relayed the story of my day at school.

"The children did their best to ignore or disrupt me. During one lesson they did the paper flicking routine throughout, in another an organised hum kept a steady background noise whilst I attempted to regain class order and a recognisable schedule."

"You must relax and show them that it doesn't get to you. Do not look at teaching in terms of winning and losing, or as a struggle. If you do, it will certainly become one."



Mauss looked credulous and a little worried as Carmella seemingly told him her innermost secrets, which were all undoubtedly gestured cameo. It was not the content but the wrapping that intrigued her. Yet, just as you had made up your mind that it was all too superficial and only a game, something from the depths of her would take you by surprise and remind you that you did want to play after all. She had the upper hand at being unpredictable, making you guess, being amazed and uplifted. She was sharp and confident, she was not ill at ease at taking the helm.

Mauss's helm was however not taken. He was too lofty, out of reach of the plot she would place on every situation. He wanted to continue to debate about art. With this in mind, he reached over and took my glass to buy another beer.

Carmella, who had up until then had not looked at me, launched herself onto my lap and wrapped her arms around me.

"I was so glad you phoned, I didn't know what to do tonight, whether I should go out or wait to see you. What are we going to do now?"

"Why not go to the college and see a band?"



Mauss came back with the drinks and settled down out of the reach of Carmella.

"Do you think that this art of the object will work, and not be another pretentious modern art gimmick?"

"I think so. I do not many friends at the college with my approach. They do tend to ask the question that you have just asked, and answer before you get a chance to speak with their own pre-determined negative reply. I am open. I am open to ideas, suggestions and life. My exploration of the psychology of man through art reflects this openness. The negative derision of people bent on criticism does not affect me. I try to answer them with honesty, but I inevitably fall prey to their limited knowledge of art and an argument ensues.

This was what probably motivated them in the first place. So I do not want to merely be subject to their antagonistic whims."

"People need controversy, it livens up dull lives."



We lifted ourselves through the haze that beer had cast and headed out to the college. The building lay at the top of a hill at the end of an impressive ark of Georgian houses. It was lit by a disco beat and the hum of conversation. We made for the bar and more beer swilled into ever swimming minds.

Mauss introduced me to his friend Blanchot. Blanchot stood well above Mauss, who was himself a tall man. Blanchot had the air of a gypsy with a worn waistcoat and tanned leathery skin.



Blanchot was a warm host, and offered to show me around the college. There were exhibits of pottery stacked in crowded rooms, jars and sculptures, ceramic painted mixtures of re-design. Blanchot held my arm carefully and guided us through studios of abstract paint assemblies. Tall helmeted men in front of holocaust walls scrawled with slogans and grafitti in neon and contrast, it was modern exaggeration.

"Is there any subtlety left?"

At this he offered to me portraits and figures of old men. Moral sensibilities and artists with eyes open to beautiful figurative work.



"Yes, the art world is chaotic. Do not look for a definite set of principles to base your judgements of good and bad on. It is in flux, everything is up for grabs.

The biggest, loudest are jostling with meek psyches dancing in delicacy and spidery forms. You cannot find any fixed points anymore. Only the expressions of individuals wrapped in themselves with a limited view of a shifting unhistoric past. Minor and major egoism."

We wound our way back to the disco, and an empty dance floor except for one bobbling figure. Carmella flicked up and down at the enticement of the two man band. They played a circular jazz bongo music which wound through the thin hall to the gathered students in the bulge towards the bar.

I united with Carmella and jigged to the beat in a unique world protected by the conformity of dance. She noticed me and we circled around together slowly. We did not move together closely, but followed the lonely music at a distance, we made a large arc. Others joined us and a mass took shape of bobbling, flicking ritual, the expression of muscles and co-ordination, gesturing in chaos.

The band left and shorter pop songs made their into the arena. Carmella was dancing rock and roll with Mauss. They found some harmony together in the thick upheaval of people squashed together through rhythm. I bought another beer and watched the turning.

It was quickly over. We headed out to my waiting car. As we left two girls called after us. I turned back and asked what they required. Mauss, who was already at the car, was the intention of their desires; I explained that he was going with us and could not attend to their wishes at the present time.

This did not dampen their enthusiasm, they hung onto me excitedly and pursued their enquiry. I told them that I had to leave, that my bed awaited, I really had to go. As I pulled myself from them, they both kissed me on the cheek and clawed at my arms. Carmella and Thasminos were at the car talking with Mauss.

"They wanted my man, I am very possessive."







CHAPTER FIVE

PART TWO

SEXUALITY



Written in large letters on the screen, visible and made for everyone to see. Cyrano De Bergerac and the love of lyric. William Blake had well expressed the contradictions of good and bad, the velvet cloaks of Swedenbourg falling from him as he walked into his own light.

French literature had found its own arena, the British voice wavered between the military Scots, with swinging principles of right and wrong, and the spiritual Irish. Their ideas floating through a Celtic dream of mythology and folklore and the Guinness stained breath of the people.

Carmella had the dance of the gypsy tucked underneath her skirt.

She strutted through the corridor to the small entrance hall and the cinema. She was dancing softly as she went. Eyes turned and lingered on the line of her torso, the wave of her arms and her contented consuming smile. Her large eyes absorbed the light around her and directed it outwards in the provocative caress of deft traditional steps to enhance a simple walk to view a film.



I was moved from my Oceanic English irony. What of my emotions, and the nervous movement of the stomach, the heart and yearning for physicality? Where was it all leading me?

We watched the film. She applauded and sighed as the story of unrequited love moved her Spanish heart to joy and dejection. The thoughts of the audience were shallow in comparison to her well of aesthetic response. She clapped and cheered loudly at the exploits of the hero as he waxed his way through the episodes of heroism and poetry. He was Don Juan for the modern Gallic femme. As the tragedy unfolded she began to cry. At the apogee, tears were rolling heavily from her face as the misunderstanding and climax were revealed.

I went to console her. She said that it was alright, she had seen the film five times before, it always affected her that way. She met a Spanish friend near the exit, we went to a pub.



Showman was revealing something of his more sensitive nature to me.

" I have only ever loved one woman truly. Her name was Tessa, she was Irish. She had thick black Irish hair, those dutiful eyes and forceful lips. She was always the one at the club who the bouncers had to remove at the end of the night. They would say every time, `there has to be one, doesn't there?' We met at night in a club, and that was where it had to end.



