A Partisan Diary

Newsletter.

2009-04-24T16:09:00.005+01:00

Suddenly this day
Poppies and buttercups do the rugby colors and the flag around every field of pale green blooming vines.
Mount Canigou rippling with snow pinking, peering around every corner against milk skies a wedge, a black hedge, grey shine.
On the Med someone's boat flattened by the season's rising wind of three names which speeds the drowned home.
A dog bullets low from a door to chase the street washer away.
Near sea transparent iced empty blue with flattened sun alone.

To photosensitives it hurts in ways you may not understand
As the Kenyan Albino said whom I tried to explain plainly
Being white all throughout one night
He listened preoccupied about
limbs harvested for magic against gout

Magic and lyrical thinking over
Narratives harvested Mnemonic
As memories indirect, they hurt as much as that
From you Neurotypicals and stink
As sulpher blind in the the mind

I have had three names this week
"Doubly Loved" says the review in Tirana
Named for my relationship and of what else I speak
And an insinuation perhaps

In Ceret. with affection from the chaps
"L'espion Canadien" and when I deny
The affection grows
In this village of similar spies

Then, on Google suddenly. an essay long forgotten arises
Above those regular slanders and rare remainders
From a forgotten conference on a forgotten Island
On a forgotten topic by me dallying on expert.

And so suddenly, email and phoning those so drowning
Because operation Lightening and Thunder
Has strengthened the armies of the Rain Queen
Around the village of Gulu towards universal dying.

I explain identity meant little to me anytime
I can remember an exact bush by the sea just fine
But not ten thousand operations for blindness
Around the monkied temples
Screaming, even though the scheduling was mine

I remember this is also, exactly, sky over Vancouver
But not your character as I don't see persons ever under
Concrete things as totems and pillars, mountains that I remember
Of even Oil fights similar, and the shadows moving in trees by the river as
Only Characteristics of meta atmospherics in social weather
Here, which is also you, perhaps in Vancouver

Brain connections which are smaller and closer together
In focused areas connecting whatever is there gathered

And are leaping now away to this day,
Canigou suddenly
around every corner.

More sacred night

2007-01-03T08:04:00.000Z

As I said I would do a confession of the event at dusk last week. Everyone had a different story.

Driving along in my automobile thinking that yes indeedy, I might be the messiah.

The way that would work is that everyone or nearly everyone picks up a few messiah trojans through the womb at birth, perhaps more in the crib with visitations from aregons or something. Most of these I thought, as I went by the edge of the park where the Japanese cherries were blossoming on Christmas Eve, how weird is that I thought as well, most of these trojans would lead to voices of conscience or minor visions out the corner of your eye. Some might lead to prophecy.

But a few might attract a whole software, a whole firewalled program perhaps a home version, a kind of John the apostle one, or the professional program, not the beta, that was here already, but the new launch of the messiah. The final version.

The park had dotted itself with lightly jacketed people attracted to its lime green December splendour consisting, most dramatically, in clusters of perfectly blooming orange and burgundy roses erupting up on bare white stakes from its pruned back rose gardens amidst wandering lines of frolicking semi-migrated finnish ducks, other feathered creatures amidst victorian creations of garden tangled perplexity, inter spaced with statuesque lethargically posing black squirrels scrunching their noses slowly while picking and choosing in unseasonable gluttony from exotic offerings of pieces of candy cane or from multi-hued tiny peels of dwarf oranges.

Could it be, I wondered, that in me the messiah program was imperfectly loaded in me, perhaps it was only an upgrade, not the whole thing, and that would account for the distortions in my various miracles and the randomness of my proverbs not to mention the repetitive mortality's.

Then bang. My car was hit just behind the driver's wheel and just at the front of my driver's door by a beige ford. The sound of a sudden collision reverberates in its own horrific way through all ages and fields of consciousness. Beyond a gong, beyond the bell of doom, it reverberates through all the other collisions you have been in or have seen. All the ones, if any, you will be in.

It sounds like the devil's cash register. It sounds like the gavel of judge merciless superstate hitting the bronze gavel pad in the court of ultimate judgement.

It was the same sound as the time I rolled the car in Medicine Hat. As the time I hit the police station, the time I collided with myself, the time I was, chauvinistically, objectifying the body of my friend's girlfriend Jennifer as she paraded down Front Street in her new 1930's style bell shorts, objectifying badly while not braking in time for the traffic light or for the caddy stopped at it.

That time the gong led to a decadent earthy sound of falling fibreglass paneling that I had just finished painting, put on to sculpt the car front. It is the sound of the complete dent in the universe of perfect metal. Of fate.

The ford was fifteen years old. My car by contrast glowed and smelled intensely of the fact that it had never seen a dark day. The scene of the accident is an absolute 'Y'. One road from the park, one road from the dreary suburb. They meet at a point guarded by two black and white traffic calming steel poles narrowly guarding a white traffic bump intending to slow you before you get to the straight part across the Heath, the straight piece which reminds you of the care free days of youth and racing but which leads to the roundabout of continuous road rage connecting those still shaking, exiting crawling from the motorway to those intending to enter it angrily and precipitously from the convolutions of the shopping villages.

A man leapt from the ford. Something in my mind thought 'he looks like a leaping chocolate ape.' 'How interesting' thought my mind next. 'You have lapsed into a surrealistic racism. This is unbelievably bad of you to now become an asshole under stressful conditions at this late stage of your life. What have you become? Something nasty?'

No I haven't. I thought dancing chocolate ape for two reasons. One is the Jack Spicer poem about that and the other was my favourite teacher in High School, the one all the guys called 'Jungle Bunny'. So 'bunny' is associated with Easter and that in turn with chocolate.

The guy is black, dickhead. And he is jumping. That is the reason you thought this. And in school they called him 'Jungle Bunny' because he was a black person from South Africa. We had never seen a black person before in our town but some had travelled to Florida for winter holidays. They picked it up there. They used 'coon' and 'nigger' too. It made them feel sophisticated. They wanted to sound knowing and social, modern. White in fact.

But we all loved him. He had a discourse we had never heard before. He had lived in Paris. He taught geography from memory of the actual features. Table Mountain. The Wild Coast. He spoke of politics.

The leaping man put fists to his eyebrows. He kicked his own tire. He shouted several curses involving the proliferation of showers of assholes. He waved a fist at me. A head appeared at the side window of the ford. It was a woman, not black but something. Her hair, framed above the beige door panel had the same burgundy colour as the car I had driven into the police station years ago. It seemed orange at the roots.

I was now considering whether, despite the fact that the two were a little overweight, and not dressed according to the code, if I had been hit by dangerous 'hoodies' or even more dangerous 'yardies' interrupted perhaps in a dangerous mugging cruising game, dope dealing as they went in a, bass projecting thumping meander around the shopping villages, interrupted by me. And I had shown no respect.

My mind chastised me severely for this. It asked how I, of all people, could do such main stream stereotyping. What a shit I was. How could I leap to judgement before even realising the detail? They had, for example, you ridiculous pissy scared child, no hoods. The leaping man was wearing a knitted sweater in a style popular at Christmas four years ago. He was probably on his way to a family gathering containing the niece who gave it to him. The woman's hair is so coloured gloriously through the Ford's glass by the sun setting there beyond the Heath.

The leaping man, now howling about damnation, leapt into his car and reversed from contact with mine. I reversed too. He then drove from the juncture of the Y through the striped poles to the straight part beyond. He parked on the verge, got out and began leaping again. He pointed to a place on the road's shoulder behind his car. I drove where he indicated and parked. Checking for traffic carefully I got out.

"Give me your identification" He shouted. "Don't you have any concentration? Don't you look where you are going? Don't you know what you are doing? How did you ever get a license? Your type shouldn't be allowed on the road." He said.

All good questions but I thought to help him with boundaries of our discourse by saying "I will not discuss who is to blame". I hate to talk about right and wrong. It always turns to comparative moralities and personalities.

The woman had now gotten out of the car. Her hair was exactly as I had seen it, setting sun or not. She had orange roots as well and a pseudo leopard skin jacket, the kind which I, because of my feelings about animals , regard as hypocrisy with evil intent, intent only restrained by opportunity, and worse, as insincere irony in dress.

"What are you smiling at" she said with a gutteral whine. This is a question one should never answer. But I did check my conscience and realised it was not because she seemed a stereotypical bumped up chav from some dreadful place, probably Dagenham. No, how could she be that if she was with a black guy. She might even be cool.

In Dagenham, the way things are going, she would be in constant threat. She doesn't look like the type to cope with that. A bit highly strung. A lot of the working class of Dagenham have been driven to madness with catastrophic visions served to them about immigrants from Africa and Asia raping their daughters and wives and taking their jobs and worse, using all the public services, taking the beds in hospitals and the education budget for their pagan schools, using all the services once for workers but now being increasingly disintegrated by liberal privatisation, taking from them while helping foul, criminal immigrants to slurp up benefits and privileges awarded by vile and corrupt mainstream politicians who sleep with them , being given cheap palatial homes, as the working class lives in rat traps ground under to drunken suicide or leaving altogether to either go to Canada to get their own boat or to Iraq to fight.

"You twit" she said. I found myself smiling again. And then, to my shame I did a class zinger at her.

"Does your mobile phone take pictures?" I said. I knew from the date of the ford, his sweater and her leopard skin that it was highly unlikely it would. If they had been real hoodies and not a lower middle class outfit as it now seemed they were, they would have a phone that probably would be able to do things my phone, still in my hand and unused, could never dream of. They would also have knives and possibly a rapid fire Russian pistol.

In silence we three now walked in rotation around the cars. For me things got better. My car, from a limited edition factory modified model especially strengthened for rallying, and painted frightening racing red with an anarchist interior design, all Ferrari blood and dracula black, had a tiny demure bump, reflecting a pinhead glow of light but no scratch. Not the hint of a scratch. A designer bump. It was enhanced actually.

Their front bumper had fallen down to the ground, the headlight had cracked, the front panel, rusted, I could see, was split. It was a mess. It looked disreputable.

"You haven't stopped smiling since the accident" the woman said to me. She looked close to crying. They had presents it looked like, ready to deliver scattered on the back seat of the car.

The man then said "Are you on drugs?"

"No, are you?"

"Of course I am" he said with a fair degree of ironic schoolmarmish, arrogant, sarcastic smugness I thought. It was a perfectly tuned and modulated middle class outraged voice, delivered with a nod to the woman as if to say, while showing off gravitas and heavy judgement, 'See what kind of an asshole we have met here and now as usual'.

"That is a useful admission" I said, with the voice of a cunning weasel. I raised an eyebrow.

He hated that. "Of course I am not on drugs" He said. "How dare you!" His wife looked alarmed and a worried look of a mixed bit of admiration and disapproval crossed her face. She may have been surprised by his radical knowing sally about drugs. Not good for appearances.

He had had a slight tone of doubt in his voice with his accusation as he looked over my clothing. I was wearing a classic leather jacket and motorcycle boots. I was doing so ironically, a calculated bit of projection and fun on my part, as the car was, ironic but authentic too and arising from my tradition and background. But hey, maybe he didn't get that.

"Let me see that identification" he said, to make up for his moment of doubt. I returned to my car and he to his. He came back to the damaged meeting point we had established at the front of his car with a black photo album sized notebook and a blue fountain pen. What was this guy? A retired operational manager of a cab company? A government inspector of drains? No, too Kafka. Was that pen a retirement gift? Government issue? Was the book for attendance at his primary school?

"Identification please" he said, looking over the notebook while writing, one could assume, a detailed waterproof attempt at a description of the damage, which damage was exactly as that I had received once in an MG when I hit a deer, an occasion I both sketched and wrote a poem about, and perhaps also writing a description of the location. I decided to be helpful.

"The whole issue is the point of impact" I said, with a smile.

"What do you mean you twit" He said. "The point of impact is back there at the poles". I smiled at the use of the word 'twit' which derived, although he may not know that, from an ancient usage for homosexual. Perhaps associated in his mind with the smiling and with the leather.

I decided not to point out, to spare his feelings and image in his woman's eyes, he was so obviously playing his manly righteousness and competence to her, that the damage to my car was on the side and that to his was on the front, so that meant I had reached the yield sign first. Nyah nyah.

Also the damage to my car meant, besides that it was a better car and that I probably was a better man for that, no, no, that isn't true I contradicted myself, but it did mean I was not moving the fastest. That is science. It might mean too I was actually stopped dead at the poles. Carefully. While he was racing along.

"Are you with the police?" I said to encourage his assumed command of the role of officiousness and which he was acting out so well. I did not smile when saying so. Let him jam. Rock on leaping man.

"As good as" He said. He smiled to the woman. I loved this. I love how the middle classes go on about their connections and influence. I believed the guy was now caught up in a wonderful dream of law and righteousness, of his intrinsic worth and decency prevailing over leather-jacketed hoodlums such as I, caught in a necessary delusion, believing firmly in a reliance on his good citizenship, on his insurance company, on his woman, on the subtlety of his social standing, to see him through this disaster of fate and unjust, unfair and criminal affront to the fragile structure of his life, in which one day, please God, he would be proven right about everything. He would be known by all as decent and hard done by. One day he would be powerful through righteousness. Perhaps it was today.

"I shall return to take pictures of the spot with my camera." He said, glancing at his wife. "You shall be hearing from my insurance company, never fear."

He looked as though he meant that this was instead of giving me the thrashing I deserved. He would rely on his public and private services to deal with me as he directed.

And never fear! How often had he got to use that phrase? How splendid this now must be for him! I decided to help him further. "I shall need your identification as well" I said.

"Of course you shall have it. Why ever would you think not? I have my driver's license, my insurance, and a utility bill".

"I shall need the woman's identification as well" I said. I had hoped to give him more room for bombast. But I realised at once I shouldn't have said 'the woman'. His face contracted. It puffed up. His eyes widened and narrowed. He was trying to compute. I realised too late I had undermined him with this. Oh God!

"How dare you! How dare you ask such a thing? She wasn't driving. She is none of your business. You twit. You bastard. You fucking thug. I have a good mind to get the police out here."

At this point my devious mind came up with three completely disparate thoughts in procession. The first was to wonder, with a kind of new curious revelation what on earth was going on there. Was this an after office party Christmas Eve affair on its way to consummation? Was this a pair of civil rights workers retired on their way to a reunion? The second thought was that astonishingly, this guy thought I was a Dagenham racist filled with venomous and coiled absolute and soulless pathological contempt for this mixed race couple who had, most likely, been rammed by me.

How dare they think that. I had been jailed for oppositional activities against racism and fascism, I had founded organisations, I had been shot at by Kalashnikovs. I had been threatened by the South African secret services with death. I am not another orangutan cruising around on Christmas Eve in a muscle car. I am taking tree ornaments to my flat over the park.

Then I felt a great annoyance at being repeatedly called a twit and a bastard. A very dark part of me firewalled off, a part that knows no fear or morality, suggested that I go back to my car, get my tire iron and bash the rest of the shit out of his fucking wreck.

Instead I said "I forgive you."

"If you are saying it is my fault, you twit, I am phoning the police. Where is our mobile Dear? Please phone the police. This is unacceptable."

I sighed. He was obviously expecting me to argue the case as the scenario went. I think he may have wanted to threaten violence to be restrained by the woman. He may even believe that I thought myself guilty. The poor guy. If only I could help. It got worse for him when the mobile was dragged out of the purse. How awful for him, at least five years old.

I gave him the first ID I could find. It was a UN passport stamped throughout but still valid. I expected a problem with this which would lead to further officious complications with my license, my nationality, the car ownership and even insurance, none of which were available to him in a way that he could write down in his book. But he could in awesome faith write down the details in the passport.

And he didn't notice the passport was blue, had official pages in fifteen languages or that my accent did not come from London's cultural mix. He only noticed the address in it. It was a suburb I had lived in years ago. It is a mixed race suburb, fairly notorious for that. He said "Is this a place near Streatham?" His eyebrows rose. I had confused him. He looked at my clothes again. I didn't look black or even asian.

"Yes" I said.

'Dear' was still trying to phone the police. I returned to my car and sat. The Heath at sunset is beautiful. On the open ground a dozen people were flying kites. The cars going by had windows open to the apocalyptic mild breezes foretelling a new range of wild electric storms like those that had just passed.

I felt such rising warmth of charity for them. The mobile was evidently dead. Poor woman. But good thing too because the police would never be bothered with this little bullshit, blacks involved or not. I knew from the radio they were presently dealing with searching trains and subways because of a red terror alert and trying to contain drunken riots in the stock broking district. This evening will have four hundred reported stabbings before santa arrives. The insurance company will instantly on reading his byzantine monkish notes with irrelevant detail forget his pathetic little headlight.

It will not pursue a United Nations ghost for recovering a pittance for a completely undocumented accident at an obscure half marked yield sign on Christmas eve.

And if they came close to finding me through my dozen official filters, impossible without international co-operation, I would have to tell them about the drunkenness, the impersonation of a police officer, the woman who was actually driving and also point out the point of impact on a previously damaged surface. They would sure raise his rates.