I had known her for months before it started. She flirted in and out of our social games like a pantomime horse on a catwalk. Her shapely body, tuneful and alluring voice, her gestures, her drunkenness. She would usually be draped over a man, or dancing on top of one of the speakers, deliberately alone, in full sight so everyone could see.

She was the spirit of the night clubs, I was young, I could not resist her. Yet she proved to be difficult to catch. She moved to and from my grasp. One night I could feel her warm breath so close that I could swallow her scent. The next I could have been mining for teeth on the moon.

Eventually, after a long bout of close calls and near achievement I gave up. I decided to settle for one of her less remarkable friends. At this, a spark of jealousy ignited in her. Now the sight of me with her friend was too much to bear, she had to have me. It was all I could do to stop her raping me on the spot. We immediately took a taxi home.

Inside the flat, her black dress uniform was soon transformed into pure white skin, a bush of pubic hair. She laughed at my slowness to unleash the beast. She wanted me there and then, before anything else happened, before we went any further. She must not miss the moment.

That night has burnt its passion deeply into me. Our relationship lasted well over a year all told. It was always a sort of exaggerated sexual St. Jerome dance. She had to want me. When she didn't want me, I had to want her. We were forever fighting. Jealousy, reprisal, accusation, power politics seemed to come into the conversation as often as we spoke. It was a necessity of the relationship that we were obsessed with each other, committed to insanity. I have known nothing like her before or since."

"How did it end?"

"The ending was scrappy and undefined. Like the beginning it was long in the tooth, had its ups and downs. First it was absolutely over, the violence had come to the surface. I had caught her with another man, an Italian. She was flirting with him as if he was already pouring love gifts all over her body.

They hadn't noticed that I was on the scene, listening to the conspiracy just behind them. Then I walked in on the liaison. You can guess what was said -

`We were only talking.'

`It didn't look like it from where I was standing.'

`It bores me to talk to you when you are so drunk.'

I got angry too quickly. My control, something inside of me clicked, went over the boiling point, my fuse was all broken and burnt. Finished with talking, but unable to leave, I made something for the others to talk about. The Italian just stayed there, cool as you like, I shouted, hit the table, kept on arguing.

I suddenly found myself in front of him with a half smashed bottle twitching nervously just before his Latin throat. I told him, `to try it, just try it, see if I'm not afraid to use this.'



My weapon out front, Tessa screaming at me to grow up and put the bottle down, the Italian motionless, his oratory with Tessa finished. His image impeccably intact, hair and jacket without a ripple. He asked Tessa in an unruffled tone whether or not she would like him to deal with the situation. This incensed me even more, to breaking point. The bottle shook violently in my hand, I began to sweat, the world twisted into a whirlpool around me.



I found myself in a puddle of blood, beer and vomit sometime later. I had fallen down, cut my arm with the bottle and been sick in one graceful leap. Tessa had left with the Italian. I saw her again, at clubs, parties, we would try and make it as it was before. It never worked out that way. There was still an attraction, the last I heard of Tessa, she was married to a soldier in Germany."

"I would never have thought that I would hear a tale like that from you. A woman getting the better of you."

"She didn't get the better of me. She just took me to the very depths of my passion. She taught me how to cope with the things that are almost impossible to deal with. Male pride, dignity, hopes for the future, security, the tension of violent sex, insanity, alcoholism and dependence.

She taught me about the need for satisfaction and release from that satisfaction. She was free, an alcoholic, but free within it. She was a lesson in survival. I have not made the same mistakes with any woman again. When you see something you really want, hold back and realise that your wants are not to be satisfied or in any way finished. They are just using the situation to expand themselves, and give you more reason to lose control. All this talk reminds me of a certain Spanish woman you have been with frequently."

"Yes."

"Do you love her?"

"Yes."

"Mark my words amigo, this is an extremely good point at which to have another drink."







CHAPTER SIX



I drained my glass, looked at the pool table and the occupants of the game. A thin man with a protruding chin and a bird-like neck was playing. His erect figure hovered over the array of balls in observation. Then he quickly settled and took an immediately accurate shot. A yellow ball fired into the hole. To the left of him, a large red-haired girl sighed as another boring defeat stared her gloomily in the face.

Next to me, I had met a serious thin faced Londoner. His greasy drawn back locks angled his face into a frame like a Dutch painting of a 14th century nobleman.

"Buying and selling jewellery, that's my game. I go to the markets on the Coast and in London. I will always pick something up cheaply, then I'll sell it at a profit to one of the antique shops here or further into the West. I do quite well, trade is slack at the moment though, there has been a slump."

"I met a man in Scotland, who said that he could reproduce antique jewellery quite perfectly."

"That sounds interesting, tell me more."

"He was originally a Londoner, who had moved to the Coast and succeeded in building up a sizeable one man business. He went to Crete, took his workshop and everything. He missed England, came back and got caught out by the police. After a while he left the Coast behind him and went to Scotland. When I met him he was almost a recluse, doing a little work now and again."

"It sounds like someone not to get involved with, considering the police and all that."



"You are probably right."

I sat and looked away from the pensive youth. The room was filled with smoke, it was a dark evasive place, with two brightly lit centre pieces of the pool tables. Games clicked on and off with the regularity of clockwork.

Carmella was sitting at the end of the first table with a small Jewish man. She was on his knee laughing as he jangled her up and down like a pantomime puppet. He was laughing too, his arm was around her and on her waist. His hand was grasping her flesh at the delicate point between breast and pelvis. It rested there, moved up and down, rested again, grasped tighter now.

She bobbled heedlessly on his jiggling leg, she laughed out loud at something he whispered into her ear, I was transfixed, staring. She said something back to him, he laughed out loud, it was an unrestrained, exuberant laughter that filled the whole room, that filled me, that echoed and rebounded until I had heard every connotation, every meaning within the sound of the laughter.

I was consumed by them, they pumped my blood heavily into my brow, they constricted my throat and sent apprehension into my stomach. The innocence and charm was transformed into constructions of phantasms crudity, intent, loathing, a picture of treachery, mistrust, betrayal, hatred, broken dreams and hollow lies. Demons lined up before my eyes in the folds of her skirt and the lines of her legs. His hair appeared like fire in the grip of the underworld, Bacchus, a wasting, an intoxicated irreverence.

Everything that I held close to me suddenly fell away, it was like the judgement of ages. A thousand dreamers all the same, naive, idealistic. What do they expect of love? What can they possibly hope to gain from the experience other than broken dreams, jealousy, intrusion and the destruction of any inner life?

Angels do not give physical pleasure, they cannot mollify the senses, smooth the nerves. I felt at once trapped, alone, absolutely vulnerable, unable to move, deafened within my world of crushing thoughts and darkening horizons.