As I sat they drove off after awhile having concluded with one another who knows what narrative of events.

Something in my mind spoke thus:

'Leaping man and leopard skin woman, you shall enter the gates of Heaven. Forgive me.'

The Move

2006-12-13T07:00:00.000Z

I am still moving in. There are appliances I am not used to even if the electricity was working. The bed is up the roof no longer leaks daily but only in storms. The refurbishment will take until the end of time.

It is my last stand.

I have been doing some wandering around as paint dries or pipes are relayed due to explosion caused by a combination of methane from the 'trap', and new pipe pressures in my redone flat, wandering in my new neighborhood. This on foot. Or I am taking things to new places to be fixed in the car. Micro waves. Clocks. A vacuum. A cracked mirror. It is a constant movement of fixing.

This area of the city, Blackheath and environs is a map of late 20th century history laying itself over the map of mediaeval London in peeling skins of a Palimpsest over, I'd say, invisibilities of the 14th to 16th centuries still haunting upwards from the chalk caves underneath.

Down Shooters Hill from my place, from the old communal cattle trough in front of The Conduit House built over the well of the old naval hospital, and over tombs of scurvy and grapeshot victims, some still wondering perhaps, in underground ruin, covered by the south circular ring road, where they are.

Down there past all that from the plateau of the Heath, is Deptford.

Deptford was settled, in the usual London way, recently by the terror enlivened wanderers and refugees from war, in this case the from the Biafra war, so mostly Ibos or middle belt tribes and so Christians. These were followed by those from that chain of West African wars up until the just recent influx from Sierra Leone. Mixed in and folded over the Africans are Vietnamese from the Asian wars and some Thais extending now to a very small sprinkling of Burmese and Laotians. So in Deptford there are groceries of good variety and restaurants cheap and authentic.

Sidling upwards around the Heath on an old route originally to a small and nasty former Royal palace of profound ugly history of torture and mayhem mainly to peasants, reworked by a clothing manufacturing family into an art deco wonder, is Lewisham.

The Palace is near where murderous racism begins in Eltham. The old white working class is still there bordered by the rows of concrete cliffs of the massifs of those estates administered by Somali gangs.

Lewisham, in the middle of Deptford and Eltham, is where the disappeared lower middle class of the world war period of rationing and state reverence, while thieving like mad in the cornucopia of the black market, met the immigrants from the Caribbean in the sixties.

This produced a flowering of culture tending towards funky surreal. This had the old Odeon to perform in.

The Rolling Stones, from neighbouring suburbs, did 'Sympathy for the Devil' after an exploration of blues. Spike Milligan conceived of the Goon Show and modern comedy in racist Aspergers frenzy. The bowling league is known as 'The Hoodoo'. It is by invitation only. This is the generating gestalt of modern rock and comedy.

I mention Lewisham because I spent a day there, a day not wandering, in the Library reading the new biography of Mao, which I recommend for those who want to understand aspects of narcisstic personality disorder in persons with limited I.q., but Aspergers. It treats 20th century history well, as it should be, as a mad narrative.

I was in the library while my car, yes I have one, oh yes I do, sorry, as it is a social necessity and an economically prudent resistance to the current ecological scams going on all around, scams connected to the ruling class being left In charge of fixing global warming, not those of us being warmed and drowned, which as you know from the Apocalyptical perspective I have, I consider a not unpleasant development in terms of setting the stage for dissolution of the present order. These ecological scams which will not fix anything but rather will increase exploitation and mayhem. Remember I am now in memory in the Lewisham library reading Mao as the car is tuned.

First an excuse. Because of global warming marketing I got my car cheap. No one would dare buy a special limited edition Schumacher Fiat Abarth Stilo in Ferrari red with re-engineered suspension and an oversized Engine. It was produced as car art, it is beautiful, but produced just at the time philistinism had moved into bed with the token ecology morality tat to slaver and drool about with electric buggies filled with celebrity as a generator of new profits, government guaranteed.

The Lewisham Library has the usual narrow dark Victorian dust scented aisles. It has a good collection of music biographies and the complete works of Spike Milligan. The rummies and smack heads are frightened to go in there as it is intensively used by intense knife armed industrial and cooking school hoodies for their computer work.

I was sat on an old cloth couch among the aisles when a caravan of mums went by pushing elaborate six-wheeled and tented prams, the sort you think right away overcompensates for a complete lack of gnos on motherhood. But probably doesn't, they may be a kind of mobile temple.

All at once the caravan stopped, like the congestion on the A2 by my place or after an accident on the road to Eltham caused by a drunk racist.

From their accents it was clear that these were mainly new EU Poles, Latvians or South African and Congolese. But there were others. I chatted to a mum from Lebanon stopped in front of my couch. She explained, in a way, that the mums were related somehow to a Lewisham social welfare program for immigrant single mothers to help with literacy and social access. They were waiting for the doors to the children's section of the library to open, because they were required to take their kids to a pre-school book appreciation class.

The doors did open and the moms filtered into a florescent snapping and hissing lighting up room hung with rotating coat hangers, hung in turn with strings of cardboard Thomas the Tank engines, Alices in Wonderlands, a variety of mad hatted hares, Rupert the Bears and other flying myths and legends.

The kids were decanted and unbuckled from their plastic and steel wagons, I believed now that these were state supplied as they had number plates. The kids stared at the mobiles blinking.

They were sat next to mom's on hard backed institutional chairs, legs dangling, facing a superb, bun haired, stereotypical example of Norfolk librarian resplendent in a blue suit of cartoon librarian school bony intellectualism, nattering "be seated, be seated", with a BBC fantasia accent, an accent which does not occur anywhere naturally on earth. It is a voice generated by the dreams of British essence perhaps best in dreams of those leaning back and closing eyes in Black Holes while being raped by fuzzy wuzzies.

"We are all going to have such fun," she said.

I was now seated at a small table just outside the Children's library door which I shared with a guy reading a copy of the Singapore Straights Times. He was chewing pumpkin seeds.

The woman sat in front of the semi circle of chairs and buggies and opened a large glossy book. It had big, oh so big, print on one side and a picture of a very, very, yellow glossy duck in a red jacket on the other. The duck was smiling. The print said 'Quack'.

"What do ducks say?" she said in a very loud voice.

The kids were all in their twos or threes of two and three year olds. As the kids of single welfare moms sent to an obligatory state function, they were elaborately dressed. Some had multi-plaited hair with florescent beads, some had leather caps, all had new trainers, some with the lights on the toes.

One little trucker had a blazer and bow tie. Very few had removed outer clothing but those who had done so revealed rainbow hued shirts and blouses, often under suspenders, and hung with fairly bright jewellery. The kids were universally wide eyed and almost to a poor thing, sniffling. Many had ears or arms grasped by slitted eyed moms. The sound of prolonged guttural sssuh'es and whispered threats throbbed out of the children's room.

"Quack, quack" said the thin English lady, quite loud over the ssushing.

She turned on a machine beside her. It was a ghetto blaster armed with an audio book. A deep voice of government doom said "what do ducks say?"

The moms cried out as one "QUACK." They knew what to do.

That was enough for the kids. I think a few may have seen a book before but not one like that one. They had seen English ladies before at the immigration desks, in doctor's offices and as police. Very few would have encountered ducks, but if they had, cooked or uncooked or hanging on a hook in Deptford, those ducks were not electric yellow, jacketed and grimacing with lust. The man's voice was the voice of an alien God.

The flight was led by a little guy in a pink snowsuit crying out in a Bantu language and running, as he may have been taught to do, for the nearest exit, hole or clearing.

The others, screaming, easily with few exceptions twisted or squirmed from mom's arms, as any kid can do, like leaping cats at a sudden snake, whipped themselves, legs pumping, around buggies and chairs, and whizzed past me into the dark aisles of the main library.

As they ran they formed into small groups, knots of threes or fours, holding hands or pulling one another, darting around corners, under tables, I think some of the groups were multi-national. Every group had a weeper and a stumbler.

The fruity voiced reading experience enabler cried out "Children, children. Please settle down!" Even as idiom this cry of hers made no sense to me. We were all trying to settle down.

The audio book voice of bad news was saying "Farmer Brown loves all his animals."

Oh sure.

The moms looked at one another in fierce accusation, "what has your child done to my child" "my child has nothing to do with this", rising slowly and with unruffled grace and dignity from their chairs, gathering loose pieces of clothing and speaking out, in small projected voices, what were probably the baby nick names of children, Tooo Too, Rizzy, Kabble.

One name I recognised as a Hausa weekday name, probably a birth date and most likely used because it would be the tempting of evil envy to use the formal name of a child so young and lovely in these circumstances.

A great laughing and weeping chase began up and down the aisles, around the check out desks, into the disabled toilets, across the foyer to the welfare offices, out onto the streets. Revolution.

While this was going on I realised no-one could think in this atmosphere. I put 'Mao' back on the shelf and went out to collect my car; I had to get grout and other fillers for the bathroom tiles because of the explosion.

If you have Google earth you can see my flat as it is in the roof. It is near Greenwich Park, the Queen's House and the Meridian. The Deer Park. Far above Deptford and Lewisham. Far away from the nasty palace. That is 00,00,00.

The corner, just by the little park. On the edge of a big bland space which is Black Heath. It looks like a giant eye as the centre of the heath has collapsed into the Caves (and people have built in there). Not bland on the ground though. Hidden depths.

The roof I'm in has a skylight. Google can see it. But not for me. I ain't under that. I'm in the bit that juts towards the river. If you are there on Google Earth you can see what I see from the Windows. Saint Paul's, the London Eye, the Tower, the Croydon Needle. Fifty church spires.

If you google 'Blue orange publishing' on Google Earth you will see the roof of my old flat, as Google hasn't changed my address and never will. That is so good for the surveillance society. It is nearby this my actual location and so causes maximum confusion. Better yet I have no officially understandable address, the house has No number. Ha, ha. You have to know where it is or are in the sky.

It has a postal code. There can be mail. That is ok for sat-nav too, and therefore for bombing, for eyes in sky it has visibility, for the common apocalypse it's here.

But for on the ground individual state agent non specificity it is not.

It happens every day. The council people, the electricity people, the police.

Yes, I have a flat number, under the roof. On no floor. But no actual street address for bothersome day to day police raids looking for illegal immigrants and imperfect citizens.

They (bad guys) will instead hit the guy with the street address number but not me in the upstairs flat way above whose number you can read only if you are a friend coming to see me.

This means that it is hard to place me for the direct face to face state. It makes so much trouble. The electoral roll guys just wander back and forth on the vale, scrunching their eyes, looking for a street number. Looking out over the blasted and empty heath. But no. Ha ha. No where.

So good, is all that, for generating multiple identities and false Leads.

I dissolve into story.

I am the guy under the roof, at the top of the street in 'the big house.'

"Jesus Christ," (says a bad guy) "what does that mean, the big house, I mean where is that? Deptford? Lewisham? I can see it on Google but I can't find it. I get it on the sat-nav but its not there. There’s just a blank heath."

"It's supposed to be by the little .. by the park, Point View."

(This Park has the best view in London. But it is virtually inaccessible surrounded by a jungle of Holly. It is approached by slanty stone steps through tall grass. You can see St. Paul's, Wembley, The London Eye, and Parliament, everything from it but only people in Conduit house know it is there. Everyone else goes to the Meridian Park with its wonderful, but limited view.)

"That Park, I can't find that either. I just keep ending up at the
Meridian. 00,00,00. That's not where it's supposed to be."

"Well raid that then. Or get the guy in the house numbered that way that we saw from before."

"Sat-nav says he's not him, he's at the bottom of the hill, and his wife says it isn't him."

"Whatever, get someone."

Richard Rathwell is elsewhere and he is well.

Except the arm went up again and I had to go to emergency again on moving day.

On the arm going up again. I have, due to a long story I have told
Elsewhere, a complete lack of lymph nodes. Several times because of
The way I hold a pen, which results in thumb stabbing when
Correcting hard copy with resoluteness, I have almost, so far just

The second time was last week. The lack of lymph nodes means that any
Foreign toxin under my skin, especially in my writing arm
Immediately becomes precipitous unfolding cellulite death, a
Creeping Ebola type of poison heading for internal organs,
Particularly my heart, and also my brain. The tiny prick must be
Followed by an emergency rush to the hospital for
Intravenous antibiotics and other horrors or that's it Alice.

What they do there at the hospital is draw black lines on my upper
Arm and elsewhere ,final boundaries which, if the creeping redness
Of the toxin under my skin and in my blood now as death poison
Crosses, means immediate and drastic surgery or a dirge. More bits
Of me, or the arm itself have to go, or worse yet, heart and brain
May be gone already. Sorry sir.

It s funny in a way. Almost metaphoric.

The red tide goes creep, creep. The anti-toxins and anti-biotics go
Drip, drip. I hallucinate the great poets and, from time to time,
Someone checks up on me. Sometimes a nurse, sometimes Virgil.
They don't take a blind bit of notice of
The dramatic struggle of good versus evil under my skin, in my
Organs, or of the dead greats reciting their best around my
Ears, 'make it new, make it new', 'equal that is to the real
Itself,' we are but flies to the gods they kill us for their
Sport.., nope! They look at the black line. They look at the red
Tide and then they say 'OK' or 'tch tch' and then go away.
Leaving me to myself and own devices.

This all happened last week on moving day and was another reason
Other than the kitchen explosion of over pressured pipes and related
Methane gas that I was going for walks after hospital and moving
(similar in stress) and getting things fixed.
Walks cleared my head. I walked with Orpheus, little gabbling stinker,
Smelling of the underworld and grabbing my throbbing arm
To show me the sunset behind a coven of crows on a lone tree saying
'the end of light, the end of day, the end of music, is coming'.

And I thought of you and others,
(and truth be said in a maudlin, self
pitying and judgemental way, of me). I thought then that Hamlet was
Right that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt
Of in literature (or something like that) or as me said that there
Is more to a single person than in all of the cantos.

And so on.

A letter to some friends

2006-08-09T07:21:00.000+01:00

I am sorry I am not as awake and engaged recently as I should like to be. This particular war has surprised me by involving me personally, involved me worse than ever combined with all that father/son role miasma (I hope he does well with war and women and words, and doesn't screw up like me ..... God save me I can't help it). It makes me dozy.

It is all especially depressing not only because it is another war being made on children and fruit trees, not only that the UN is again the midwife and the aid agencies the collectors for the slaughter, not only because the language of it is so infuriatingly banal and stupid but especially because I thought I was away from war into somewhere else.

There is as usual a collection of stereotypical figures in my pantheon. Once more, and for the second generation, we are tied up with the grand daughters of the fathers of the country, tongue-tied and desperate Palestinians, there are meetings of family combatants, Romeos and Juliets, angling amongst the bomb damage for epiphany and chunks of light.

It destroys my focus and plan. It upsets structures and correspondences. Once more, and for the third generation, we are in the spider sight of the spies.

And it is all such a little silly thing. And it came so fast.

But again I watch the news all day and write very little sardonic revelation. I cook for seven, I drive aimlessly, I have the same idea over and over again. It is all so deadly obvious. For son it is all new.

Then there are my daughters.

The Cows of Freedom

2006-05-05T03:40:00.000+01:00

The funeral went well. Everyone was cheerful as they gathered in Baba's house for the snacks, raki and whiskey. The proper ones didn't drink the whiskey or raki of course. The idea was to show your disdain for it and sip the surface of the liquid only in the tiny glasses. That was the custom. It showed not only respect for tradition but morality. The real drinking would come later after the gathering and it would not be here.

Baba, the dead woman's brother, walked around the room shaking hands. Everyone smiled tiredly at him, even the children. Dressed in the old trousers he wore most days with a jacket that must date from before his retirement, he shuffled around the small room of the apartment bleary-eyed and distracted. Most eyes were on his wife Bebe to see how she was coping with the crowd in the little apartment. Energetic and grim-faced she watched each move of her husband confirming or changing every indication he gave to the guests about where they should stand or sit.

Everyone in the room knew something of who everyone else was. Some knew everything. This was the family. Baba's younger brother would do the talking. There would not be much if any at all through the coughing and wheezing silence and above the muffled whispering of the TV.

Everyone in the room knew what would happen. Bebe, Baba's wife, would buzz about making sure the plates of snacks and fruits were in a frenzy of replenishment and questioned everyone so suddenly, loudly and closely about what they wanted next and how much they liked it that no-one could eat more than a token. The topics of the government, the condition of the roads and what is wrong with country people would be briefly revisited from where they had been left at the last funeral but only by one or two comments made by a senior into the quiet between the long pauses. Each comment would probably be followed by Bebe interrogating someone again, maybe the speaker, about whether they had had enough or wanted more whiskey or had liked her cookies. After an hour everyone would go.