"Are you alright? We shall go now."

She took my hand and led me into the street. I was still inside myself, brooding, speechless.

"I go tomorrow, to my country, you shall not see me for two weeks, this night we shall be together."

She led me back along the haunted street. Windows of houses reared on either of us like bats in a cave. I could taste my own blood circulating around my body in a broken, irregular shuffle, my heart was beating too fast. I could feel every jangle of my nervous system on their edges with the reality of chemical interaction, muscular control, sinuous collections of merging and growing. My brain was giving out random messages to release and to constrict. I was confused and alone.

"You are feeling sad that I leave, it will pass."

She appeared to comprehend my every undefined movement and thought as if she were reading from a script, or if she didn't understand, she was convincing in every conviction that she expressed. We turned the corner and came into the arc where her flat was situated. She turned the key, pushed open the door, gestured and I stepped inside.

The walk of a few yards seemed to be the run up to the throne room of Alexander the Great. I could feel every part of me quaking. Every sound that my shoes made against unremitting tiles was amplified into the haze of emotional distress. Here we are all one, we are merely spokesmen for primal beats, we are the noise of our molecules drowning in the water.



I climbed the stairs, deliberately asphyxiating and clawing back to a knowledge of myself, the lay out of my body on the inner map of the brain.

"You seem very quiet."

"I was just thinking of something, something unnatural."

"Sounds perverse."

"Perhaps it is."

Artificial drama drew across my voice, Carmella eased open the door and smiled. She offered the kitchen and coffee. She looked across the black topped table and took a couple of nonchalant sips from her full cup.

"You not want to drink? We go straight to bed."

The bedroom lured. Its deep red light, the mattress on the floor, accumulated underwear. The black folded lamp, the painted wooden planks used as shelves, on which sat shoe boxes just above the floor. Inside amassed mementoes, letters, stamps, a jumble of small ornaments, frogs, grotesque gnome men with scrawny purple hair.

The window was open, an icy breeze chilled the narrow room. I went past a wardrobe. Inside was her collection of clothing, delicate black blouses with rows of sequinned balls tied in abundance, light green silk shirts open and ready, black leggings dangling forcible, the mould of small muscular legs still existent. Green paste coats, black shawls, red brilloteen jackets with small shiny studs, leather used jackets and warm mixtures of dresses, brightly coloured skirts and folded redolent jumpers. There were intricate jumbles of cotton woven materials, and the flair of patterned cloth interspersed with delicate space to expose and draw out and suck in the containment of flesh.



I closed the window. The heating was on, it wafted relief from the spring chill. I turned and saw my combatant. She had changed into a black silk dress that went half-way down her olive naked femur. Lust and pleasure shone directly from her eyes. Every movement was deliberate now, she glided to the bed and stood above the entrance watching me carefully. There was an uninterrupted vision of connection, she had a self-asserted delight in the mystic stimulant powers of sex.

She motioned to my taught affected frame. I could feel fluid seeping from me, starting to move.

"Are you ready?"

She laughed from the deep inner nook of her diaphragm. The sound spiralled around her lungs and traces and larynx and throat and teeth to a cleaned out absorbent palate. Vibrating the air and motioning it between us in a circular twirl of decision towards me. I responded with a chuckle of compliance, a softening and an agreement, a signal from pleasure loaded definition. Every moment opened and brought my factories of life nearer to their source, more aware and able to climb their ascent of tantric concentration. Sharpening and beguiling a thousand vaulted attics of cushioned panorama, I moved towards her.

My clothing fell to the ground without sound, in an easy conscious appeal to nudity and to might. Beginning slowly, the pace quickened as we lay parallel in the bed. I surveyed the curved soft warmth once more before diving into its sea of equivalence and profundity. My hand swam at once with ages of languid expression divulging to my touch. First, on the graded surface of the black cloth, then more firmly on squirming insistent legs. We had been released from the torture of the vertical to a cylinder movement feast of the horizontal and consistent moisture.

Sapien torches breezed in quicker moments of soft and hard on the destined black pocket. Carmella moved gradually closer, rasping slightly with her tongue, pouring a thick, cool water over us, immersing two into one. She was keeping a light on, a bridge between us in heady brazen days, adjusting and fornicating and savouring our physical attitude beside the entrance to a pool.

The pool gave off a heat and a scent. It sent deep muscular shivers of remembrance through me, it brought the juices of my stomach to vigorous enlivened attention. They played a feeling, airy song. The two wells lapped surly heat, praised to life, clapped and danced and bounced and reported.

My hand slipped beneath the dark vestige. It crept up through soft, tickled hair amongst the channel of the legs to a closer, smote place. The morphic, muscular entrance of the vagina. It breathed now, clasping and expanding, beginning to open. Solid pungent fluid overflowed the gate, greasing the thighs, lubricating the folds of skin thrown up about the mysterious hole like hills drenched in the morning dew on the moors.

Both of my hands gripped the hem of the slip and drew it over Carmella's amoured head. A package unwrapped, she appeared fresh in her exact naked ferocity. She kept her hands over and behind her head and arched her back. The rest of her body swayed magnetically before me. Her soft breast circling around as she moved from her hips. They shone as delicate objects, perfectly caressing my touch, inviting me ever nearer. Her deep red crowns with nipples like small fingers standing up, vulnerable, awaiting to be stimulated, aroused, looking for union.

My erection was released from its cage. She gripped my underpants and straddled them along my legs with the edge of her heel. I circled and squeezed and brought up her nipples in my fingers exuding delight and watching her face in the half-light, bore down on her with a fickle juicy tongue. I was above her now, seeing the gliding body in the abyss. My buttocks were raised and remote, my spear was ready to be launched.

It slide into place. I caught the end of my blood filled pointer in the sodden trap to which it had been directed. I began to control it exactly, feeling the extremes of the bell tingling with energy as it encroached on foreign soil. She manipulated the hydra in her grasp and rocked and squealed with it as it plunged into the opened beginning of sexual intercourse. I caught a breath of determined relief and sank my weapon through its course into the mire and a warm surrounded environment.

I continued and became lost in successive dives from a great height into that revealed space, kept at the edge of excitement. I was making sure of control to contain the bubbling sperm that was collecting inside my trunk.

She withdrew and rolled me onto my back. She sat on top and momentarily flicked my rigid argument into its pre-destined slot. She slide on the railing with deliberate slowness. I could feel my penis being squeezed and let go inside of her, she bounced and came down again and again, more quickly then extremely softly.