How many of them was that dead now in that part of the family? She was nearly the last. There had been five brothers and two sisters. A brother and a sister were left seated there on the couch. Sister's deaf husband and brother's dying wife were on the two comfortable chairs. Someone or other from most of the children of that group, the dead woman's nieces and nephews, poor thing she had been childless, were there. In fact a child or two from all the branches of each generation since the terrible old man, the dead woman's father, were there. Among nephews and nieces were two doctors and a cabinet minister with some kind of public relations person too and a few now unfamiliar faces back from doing god knows what abroad, some of the ex-patriot husbands and wives or god knows who. All of the nephews and nieces were now swaying quietly in their black clothes, arrayed in a standing circle of munching faces against the walls behind the comfortable chairs of the dead woman's brothers and sister. Some of their children were on the floors.

There were less comfortable chairs. Each of the adult generations but not the children had brought some specially connected friend of the family who, with well-placed more peripheral relatives, cousins of various degrees, was displayed on the dining room chairs that had been borrowed for that purpose from neighbours and arranged as the honoured first circle nearest the snacks table. When the ordering of all was completed, the few words spoken, snacks nibbled and liquids sipped and moreover everyone had seen who was there and who wasn't, then the friends and cousins would be the first to leave from those chairs.

As Baba ended his hand shaking and moved to the central table Bebe surveyed the room and saw everything was going very well.

Then one of the children, that damned fat boy of the minister, said loudly, "What is in the box Baba?"

There it was. It was under the snacks table. The sea chest of the dead aunt. Baba had gotten it from her flat on his way here after the funeral and put it under there before the snacks had been served. He had once slid it further under, bending painfully and sighing because of his condition while the late arrivals were bunched up apologising at the door before being shown to their places, this time by Bebe.

The child had seen that. Everyone there had seen that. The child had also been in the car behind Baba's nephew's little car with Baba and Bebe in it and Bebe's friend from girlhood, the schoolteacher Lira, the car that had held up irritated and honking traffic while Baba went up the stairs weeping and holding what was in fact, unknown to the child but known to others, the duplicate key Baba's sister had given him when she had faced up to the facts of how ill she was.

It was now Baba's turn to keep the chest. And after him, who?

The minister whispered a hush to the boy. The boy looked up at him and shook his head defiantly in that way fat boys have. Of course the people in the comfortable chairs and on the couch knew what the chest was, some a little, some more. The children, outer relatives and friends didn't.

But nevertheless they all knew an impropriety when they witnessed one. Shame on that child. Even the other children knew one, or should. They sat guiltily still. The minister was awful with his children. He spoilt them. That was because he was never home and we all know why that is.

The aunt's sea chest was the sea chest of her father. He was the man the eldest in the family knew as Baba long before his son. The keeper of the chest now became Baba. The Baba now had not always been the new Baba either. His older brother, now dead, had once been the new Baba, son of the old Baba. The sister of that new Baba, the maiden aunt just buried, had been the new Bebe once. Bebe had been the name of that old terror's wife. She had been a wonderful woman. All her children loved her especially the new Baba just new. And so it had been, Babas and Bebes.

But this was a moment unprecedented. New Baba was the first New Baba to get the chest since the old regime had gone. He was the first since the internet. He was the first to get the chest at a time when the newspapers wrote of private scandals of public officials, the first since genealogical searches, the first since people lived together openly without marriage, the first since modern immigration, the first since kids came home, the first since fundamentalism wasn't official, the first since he had begun writing poems and memoirs and the first since they all had left the party.

"Let's open the chest," said the new Baba to the minister's fat boy.

Baba pulled the chest from under the table. He motioned to his surviving sister and brother to help him. Bebe saw what was happening and cleared away the snacks. The chest was placed by the elderly trio among the whiskey bottles. There it sat as brother and sister sat down, sister smiling, held shut by a wide headed brass nail thrust through the two parts of a broken clasp.

"This is the sea chest of my father," said Baba. "As some of you know he was an Imam. Some of you may have heard also that he sold charms in the countryside and relics of the saints to the Christians travelling as a priest.

"This is the chest he brought back from America. It is made of Canadian wood." From the chairs of the special friends and the peripheral relatives radiated a frozen silence as normal movement ceased. A cousin from the mountains coughed.

New Baba had spoken in an elder's voice. It was in a soft cadence but almost angry with a hint of weariness. Everyone recognized it. The minister used it in parliament. The fat boy used it on his smaller friends. The doctor used it on her patients and also her husband. The public relations person heard it from the boss. It was the voice an elder used when he was entering into a narrative, a story an instruction to which people would listen and in which they must, for a moment, believe.

"Baba was in America for twelve years."

The mountain cousin shook his head. He said, "America!" New Baba paused. New Bebe turned off the TV. The room darkened. The minister took a whiskey bottle from the table and began to replenish some of the glasses that had been hastily emptied. New Baba's younger sister did the same with the Raki, hobbling around the circle with her cane. The public relations man smiled at her and thanked her, calling her auntie.

"While he was there in America he was a member of the Society of the Sons of Freedom and wrote for their newspaper."

"Surely not the Sons of Freedom!" whispered the mountain cousin who most there knew had just gotten a post with his municipality, it was thought only through a bribe to the republican democrats. The son-in-law giggled derisively.

"Yes, the Sons of Freedom. And when he came back home he married again. Well not quite again, it was a second wife, one in the city. That was normal .My mother was the village wife. When Baba died he told his eldest son, my half brother, you don't know him as that, he is Janus, the police chief, to give this chest to my mother. When she died it went to her eldest child and down through dear sister to me."

"What is in it then?" said the husband of new Baba's pretty daughter in a casual, diffident voice. He worked at the airport as a baggage handler and often brought lovely things as presents for Bebe. This time some thought he had spoken a little out of turn. The daughter reddened as one does when anything in the realm of inheritable objects are mentioned.

Baba took the nail from the clasp and opened the lid. A smell of dry paper wrinkled a few noses in the room. One child began to play on the floor with a toy truck she had brought, humming in a bored fashion. The novelty of the chest and authority of the voice had passed for her. Above the child a woman standing kicked at the truck quickly with her toe and shushed. The child looked up at Baba, this time a little fearfully.

The minister said, "Baba, perhaps now is not the time for this."

Baba's son-in-law said, "Go ahead old man."

"Horseshit," said Baba to the minister and pulled a sheaf of photographs from the chest.

"On the top I find, dear friends and relatives, photographs of me that my dear departed sister has herself put on top of Baba's things. Here is one of me with Nadje, the old dictator's wife. That was taken last year in the ancient bat's confinement just after, what, her seventy-fifth birthday. Here is another taken the year I married Bebe. I was thirty something. Sister took that to show with me with the Danish cows.

"Here is one with me in the background of a group around the dictator. I am in it. See where the faces of the Chinese delegates are rubbed out. We were up all night doing that, my sister and me. Rubbing them out of pictures and ripping pages out of books. Bebe wouldn't go near any of that. Too frightened. Under that is a notebook of draft poems I gave to sister when she was alive for her birthday and under that is the first of my Father's journals.

"Yes, there is some jewellery here and coins. There is clothing too. It looks like the cloth for a turban. There is a suit. It has a vest. There is a watch on a chain. God! Here is a photo of Bebe as a teenager with the dictator and, why it's Bebe's father too! What's that doing in here?" Baba turned swiftly as his wife dropped a plate of cookies. A cluster of female relatives leapt at once from their positions to surround her offering to be the one to clean it up and where the cloths were.

"Can I ask a question Baba?" The voice entering into the tumult was again that of the most irritating son-in-law. A property developer, the son of a famous city family well connected in the minister's party, he was the least popular of the crew the daughters had picked up. When he came for Sunday dinner he always seemed to delight in provoking Baba about his past connections with the communists, his peasant background and his lack of understanding of modern things.

He liked to make fun of Baba's present customs, sitting all day in cafés with decrepit friends, rotating around the open markets all day looking for the sausages of his youth, getting embroiled in complicated bureaucracies for hours of wrangling sarcasm about the simplest matters, leaving his flies open.

"Baba, I am confused by this," said the son-in-law. "You were a party secretary and member of the central committee. You were known as the son of the soil. You were a boy from the mountains, a peasant from the village who overcame an ignorant religious background to become a scientific socialist. You were the brother of martyrs. That was how you got your position."

Baba ignored him. He spoke instead to Bebe softly as if no one else was in the room. She was before him brushing the cookie crumbs into a pan. The family women had all been waved to their positions. "What is this picture here with you and your father with the dictator? How can that be? You were all bourgeois reactionaries. Your father was a royalist!"

"Baba, I gave your sister that picture in secret for the chest in case the affair of the Danish cows went badly. It was a life insurance. You know how things were then. But Baba I am astonished with you. What were you doing at Nadje's house last year?" She stood up. Hand with the brush on hip. Pan held towards Baba with the other.

"Yes, what of that!" said Baba's younger sister.

Bebe's friend, Lira the schoolteacher, clicked her teeth and said, "Tuuch."

"What was the affair of the Danish cows?" asked the minister. He was minister of Agriculture. Baba looked nervously around and then at Bebe with what she knew as his "have I been naughty?" look. He thought of it as his brave face.

"I will not bore you too much. It was an old thing. But first let me read something written on the back of the photo of me and the cows that sister took. It is one of old Baba's quotations. He used to write them on pieces of lamb skin and sell them to the faithful as charms based on proverbs and apocryphal books. He would say they were from a saint. He would never do that with his own lodge people though. He was Bektashi as you know. I see you smiling, son-in-law. You think they were mainly homosexuals because that is what you have read in the American journals. No they weren't. They were mystics and ecumenical promoters of revelations. They taught Byron how to write poetry.

"Here are the two proverbs. There are more in the journals. They are full of them. The first is "Every lie becomes a fact" The second is "Every life is to the honourable man a failure but to the envious a triumph."

"Now the story. I was the party secretary for the capital district of the suburbs. Above me then was only the regional secretary for the district and the dictator himself. My brother, the eldest now dead, was the secretary in the mountains where he had led the partisan column against the invaders, the one the dictator is said to have commanded. My other brother was a general. I hadn't fought in the war, I was too young but because I was a peasant and my family contained martyrs I was given a university place. I studied agriculture. I rose through the party.

"Then came the time just after the Chinese. You see at first we loved the Russians. We had their tractors and textbooks and the Bulgarian vegetables. I even had Bulgarian pen pals. I wrote to them in fraternal joy every week about their tomatoes. Ours were better though but were discouraged.

"We got those Russians because we wanted to frighten the Yugoslavs, our comrades in arms from the war, who afterward wanted to absorb the whole country. They put a big army on the border so we got the Russians who gladly put a big army on theirs as the Yugoslavs were insulting and screwing around their dictator. But then the Russians started charging a lot for their fucking junk. They wanted to put their submarines on our islands and not only that they started insulting dictators, even their own themselves. So we got the Chinese. You know that one. Plastic lanterns and cheap paper books, silly raincoats and flowery calendars everywhere. Then their dictator hops it and they start to help the bloody Yugoslavs so we spent weeks erasing their pictures and burning calendars, the ones with the secret pictures of the Great Whoever hidden in them, or so we thought.

"So we go it alone. David surrounded by Goliaths. In the circumstances our Leader decides that he needs to pick some successor who won't insult him when he dies like happened to the others. He can't pick his wife as she's always fighting with people. A very feisty and proud woman that. Very attractive too in a blackbird kind of way. The Leader can't pick his comrade-in-arms who fought the war with him but at the front, some say won it, because he was disrespectful to the Leader's wife. He was rumoured to have insulted her at a party. He even accused her of disloyalty. She thinks he is too ferocious and picky. Others say he knows dark secrets which once everyone knew but had now loyally forgotten. Besides, our leader's comrades-in-arms' wife, the very clever woman who headed my party training school, and the rest of his family, were said to be taking over the government. She had been a school friend of the comrade-in-arms' wife as you know but had known the Leader well. They were in the police, in the defence ministry, everywhere. The Leader is told that when he dies they will try to kill his wife and then insult his memory.

"So our leader picks a younger guy. One he travels with a lot and spends time with. It is a guy who dresses like him and enjoys the sorts of things he does. He is also good friends with the dictator's wife. There is a problem with this guy. He was leading our youth wing at a time when the slogan was "Think for yourselves as we are surrounded by enemies!". So a bunch of kids started having rock concerts and writing love poetry with sex in it. The successor was actually one of them. The dictator, his wife really, he was a little dotty by then, went ballistic like a Russian rocket because he had written the slogan and he meant it to mean "Hate the Chinese and Russians, the Americans too and maybe the Greeks and Yugoslavs too.

"They got the successor to denounce his friends and put them in jail. Some were there for twenty years. You can see them sitting in the cafes on the square now. They just got out last year. Two have become fundamentalists. After this the successor's picture was everywhere. The comrade-in-arms' picture was not so frequent. His wife's picture, an attractive scholarly woman, disappeared. You saw the Leader with her and swarms of Chinese especially at the time of opening that huge industrial complex that we later learned sabotaged and ruined the economy of the country, especially the agriculture.

"The affair of rock concerts and love poetry started a big purge of collaborators with foreigners. The secretary in the district next to mine was denounced by his superior, the regional secretary for sabotaging the state and collaborating with foreign powers and spying. We knew what that meant.

"The first time I had heard of a case like that was when the Yugoslavs were on the border. The Politburo met and voted to join with their Yugoslavian brothers with only one dissenting vote. The country was finished. The dissenter went to the soviet embassy and informed them. They told the Russian dictator and he shat birds. He told the Politburo to reverse their vote or he would have them thrown in the boiler of an aircraft carrier. The country was still full of their advisors and spies but there were Yugoslav ones too. The embassies were riddled with them.

The Russian Dictator said to change the Politburo completely, to let people on it like our Leader's comrade-in-arms.

"At the time I thought the dissenting vote had been my teacher at the agricultural college who had become a minister and Politburo member. He was a famous Partisan and ideologue. He was calling for an independent agricultural revolution. But how could that be? Our leader was on the Politburo. He was the head of it. It must have been him.

"We heard the shocking news that my teacher had been the one plotting with the Yugoslav pretending not to and that our Leader had drawn him into a trap and the Yugoslavs too by pretending to support them. My teacher shot himself in depressive despair on being exposed after confessing to the comrade-in-arms. He shot himself with his own pistol. All of the party members of a certain rank were issued with a pistol. I think I was the only one who refused mine. I said that if a class enemy wanted to get me, a little pistol wouldn't stop him. I came from a family of martyrs. And of heroes too. My sister, bless her soul, gave her life to the party. It is why she never married. She never thought of anything else from the time she met a comrade giving out leaflets in our village when she was a girl until the day she died. She lived with the Partisans in the woods. She had no romance no love. It was forbidden.

"Anyway in the purge of the rock and love poetry the secretary of the next district was accused of sabotaging agriculture. He was said to be a follower in hiding of the old teacher. He was said to have undermined the anti-Chinese self-reliance plan by sabotaging the production of peaches. In fact all of the production targets in our area were way below the plan. The propaganda ministry was having a hard time convincing people we were overproducing in vegetable and bread. The regional secretary had discovered that the underproduction was due to a nest of spies and saboteurs and reported that to the Politburo. My neighbour secretary, who was also a friend, was apparently put on trial and confessed. Then he shot himself in despair with his party gun. During the investigation the security police talked to me. I said I knew nothing."

During Baba's story the family and friends had kept still except for the minister and the living sister who circulated to fill glasses. Bebe had given the children plates of Baklava and forks. They were eating quietly and not spilling a crumb. New Baba had emptied his glass twice. Once he had lifted it to the annoying son-in-law. His younger brother and his wife had nodded vigorously several times. The mountain cousin remained still. The annoying son-in-law had neither drunk nor eaten. He kept blinking and swallowing.

"Then I was called before a party court headed by the provincial secretary. He read the charges to me. The first was that I had sabotaged the production of milk so that the country would become demoralised. The second was that I had married Bebe. Bebe as you know is from the Tanzania family. They had been aristocrats and supporters of the puppet king before the great patriotic anti-fascist war. Her branch of the family is made up of bourgeois urban moneylenders and landlords. Very unusually she had gone to the higher schools, not meant for class enemies, where I had met her and we had fallen in love. She was the top student in engineering and mathematics but wasn't given a prize. She wanted to work in her profession but on our wedding day I was transferred to a post in the mountains. It was a hard place with little water or food but the party wanted trusted comrades away from the degenerating city life of drink parties, soft living and intrigue. We married and took the train; she changed from her wedding dress in the train toilet. We had a tough life there. It was cold and dirty. Our daughters were born while I worked eighteen hours a day to build socialism. Bebe raised them alone. Then after the Russians I was transferred back to the city.

"Bebe's sister married a minor party man who was a cousin of our leader. My elder brother married a peasant woman who became the membership secretary of the party. That woman's sister had married a member of the Politburo who had seen her in a cotton dress picking turnips in the rain during a tour of inspection to choose hero workers for the propaganda ministry films. A lovely woman. She was in "War Against the Weevil Saboteurs". Do you remember the scene of the wind storm and her little pistols?