For a moment she seemed frightened and lost with it. The sex she had initiated in so many men, her identity as a woman, a lover, a temptress; an individuality compromised and altered by the congealed male hormone, by the labels men and women put on sexually active women. There was a brief look on her face of anxiety, she remembered the sexual union that had not been satisfied by partners unready or unable to dance in the darkness, those who had been tormented by passions other than immediate climax and arousal; those whose style had been incompatible with her own.

We shifted finally for the conclusion to bargaining. I went behind her back. The least personal position. My legs and pelvis bounced ever more firmly against her rounded soft buttocks. I gripped her bent and open form with all my strength.

My will could no longer hold back the trained carriages of reproduction inside of me. We came together in a lasting frenzy of exact fulfilment. I kept my penis deep within her, it remained taut and hard until I was taken by dreams and could hear again the relieved normality of cars cruising past the window and sharp coatings of spring rain knocking briskly outside.





Following through the instruction of her words, I drove Carmella to the railway station the next morning. She had packed her bags quickly and stood besides the car, ready to journey. I felt without a plan, destined to remain in England for the present while Carmella would be seen tramping the stage of France and Spain.

"I will be back with a friend, she is stylish."

I waved her off and drove back to my cottage. The sensuous life, the one packed and full of characters, turnings and events, was replaced by its opposite. The empty life, the world where ideas hold sway. Crystal thoughts, dreams and visions alight here, it is an airy place.

Yet here the dreams of millions are obliterated. The hopes and the ideals of life-style, future and meaning are systematically buried in the never ending machinations of the mind. This is not a place for the unready.

Where the mind is master, all things pass through it, and are transformed into the complex sign language of the understanding. Immanuel Kant lived here in ritual observation for many years, Descartes found some kind of security within it. Goethe treated it like another friend and a partner for lyric. Hume invited the stained glass of the world of the mind into his social life and an elongated dinner of words.

My understanding lay in the dust on my books, in the needle of my record player, in the paintings on my walls, Modligiani and Bonnard were talking to me. They were all telling me not to become a crazy locked in a cell, waiting for the sensuous world to be re-born again. Life on the outside was not a joke or a lie; there had not been a monstrous mistake, I was seeing the world with good eyes, and it is the same on the inside as it is out.





CHAPTER SEVEN



He was fixing a bicycle. It had been a wreck of a machine, he had found it at a cheap auction in the heart of the West. The man had gone with a friend, spotted the machine, noticed that all it required was a little paint and some simple restoration and put it in the back of his van. He went about the task diligently, had bought black paint, grease, a chrome finish and new pedals to replace shabby counterparts. The bicycle was half finished when I arrived, and looked attractive in the last hours of sunlight of a sparkling spring morning.

"Excuse me, haven't I seen you by a pool table?"

"Yes, you are Crispin aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Come down, I'm just mending this old heap."

The small wiry man ushered me down the close stairway, and past a compact window box crammed full of tiny flowers. Pansies and forget-me-nots were amongst them. Opposite to the flowers was a storage space for clutter arched in darkness, and the smell of damp limestone rock. The bicycle stood at he end of the stairs in a painted white porch, that flowed into the basement apartment of the spring footed elf.

As I entered, I noticed a futon wrapped in a large duvet, and a solid wooden cupboard that could have consumed a ship's cargo of clothing and still have echoed with space for me. There was an intricate coffee table, ornate, carved Eastern chairs and a Turkish chaise-long.

The man had scuttled into another room and emerged out of his blue overalls and in a green army trousers and a vest T-shirt.

"Are you hungry? I can make us an omelette."

I went through the lounge and joined the man in the kitchen. He was already hopping about, heating a frying pan, chopping some tomatoes and making some dressings.

"Don't worry, I'm a professional chef, its my living. Would you like mushrooms in the omelette?"



I accepted and explained my position as a teacher to him. He seemed to be uninterested and busied himself with the food. We sat in the decorative chairs, which were extremely uncomfortable to sit upon.



"I'm seeing Amabela, she is a photographer. Carmella has told me all about you, don't worry its all been good, or pretty good as I recall." He winked slyly and continued munching some lettuce with a boyish grin.

After eating he got out his wallet and began to explain about his past.

"This is my son. Alfonso. Here is his mother in our house in Barbados. I was married to her for five years in the heat and life-style of the West Indies. I was one of the most intelligent men on the island, I set up my own business. A catering operation, we made pitta bread and filled them with a mixture of flavours to suit every taste.

We started on the beach. We served people after the restaurants had closed, the tourists get very hungry at about three in the morning when the effect of alcohol had begun to wear down a little. The parties used to carry on all night, wild affairs some of them.

After making a name for ourselves in the after hours pitta business, we opened earlier and then bought a kiosk on the beach to serve pittas and soft drinks. The pittas were doughy, like bread, that's the difference from ordinary ones. After six months, I opened a restaurant in town and made a packet. Five years of it were enough though, I sold up and left the business, the wife and the child. I still go back every now and again to see how they are moving along."

The picture was of a little black boy jumping up in the air. The woman looked huge, a black momma with a small blue hat and a flowing matriarchal dress.

"Do you want to go to a party?"

I agreed and insisted on driving. The party was out of the city and in a beautiful country cottage in an isolated village. Andreas talked amiably all the way about his shifting, changeable life, its hazards and high spots, the globe trotting, of the city and the Coast.

"The hostess is an old friend of mine, we have done some work together."

Andreas grinned unnaturally and ominously as if the woman was going to be somebody that I would remember.

The path to the house wound around a small vegetable and flower garden just beginning to bear fruit in the new season. The garden was bordered by a close hedge, paved with deliberate gray slabs and everywhere lines criss-crossed, met and parted.

"Hello, so very pleased to meet you."



The hostess for the evening was a resplendent woman. Large, smiling and opulent, exuberant, forthcoming and dominant. Curling red hair jangled down her back, she bounced and ushered us inside. She sat down by the fire and carefully proceeded to roll a joint. Already in the front room was a squat, haggard looking Scotsman with a thin rucksack resting next to him. He was also rolling a joint when we arrived, and was at the same time listening intently to the effervescent gifts pouring from the throat of the hostess.

Having finished her detailed labour, the hostess looked up and said -

"Yes, this is my house, a lovely place isn't it? Real tudor beams, the rest is Georgian, built around the remains of a Tudor cottage. A little small, but I love it. Do you want to see the bedroom."

The bedroom was exquisitely furnished. Andreas, the Scot and myself squashed into the tiny room which was entirely dominated by a bright pink bed. She stood smiling next to me, this of course is the bed she beamed.

The guests came in soon. I drank and smoked my way into oblivion. A prim, attractive looking girl perched herself close to me. She wore a tight black skirt and fashionable accessories.

"And what do you do with yourself, you beautiful young thing?"



I was being less than charming. Intoxication was soaking my quota of wit and elegance away to some distant memory, perhaps an entirely different person, I wasn't sure. The girl seemed to be immediately offended, but had a rehearsed reply to fend off unwanted intruders into her private world.

"I'm a hairdresser."

The conversation, which was started clumsily had hit an immediate barrier. I had little knowledge, understanding or desire to become acquainted with the world of the hairdresser. Though I suppose there is something to learn from everyone.

"Is it interesting?"

"Well yes it can be. Its an enjoyable career that has prospects. The money is quite good, but I have to work long hours."

At that response, I was definitely repelled. I could not go through the hours of tedious non-talk, even for the possibility of the sight of young thighs, a black pubic triangle writhing under my grasp. Andreas was faring better than I.

He had gathered around him a crowd of listeners. They were all gripped by what seemed to be from a distance an adventure story. I could hear mention of Guatamala, getting stopped at the customs, having to bribe border guards. It all sounded fascinating. I began to lean further and further over in the direction of the story telling huddle. I could pick up snippets of boat trips down swollen jungle rivers, fighting with water snakes, drinking tequila in small sweaty huts in the forest, walking in the mountains of Central America.

Hypnotised, I was by now leaning almost fully over the magazine siren who I had been conversing with a little earlier. I was holding a large glass of red wine in one hand, and a joint in the other. Almost in slow motion, I watched as the wine tipped over the neat tidy lap of the girl. She screamed and jumped into the air, then ran quickly out of the room. The rest of the party goers stopped conversation in mid-sentence and all looked at me.

"Its only red wine, I'm sure it will come out in time."

The hostess laughed before accusations of molestation could be hurled. The intoxicated burble of the party, launched into action again. The red bouncer winked as she left the room and searched out the sodden mistress.

I sat back in my residual inebriation and the gaunt Scot came over to me. He babbled about women and forgotten dreams, he spoke of too many evenings spent in alcoholic reverie and they were all taking their toll fees. His mind was clouded, distant.

Feeling close to him in my state, I patted him on the shoulder as a brother in conspiracy against those boring sober types out there, on the other side of the fence.

"What do they know about life? About suffering? They spend their entire lives trying to make it in a career of some sort. They look for a serious job, a wife, a mortgage, a pension. What do they get out of it? A hernia, hyper tension and a nagging bitch who won't lie still.

Yes, we know a thing or two, just you and me mate, we'll show 'em, don't you worry. Nobody can touch us, because we've earned our credentials from experience and pain, we don't go along with the crowd, not you and me mate." We both patted our chests in unison.

" Yes, you'll see, those straight jacketed, boxed people out there will regret it in the end. When they've only got stress left to themselves, where will the F.T get them then? Hey? No, you and me brother, we know where its at, we don't give a monkeys, and you know why? Because we are happy."

I turned round and saw that the rest of the revellers had gone home. I felt satisfied that I had lifted the spirits of a flagging Celt. He sat cheerily upright now. Andreas and the hostess were lying on the floor, still smoking cannabis and listening to the first Queen album intensely.

"Really great, isn't it?"

"Yeh."

I suddenly decided to leave and stumbled to my feet precariously.

"Which way to the door?"



I bent down and kissed the householder on the lips. She nearly sucked me in before I could retreat with Andreas into the fresh enclosure of the garden. We wobbled about in the vegetable patch before catching each other and laughing until we cried.





CHAPTER EIGHT



I was sitting at the end of a long bed looking at an old lady. She was bent and withered. Her eyes looked regally at me through wrinkled and nearly detached corneas. Her bodice was stained and intricate, browned with age like the expansive white mattress, covered in a lace quilted blanket.

`Tap,tap,tap.'

The old woman emerged from her bed and shambled into her slippers. She walked through the wall just next to me.

`Tap,tap,tap.'

I climbed out of my dreams and into the day. Clawing on a t-shirt, I noticed Carmella peering through a chink in the curtains. I went to the door.

She was outside, with a young French girl.

" Come in, I've been expecting you."

" This is Katrine."

Katrine sat with a compact and assured manner. However, she did not contribute to the conversation, but allowed Carmella to describe the skiing and horse riding and adventures which they had undertaken. We arranged to meet later and they left in a bristling white car.



We finally met outside Carmella's flat in the middle of the street. I was with Showman, Carmella stormed up to us with as fierce a look in her eyes as I have ever seen.

"YOU ARE LATE!"

I explained to her how we had been delayed by being diverted to an old friend's house who had just delivered a baby. She rightly didn't believe a word of it and stormed back to her car. Inside with her were Katrine, Mirandella and Evela, peering out at us. We led the way to Irish music and more dancing.



Mauss was there in his dishevelled, philosophic attitude. He leant thoughtfully against the bar. Kim sat with some other girls in a circle, chattering gossip filled ennui to themselves.

Drinks poured down us, and we settled as far from the din of the disco as was possible. It was still too near to breach superficial tit for tat. Mirandella and Carmella had become incredibly close, and sat talking in the corner. I got up to be a little closer and perhaps overhear what was being said between them, even if it was in Spanish. They got up to dance.



I watched as Carmella effortlessly attracted everyone around her, as she became unconscious and lost in the dance. She paraded liquid sex. Mirandella was stiffer, less open to the sound in movements, men begun to crowd around Carmella. I waited until the flies had gathered sufficiently, then strode over to the spot and took Carmella by the hand. We danced briefly, I became bored somehow, I went for a walk.



I was questioning the validity of the experience. Conversation was impossible due to the intense noise, the only recourse was to flirt, all that takes is body language. The purposes of the activity were drinking, flirting and dancing, all releases in their own rights. Intellectually unsatisfying.

Dancing can be viewed as an art form, especially Spanish dancing, the films of Carlos Saura. The aesthetic appeal is magnified by practise and expertise and the beauty of the traditional forms. But Disco?

I was certainly no Michael Jackson dancing disco, I inevitably felt rather absurd. I went back into the hall.



Carmella was dancing again. She was by herself this time. She could move effortlessly and smoothly, like her sublime sexual intercourse, she was absolutely fluid. She banged the ground with her foot, she laughed, she span around, she was losing herself, she was always losing herself. I sat down next to Katrine.