"None of these people helped me. The sister who married the Leader's cousin said she had hardly known her sister as she was sent to work in a factory. My ferocious peasant sister-in-law actually wrote the indictment. She wanted no taint of me on the hero name of my brother. The peasant woman sent over some sausages with a son but nothing else. She ignored my wife on the street.

"The third charge was that I was in the love poetry and rock faction which was a revival of my teacher's pro-Yugoslavian conspiracy which my friend had been a modern leader of and which may even go higher up to those close to the Leader.

"It was a critical situation. If I denied the charges it was certain that it would be taken as proof as I was anti-party as they were being brought by a superior. It would be a breach of discipline as the party line was that these were the charges and the party was never wrong nor was a leader. If I broke discipline at a time when the party was fighting an encirclement of decadent and predatory war mongering imperialism who wanted nothing more but to steal or even destroy our beautiful valleys and mountains and god knows what else, probably our traditions, revolutionary souls and virginity with bombs and rock and dope and sex drugged love poetry and motor cars.

"It was a time when bitter and rejected egotistical class enemies hidden in a thousand disguises were formulating wild and seductive stories to seduce and blind the heroic people and deliver them into the blood-soaked maws of the oppressors taking shit-covered gold from the murderers' smelly hands to deliver our state secrets to the vile assassins and lying propagandists of their intelligence agencies and to spread filthy lies about our dear Leader, the sanctity of his comrade wife and the manhood of the successor.

"I had not to deny the charges. I took first the one of being a member of that group and second the one about marrying Bebe. I said that I had been an unknowing dupe of the group and had been fooled by the things I had heard about my teacher's heroism and my friend's party dedication. I said that because of this I resigned my post and wanted to return to private life. I said I had disgraced the martyr relatives I had, my brothers and my other relatives in the party. I apologised for my marriage. I wished now to live a quiet and contemplative life in the city. That is how we got this nice apartment so close to the shops. Soon after I left the party Bebe was given a job in her profession."

"But the other charge," said the minister.

"The charge of milk sabotage was harder to deal with. The plan had set a quota based on the assumption that we would import a herd of Danish cows, who had higher yields than the ones we bred from Russian semen, and a Danish bull. Half the cows had come and a youngish bull but the bull had been butchered for the Politburo shop and some cows had been re-exported illegally to Yugoslavia to get hard currency for ministerial trips which had brought back whiskey for the same shop or on the black market or given to the Leader's wife for use at her parties. Only two cows had come to my district. They were in the state farm at night but during the day were with a moonlight independent farmer who knew how to take care of them.

"On this charge I had a risky plan which had been inspired from some proverbs of my father. I said in the party court to the provincial secretary that as a last act of being a party member I wished to defend the integrity of the always correct part and denounce the source of sabotage. I would do this because his vigilance had found out my errors which I hadn't even seen myself but now did do to the correct line of the party under its unshakeable, unified leadership.

"I pointed out that the party was led by ideology and politics and so armed the heroic people, the people's liberation army, the state organs of security, the progressive peasantry in the state farms, the workers rebuilding the factories to fight the material battles against the bourgeois encirclement and treason scientifically.

"I said the party was right to identify incorrect ideas such as the problem with the milk quota. It had done its duty. Now I as my last act armed with new vision would call for the proper managing of the cows. I denounce them! They must be punished! Let them face the wrath of the masses. The party has done the politics. The cows have neither bred nor given a patriotic level of milk. They must be judged and punished. I pointed out that since party courts are only for the party members from which sacrifices and high political discipline were expected to preserve the infallibility of the party the cows could not be judged here. They must be judged in their own commune by their own perhaps with guidance from a party member. As for me, I felt they should be executed and eaten by the people.

"I did not become suicidal and depressed. I did not commit suicide. I was retired to a teaching post. From there I wrote on improving peach production, export level cucumbers and then retired. I went to the cremation of the comrade-in-arms. We were only three there. One was a woman who watched from a party car. His relatives had all been arrested on the night he committed suicide from depression and despair and left his confession of being an imperialist spy his whole life. His body was found by the Successor. Some people who were walking outside the politburo compound had heard a sustained gun battle on the same night which may have been a practice session of the security forces as occasionally happened. This is probably what was being an initial announcement some remember that he was killed in a coup attempt. But that may have been put out by state enemies. The Leader died shortly after. The successor came briefly to power. I know his doctor has said that the leader was demented for some time but that man was not one of our doctors. He was a foreigner brought in. He was also a friend of the Leader's own local doctor, that traitor who led the American-financed overthrow of the party and set up a bourgeois republic in which our dear relative is a government minister.

"The leader's wife is now in confinement. The Successor lives with a close friend in Paris near a hospital. He has a degenerative disease.

"And you Baba are doing very well with your apartment and pension; also there is Bebe's salary," said the annoying son in law. Baba smiled at him. The boy's taunts were well-known as were Baba's passive reactions. The boy needed to show his distance from old times and modernity.

"Things were better when the leader was alive," said new Baba, looking at the boy.

"The party was something then, not like these parasites of weasels, sell-outs, car thieves and puppies now," He looked at the minister. "It was muscular and ruthless. On edge. Life or death. Not a bloated bunch of gibberers. You always knew where everyone stood. Clear lines. Clear slogans. Clear ideas! History! Glory! There was nothing to touch it. The only thing that comes close is the new religious party of those old poets and rockers and their sons. That has balls anyway."

"Why did you see Nadje?" asked Bebe.

"What is in that picture?" asked Baba.

"I know what it is," said the minister, Bebe's nephew, the son of the sister who had disowned her and son of the cousin of the leader.

"The leader's family owned a bookstore next to my grandfather's dry goods shop. Bebe worked there as a teenager. The leader and his friends would meet next door in a back room to have coffee and discuss politics and life. It was a gathering place for fashionable intellectuals who came to buy books. The comrade-in-arms went there, the woman he married, Nadje and some others. After the meetings and at other times the leader would sit in front of the shop and smoke. Bebe was a few years younger and she would talk to him when there were no customers in hers. She was fascinated. He spoke of Paris where he was going to go to school; of the fashions there and of symbolist poetry, novels, new inventions, motor cars. Of real life, not like in this stupid peasant backwater. He also spoke of history. How it was made and written. He wanted to be a professor at the Sorbonne. You know later he became a history teacher far out in the provinces in what they call the Paris of the Mountains. But before that he went to the real Paris.

"After he came back from the real Paris and had started teaching and agitating at home he came one day to grandfather's shop to tell Bebe about his travels. He showed her photographs of Paris including one of a handsome French boy, a communist student he said, his best friend while there in Paris. They had changed a room. He was also a poet. Bebe was quite taken with that student and with the leader too pictured sitting in cafés, dressed in spats and long tight coats. In some the leader and friend were with Orientals or Africans, people Bebe had never seen. Everyone looked so rich and sophisticated. Then he asked Bebe if she wanted to meet his local friends. She was thrilled. They went into the bookshop to the back room. Nadje was there and the comrade-at-arms. They were rowing. She took a ring from her finger and flung at the leader's friend. The Leader tried to calm them. Bebe said she was frightened but fascinated."

"How do you know this?" said Baba, softly looking at Bebe who stared back defiantly.

"We don't own each other," said Bebe. "We don't own each others' histories."

"I have it from my father," said the minister. "The story has been in my family forever. Bebe's father tells it every family gathering. He was in his father's shop next door that day. He was there for the rest.

"At that moment the group in the back room heard Bebe's father just outside the door say "Run! It's the Police!" He had seen them enter the street and guessed their intention. A big sweep was going on after some patriotic disturbances.

"Bebe led the group out of the bookshop back door into the alleyway. From there she took them into the back door of the family house next to the dry goods store. It is the house I live in now although the bookstore and grandfather's are gone. The group hid in a bedroom. Bebe held a shaking leader and Nadje was crying when Bebe's father came in. The comrade-in-arms was by the window with a revolver. The police had left him alone as he was a respectable businessman. They had seemed disappointed that no one was in the back room. They said they had a tip-off that a radical was there.

"Why have you never told me this?" asked Baba of Bebe. "Why is this not known?"

"It is known," the minister said. "The party history is full of clandestine meetings and escapes from the police. It just doesn't say who did what. Why the party was founded in a secret cellar in one of my cousin's houses. The family were asked to keep it quiet. But it was known. Why do you think Bebe got a place in school? Why do you think you weren't convicted?"

"What were you doing at Nadje's?" said Bebe.