"Have you read Zola's Earth?"

"Yes."

"Isn't it one of the most incredibly erotic novels?"

"Yes and described in an intense, humanistic style. The eroticism is such a part of the subjects themselves. It permeates everything they do, all their thoughts, everywhere they go."



Conducting an interesting conversation through loud primitive beats was not conducive to pleasure and understanding. Carmella returned from the dance floor and leapt on top of me. I fell backwards from my chair and sprawled on the floor.

In this prostrate position, I was a simple target for an excited Carmella. She sat astride me with, her legs stopping any movement, her hands pinching my nose and ribs.

"Here we are again." she decried.

We were on our way soon afterwards, Showman had to be extracted from a duckling at the side of the hall. Mirandella and Evela were cavorting with two large sporting men. I felt a pang of regret at seeing Mirandella beguiled with someone else, and gained some pleasure at hauling her away towards the awaiting cars. She did not complain, but seemed quite pleased by the attention.

In the car we sang songs and laughed and flirted some more. Showman was in full throttle and punched laced dagger expressions of ridicule into the air. We slowed the pace down to a crawl and drew out the celebration of booze and laughter and sexuality until it had no energy left to breathe.



I was on a train looking at a couple occupying two seats opposite to me. The man was middle aged, balding with sparse blonde hair and a blonde moustache. He was cradling a belly and wore a light overcoat, he smiled meekly. His partner, also in her middle years, bore dark hair and a sterner complexion. She sat more rigidly and was less prone to joviality.

"Where are you from?"

"New Zealand."

"I've heard that New Zealand can be excessively dull, is there any truth to the rumour?"

"Not if you like sheep."

The situation clicked on by in the towns and posts and miles to go to London. Carmella sat next to me, subdued and gazing. We were lovers going on a day trip, to the capital and place of my birth.

I was lost in a romantic image of myself. My lover and I were proud and happy; life was full and purposeful, it was worthwhile. I was with a wonderful woman, had an excellent social life, a satisfying job, life could not have been better. Carmella looked out of the carriage window, her brown eyes absorbing light reflected from green hills small valleys and fields. This was England.

My love held my arm, asked questions about my country. I spoke of history and literature and theatre, with a youthful idealism and verve. I was creating a dynamic, full picture for my love, with blossoming, fertile intellects, electric and satisfying.

There were Dickensian characters living in tiny hamlets, Austinian dilettant infecting party manners and an English morality. History streamed past the window. Stuckey's research and the love of antiquity, McPherson's Ossian, the fragile verse of Keats. Byron, my masked Don Juan feelings. The Victorian ideal of the Englishman, moral, superior, colonising the world with his technology and diplomacy, tact and ingenuity.

Shelley, the rebel. The calls of the Irish and the Scots in his ears, the lyric of the Welsh, the uprisings of the peasants, Wat Tyler, the heroes of English history, the Crusaders, the navigators, the generals and the soldiers. My love consumed them all, as I poured forth to her.

Onto London itself. `Echoes across the Thames that are heard from London,' as Whitman wrote. The great capital, an infusion, a chaotic mixture, different cultures stitched together, the outpouring of the Empire, the endpoint of the lines of trade that stretched across all corners of the globe.

I told my love of the great fire, the plague, Parliament, Cromwell, Buckingham Palace. St. Pauls and Sir Christopher Wren, the Tate, the theatres, Shakespeare, Bacon, Henry the eighth, the Bloody Tower, the battles of the Church. My love heard them all. I poured all the knowledge into her gently with a passion and delight that wrestled and wrought the English language into a beautified medium of intimate communication.

I explained and sought all the limits of my knowledge. I kept the consonant and vowel mix continuous, enlivened. I was stroking my dear with the sweet precise intimations of love that were flowing from me. I charmed and trod softly through the poppy fields of understanding, its paths lined with books covered in leather, amazed to be eulogised, written in Greek, Latin and French.



We pulled into Paddington. I suggested that we go to a Spanish bar for lunch. We whirled into the tapas and wine and music. Carmella spoke in Spanish to the waiters, exchanging animated, expressive interactions dear to their hearts.

We flew out of the bar and to a market. We traversed the assorted bric-a-brac and jewellery and antiques and ornaments. The shops wound along the road and out of sight. Everything you could possible imagine to buy was lined out here in the stalls and interiors of the market. It was all displayed in random profusion, the spoils of the Empire still evident.

There was a shop entirely devoted to selling old wooden objects, the figureheads of ships, wooden chests, statues, advertisements for the Victorians, Edwardian oddities and Georgian sailors. We delighted in the panoramas of the varying objects. We laughed and sorted and explained and exclaimed. It was a lover's journey into the possibilities of satisfaction at the market. We were living a full life. Everything was laid out for us in neat confusion; it was a duality for laughter, hopes for the future and expressions of joy for the second.



Ornaments for an ideal stylish flat merged into clothing and the domain of the youth. Gawdy designs and cheap articles. Leather jackets, joss-sticks, second-hand records, Chinese food, reggae, 40's and 50's clothes, designed cheap lamp stands, Egyptian style t-shirts.

All the profusion of choices for money barter was weighing me down. We headed for the nearest public house.

It was an old London pub. The bar stood firmly in the middle of the room. Couples were spaced out strategically around the interior. A woman with psychological problems danced to Jimi Hendrix on her own in a nervous peculiar fashion and without the need for music. A young blue eyed man spied Carmella and displayed his limited knowledge of Spanish earnestly in her direction. She answered politely, before diving back into our lovers double act.



We went out again into the London macrocosm. The tubes and the streets, the labyrinth of the sign. We went to a cinema and an Almodoba film. We circumvented Piccadilly and Soho and an Italian restaurant. After we headed back for the train. Catching it without a moment to spare, it rounded off a perfectly executed day. It was a waltz, a glide into the future. It was part of the never ending, the delightful, it was affection and experience. We trailed into the bedroom like the last couple left standing at a dance competition. Benign smiles glued to our faces, exhausted, elated, serene and content, we could have seen through anything.









CHAPTER NINE

PART THREE

CRUELTY



The sun was beginning to give lasting heat. We sat on the grass in front of a large crescent of Georgian terraced houses. Their resplendence gave rise to a dignified and calm air. We laid out a blanket and began to commune in a picnic.

Carmella, Mirandella, Evela, Ambela, Andreas, Thasminos and I were on the mat. I was talking with Thasminos-

"Studies of death resound though literature, religion and science. It is a question where an answer is still entirely open. You can take virtually any perspective you want on it.

The beauty of death. Death seen as an aesthetic ultimate. Something far from inspiring grief, morbidity and relaxation of the artistic sensibilities, but giving impetus to increased activity. Death in the eye of the artist as the subject becomes the apogee of life."

"The romantic movement has always found great solace in death. Catholicism has a debt to pay to the conception of European death. It has brought a statuesque rigidity into the black rose, the symbols of life reversed, blood and wine, the capitulation into mystery, the link between sex and virginity."



"There is much clear imagery and sensuous excitation in Catholicism. The precursors of Judaism and Hinduism treat the passing from life to life with a much more even hand. Breaking the circle and explaining emotional sentiments in a desperate need to achieve fulfilment before a once only experience disappears is a good trick.

People begin to feel the intimations of death everywhere. Their emotive movements are being changed constantly. They are becoming more and more excitable, nearly out of control. Passion is taken away from the near, the intimate, the realisable, and is posited into great hopes of redemption, into perfect moral behaviour.

The redeemer himself is an emotive draw, heaven, salvation, confession and guilt, the passion of Christ, are all sources of emotive disturbance, of excitation beyond the practical.

Such a great movement of emotional energy is an artistic lie. They have taken the idea of death as the subject of the creator, and withdrawn it from the realm of the individual artist exploring it with an open mind. The Catholic church has resolved death into a moral precept. It has become something beyond the hands of the artist, something for the herd to wield, a life draining idea of a barren perspective."

We rose from the mat and played with Thasminos's boomerang. He skilfully threw and retrieved the U-bend, my efforts were less professional. At one point I nearly took the skin from a man's head, as the Aboriginal hunting device soared close to his brow. Disposing with this distraction, we became part of the group again and had some food.

Andreas and Carmella had contrived to produce a good selection of food. Tortilla, ham rolls filled with pear, thick slices of cucumber, tomato, dips and white wine. We munched and spoke in the soothing sunlight. We played card games and ball games and let our voices spread about the scene.

There were families and lovers and young people and family pets. As clouds swept across the sky we left the grass and the idyllic postcard picture, and made for the cars. We drove out of the city and to a country pub.



The public house was decorated on a shipping theme. Boats, a model in a glass case, life boys, pieces of rope, some interesting varieties of knots which I had never seen before. Pictures of cutters and dinghies, a few sailors dispersed randomly, Toby jugs and a small silver model of a battleship.

We were all around a small wooden table lined with bumpy brass.

"We are turning around and around."

"There is an incredible space between us, like an island in the sea it rises and defines all the differences that there are in our characters. What is there between us? Sex, trust or reliance? Friendship or familiarity? Perhaps we would like to think that we understand what we are doing or why we are doing it. If the truth be told, we are here merely by chance, with little in common other than a fleeting moment in an ever more fleeting life of change, superficial relationships and barely meant exchanges."

"Then we have nothing, so be it, let it rest, why explore such a negative, such a dead end?"

"If you stare into the void, it stares into you."



Outside a rumpus was beginning. Men, drunken men were collecting near the window. They reeled with alcohol, their minds were overloading, they were starting to get out of control. Shouting and violent approbation mingled with physical exertion, taunting and fear.

A woman turned away and entered the pub. Three men screamed at each other, seemingly to exert some sort of damage. Just before their cuffs got out of hand, they were joined in a passionate embrace and laughed out loudly. The laughter was filled with fear, trepidation, normality. They began to simulate sex.

They threatened each other with the insertion of genitals, humiliation, kidding, teasing, bragging, saying, `you can do it, go on, you can do it can't you, go on have a go.' One of the men, even more drunk than the others, pulled down his trousers and simulated masturbation next to one of his friends. His friend dutifully pulled down his trousers and bent over, has bottom in the air. The first man started to masturbate over the naked bottom. They were displaying for us, right outside the window next to which we were seated.



"I wouldn't mind, but they are not even homosexual." said Thasminos

"I will go outside now, I will see you later." said Carmella.





There was a party. At my house this time, during the day, in the beautiful world of an English garden. I cooked with Thasminos. We played games in the sunshine. The boomerang whistled into the air again, Andreas was telling stories from his life, the Scot arrived and got drunk, Carmella, Mirandella, Evela and Ambela played together skipping and found joy in the activity, they remembered the innocence of youth.

There was an opposing group on that afternoon. They stayed separate to ours, the party was definitely divided. Showman was certainly the centre of the other bunch, I had not seen him of late, our liaison had fallen apart under the weight of my relationship with Carmella. He fired glitter filled, Harlem parades of debauched nights, with the idea of being ever nearer to his source of enjoyment. I did not feel at ease with his examination of the world, I fitted into my social category with an elegance that I enjoyed.



My group had the presence of my love to knit us together. We were together in a friendlier way than the other. My love organised and swirled around, the pollen and dust of her personality settled on us in our gleeful, grateful abodes. I came to her and felt her warmth once more. I was still bounded by joy for her, she made the course of a party complete. I was always too concerned with thinking to make a party move the way it ought to move. I relied on the Showmen and the Carmellas of the world to supply the social entertainment.



The next day we were away again into a car and the Coast. It was only Thasminos, Carmella and I in the vehicle. We skipped through the twisting roads of the south of England, singing and dancing and laughing. The sea finally came into sight, blue and cool. Its soothing breeze brushed our faces as we examined the tiny alcoves and shops of the town on the Coast.

"We will split up and meet later."

It got dark and Thasminos went to meet an amor that he had found in a bar. Carmella and I stuck together in the environment of the Coast. We met another couple, they suggested that we go to a club and we agreed. The club was a setting for dance more drink, rave music and a light display.

The beat was modern, frantic, nervous and complicated. We danced and sweated, brought our physical exertions to a kind of pinnacle, then relaxed. I walked alone around the club. The children alighted there in their established fashionable uniforms. Tight black gym slips for the girls, jeans and t-shirt for the rest. They gyrated and repeated similar movements again and again and again. The men were looking for women, the women were looking to look good, to get into shape.

I noticed the sweat and the lonely and the exaggerated distortion of the faces and the effects of the drugs: `e', lsd, alcohol, on the youth. The nostrils flare out, the eyes bulge, the pupils open, sensitivity runs amongst everyone in the opening of the hallucination. I passed under relationships wounded or broken too early, love traumatised and chased down the street. Here was a cynical but fashionable exclamation of independence, dissatisfaction and resolve. I moved back to Carmella. She was standing with a large black man a fan.

"I thought you had left."

The black athlete walked away. Carmella squeezed his arm as he moved off. I turned, a stab of an assorted, uncertain future shot straight through me.



We made for the car and a meeting with Thasminos. He came to us late and with a new boyfriend. His newly found acquaintance was a young Irishman. They spoke to each other in rather stilted but flirtatious reprimands in the manner of two lovers who had only just met. They wanted us to leave them, we intimated that we did not have anywhere to sleep. The Irishman said that it was impossible to sleep at his house without getting the prior agreement of the landlord, which was now patently impossible. We arranged to meet on the next day on the beach.



Driving around the town and its environs, I still had the sound of the disco thumping in my ears. Carmella confidently predicted that we would find a good place to rest soon. Sure enough she directed us to a cliff and a parking space overlooking the town. The street lights and houses blinked away as I attempted to sleep in the cramped space of the front seat of the car. I wriggled and twisted and felt pains in various parts of my body. Carmella was absolutely lacking in sympathy and would not get close to me, I could not sleep with this din still in my head and not a comfortable position to be had anywhere, stop, sleep, awake, end, sleep, no end.



The day after I awoke contorted and distorted and plastered into place. Carmella was already awake, we went slowly down the hill and to the agreed place on the beach near one of the many small cafes along the promenade.

Warmed and alive again, Carmella and I played on the beach. She was still somehow away from me however. She said -

"You know, some days, I do not find you attractive."



Thasminos and his boyfriend eventually arrived. They stripped down to their underpants and sunbathed next to us. A fat woman was bathing close to us as well, her rolls of fat rubbing sorely on each other, she was in a tight bikini bottom only, exposing immense whiteness, drooping breasts in a rolled, concertina form.

We rode to the Irishman's house, and sat down for some food, then closed together for conversation in a circle.



"In Spain there was a dancer. A Spanish dancer, she was the favourite of the public. She married a matador. Can you imagine? They were always in the newspapers and the magazines. Everybody loved to read and hear about their wonderful marriage. Then one day the woman was caught sunbathing topless in her garden. The pictures went all over the newspapers. After this there was a divorce. Why did they divorce? She was caught having a lesbian affair with a tennis player. Can you imagine? The top flamenco dancer in a lesbian relationship with a tennis player? Well, her fans were shocked, I can tell you."

"Yes, how awful."

"Lets telephone Phil."

The leader of the house decided to telephone one of their friends. They had a telephone which could amplify the conversation so the rest of the room could hear it -

"Hello Phil? Its me Ramero."

"Hello Ramero."

"So, where were you last night?"

"Well, down the club, then I met a man, and we sort of went back to his house, and you know, one thing led to another, and I stayed."

"What's he like?"

"Big, blonde and blue eyes."

"Sounds lovely, are you going to see him again?"

"Well, maybe, we'll have to see how it goes, and you know how it is, there are just so many nice men around."

The rest of the room were in silence except for the occasional giggle, Carmella usually being at the root of such disturbance. I couldn't help but feel a little unrelaxed. Thasminos was cuddling with his new found love on the chair next to mine. I looked at him to say something, and he said that I was not to intrude on their privacy again.



We did all leave the house in good spirits. The sun, food and cannabis contrived to produce an ecstacy of joy as I drove us back through the English countryside. I sung Irish folk songs, Thasminos was with me in his clapping, Carmella slept on the back seat. Suddenly as we rounded a corner, a loud crash came from somewhere beneath my automobile, which did not sound too healthy.

Something had gone drastically wrong. We stopped and parked in a bleak place near a motorway. The police soon found us. They phoned for the AA. We were taken to a garage, we had to stay the night. We slept in three wrecked cars, uncomfortably again, the second night for Carmella and myself. The morning brought a mechanic and his tools to mend the broken piece on the underside of the car. Everything was mended in a matter of minutes. We trundled nervously on our route back home. We slept relieved and not at peace during the night in comfortable beds.





CHAPTER TEN



My ambitions in the world of work continued. I was a teacher, a job which was, however, getting more and more difficult. The days heavily contrasted the nights. There were stressful days, easier days, then voyages into the night and passionate love. Both sides of my life needed absolute commitment, they were beginning to tear each other apart.

I didn't always feel right in the job, it took so much energy out of me, the children needed so much, the other teachers were so full of stress. One day I heard that my job was under threat, there were to be cutbacks. The head of the department came up to me soon enough and explained that as the youngest in the department, I would not be offered a new contract for the following year. He was sorry of course, and would write me a useful reference, especially for my work with the year nine pupils. I felt a mixture of relief and trepidation. How would I earn money now? Where could I find another job?

I would have to start applying immediately.



Carmella and I took a holiday. We went to Scotland together, up and along the long motorway to the North. The land of the Pict, the memorials of the past and history studied and lived. We played music, I stroked my love on the neck, she glanced a smile in my direction.

Soon we went onto to the mountains and a crofter's cottage. A friend of mine lived there with her boyfriend and an assortment of animals. The cats and dogs and chickens and ducks and goats and geese ran everywhere. It was a domestic, settled environment. Amid the pollen of the countryside, the cycles of the weather were concerns beyond the fringes of the city and in the clean fresh air.

I was with my love again and having a happy and relaxed time. Carmella bristled and fawned towards me. We shared intimate moments, touched and created the illusions of love that were everywhere that we went. The locations of highland piece became moments of sentiment and scented, sweet outlined memory.

I can recall her shapely thin legs in eternal black leggings manipulating the levers of the vehicle. I can remember our gazing and wonderment at the scenery around us. I can bring to mind the warmth of embrace, the funny unpredictable times, I can remember travelling, up and down, in and out, over and under, the valleys and the lochs and the castles. There were tiny beaches of pure white sand, incredibly clear and beautiful water, lapping the magnificent rock, majestic cliff and proud mountain.

Yet time was quickening now. The gorgeous scenes, the bristling love was hiding a shadow. I became absorbed in thought, I was away from my love, I was absolutely next to my love. My consciousness was wavering on a doubt. Through the descriptive quality of the pictures filling our minds, and the impressions of love, affection, and intimacy with someone you find charming, intelligent and attractive, there was something unspeakable lurking in wait.

The other side of the mountain. The dark region of the planet, difficult to see, murky, unkempt, somehow reared into view. The path of failure, depression, mental instability, loneliness. These depths can only be routed out after the pinnacles and heady heights of the completely sublime have been climbed. This undercurrent was below us now, yet it was totally unmentionable.



"Is