"I was feeling sorry for her. I was curious too. Yes, I have visited her from time to time. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to worry you Bebe. You know how you get. She is after all in detention. It's really just a small house in the old military barracks. She spends all day watching Portuguese soap operas. She writes poems. I have a few. There is a lot of the ancient politburo there. Some of them are completely mad. I felt sorry for her, once a queen now so low. On her own. She is living in a reality even the memory of is mostly gone. She has only a girl to care for her once a week. Her family only visit once in a while and the police and journalists used to of course ask about hidden treasure and crimes but they have given up. There are a few cult communists from other countries.

"Why does she see you? You didn't know her. You were too junior."

"I knew her as a girl and I visited her a few times after her marriage."

"What!" The cry came both from Bebe's friend and Baba's sister.

"Father took me to the city one time to meet his second wife and all my half-brothers and -sisters. I went down the mountain with him from town to town to the city as he was selling his charms. At one place he sold a charm for pleasing a man to Nadje's mother. They talked a long time. I spoke to Nadje in the yard. I was carrying some charms too and I gave one to her. She saw me years later among the delegates me from the platform of a congress and sent a message to me to meet her where she was staying. It was just after the Yugoslavian affair when both she and the comrade-in-arms were put on the leader's politburo. She said she was happy to see me and would follow my career but that I must tell no one I knew her. There were too many rumours already spread by reactionaries about her and the leader. There were even rumours that the leader shot a close comrade who people said had been his lover but others said that it was really because was going to reveal his failings. But Nadje said we were both used to working underground and taking risks, used to fooling and deceiving our enemies so we should be alright if we knew each other and looked out after each other." Bebe seemed angry.

"Go on about your father," said the minister.

At this two cousins and a friend of Baba's younger brother, a priest, got up to leave. They thanked Baba for a lovely story and Bebe for the snacks. They expressed condolences again, nodded to the minister, buttoned coats and left. Bebe had not yet closed the door behind them before a second echelon of distant relatives and friends got up to leave. When they had departed glasses were replenished. The wife of the minister who had been silent offered to take two of the youngest children outside to the park for ice cream. The other children had plates replenished with baklava and cookies but were moved to the hallway with their cars, dolls and picture books. They were told not to fight by Bebe.

Glasses were filled again. "Tell us about your father," repeated the minister. Baba had not moved. His eyes had followed Bebe as she did her tasks with the desks. Bebe returned to a position on the other side of the table.

"So that is how you did it!" she said and laughed dryly. Only the son-in-law laughed with her.

"We have had hard times in this country," Baba went on, his voice now quivering. He looked like someone on a playground slide. "I do not know whether ours were worse or those of the old Baba. But we have had to be clever and artful. Baba knew that to get money was impossible in those mountains. He borrowed from relatives and friends. He was friends with both Christians and Moslems in his village. He had charmed them all, especially the elders. But I found him frightening.

"He took passage to America. At Ellis Island, the immigration place, he claimed to be an Italian. He gave a name but they changed it anyway to make it sound more English. It is the same name as a recent president's. He worked in the mines and as a salesman. He travelled into Canada. He learned good English and once wrote for an English newspaper. He was an officer in the patriotic organisation of exiles against our government then. The society also did social welfare work with exiles. He started a Bektashi lodge. He sent money back home with a brother who had gone to America with him but got homesick. The brother stole the money. When he heard in a letter from my mother that took a year to reach him he took the money he had and went home. He worked at the selling of charms. He had brought chains and metal things back with him in this trunk. He travelled all over the countryside here staying in the lodges. As was the custom he took a second wife, the daughter of a lodge brother, and supported her too. After the Geeks attacked our village and stole children and raped the women he became increasingly depressed. We saw him infrequently because of work and the situation. The country was in turmoil. My mother raised us telling us to be tolerant and quoting his proverbs. From her they made sense. They were beautiful. My brothers joined the partisans. Father came home from America in a suit and as the success he had been there with this trunk.

"But before the suit and the selling and writing he joined the army and fought in France. I believe his army papers, passport and citizenship papers are in this box. There may also be birth certificates of children and letters. There is a novel."

The annoying son-in-law began to laugh. It was a strange laugh, almost a choke. "Are you saying, Baba, that you are not the son of an ignorant superstitious peasant who served the party and country but rather the son of an American soldier who was a secret anti-patriotic terrorist?"

"He was that there. He was something else here."

"He was a bigamist there and here." too.

"He was a poet and saint in those days, son-in-law. You should respect him."

"Then you are now, with respect, a bastard ex-communist, Baba."

"He was a prince among princes then and he is still now," said Bebe angrily. She had tears in her eyes.

The minister laughed at that. He gestured to his wife, shook hands all around and left. This was followed by a general departure. Startled children were scooped up from the hall. Final greetings and well wishes were exchanged among all and condolences. Bebe refused all offers of help to clean up. The son-in-law gave Baba an extra strong embrace on departure.

six thirty

2005-12-11T04:25:00.000Z

Children were blown out of their beds. Someone phoned the BBC and said everything had gone black but he found his friend. They couldn't get out of the door because it was twisted but they could go down what was left of the stairs. He thought he wasn't hurt. The BBC person said "I don't know what you are talking about". Later she apologised. That was after one thousand mobile calls, texts and video pictures. They heard firecrackers in Taunten and plane crashes in Westminster and in Hamel Hampstead the roaring was followed by a pressure blast and then explosions.

Someone else phoned and said "It is coming from the refinery. I have smelt gas there for two weeks". Thereby giving the cause before the event happened.

We all have become prophets. There is a collective mind which is free of the official narrative. We were trained by the London bombs. We knew the man shot then was not a terrorist. We knew the phone system had been shut down and now we know the cloud approaching us is toxic even though the police announcement saws it isn't. "Then why is it black mommy?". Some of us heard the car alarms yesterday. We thought an earthquake was coming. I awoke before the windows rattled.

Everyone knows of the vast petrol vapour bombs the Americans used in Iraq. Everyone knows that heat and flame with metal and plastic makes toxic fumes. Everyone knows the wind direction and everyone is phoning their lovers before the cloud comes and they shut down the phones again.

It is another officially designated emergency incident. Everyone knows how fragile this society is. When the Member of Parliament comes on to reassure us as any incident like this is immediately political and he has instructions in a manual everyone knows he is bullshitting. The company spokesman comes on after the MP and says that their first thought is to find their employees so they can't say anything else now except there has been an incident. The blue orange flames at this time are 200 feet in the air. It turns out that only two employees were there to watch over sixty million gallons of leaking aviation fuel. They are missing but this isn't official. The spokesmen say we are not to worry because it is an industrial area and not a suburb. It was early morning. For him.

Except we do worry because some of us know the workers who were up in the early morning in the factories there making chips for the MacDonald's in the city the next day. Some of us have friends in the sink estates next to the refinery fence. Some of us even know the gypsies encamped in the scrub.

The news stations now ask for video phone shots of the flame. They are now competing for extra-ordinary coverage. Fools creep close to the flames with their mobiles. As usual the police and firemen hurl themselves towards some unknown horror.

By now all of us know about the bad safety, the rotten town planning, the official narrative of political spin. The explosion was only thirty minutes ago. We all know before the Prime Minister, before the head of the Police, before the hospitals.

Bhopal, Baghdad- the smoke is coming. Children blown out of their beds.

The Queen Anne House

2005-10-02T08:03:00.000+01:00

I went back to the Queen Anne house. I was with a daughter who was then composing a story about a daughter named Ann who went back in time with her step mother to visit her father at the time of his first marriage. It was to question him.

My daughter is named Ann. We were with my present wife. We had just come from visiting the hospital where the daughter was born. A midwife there had been in a photograph who may have remembered that year. She certainly had heard of the house. The daughter worried that her birth may have undermined her citizenship elsewhere as her real mom had suggested. She was told not to worry about this; Ireland was doing very well lately. But she thought that this was not the point. It was a spiritual matter.

The house had deteriorated. The paintings I had organised had become soft and crumbly. The basement had been flooded for two centuries before I had started the draining. Ongoing subsidence was inevitable. The perfect masonry of the sixteen hundreds had columned into wrinkles on the facing wall. But all of the windows were unbroken in their ruthless symmetry, a symmetry that inspired in Ireland a thousand houses just like it. For this was the original built by that maverick, that man entranced by Italy and grace. Who on his return from sun and passion slapped down this masterpiece in the middle of a decayed King John castle in a scatter of cow huts as if to say the past is over.

I asked Ann what she thought of the house. She found it hard to answer. She mentioned how it was getting dark and she was worried about where they would sleep. Some of the hotels had been spooky and she got anxious. She hoped dad would not talk about the forbidden things even in strange and sneaky ways like he does. He should not corner her especially given her condition. She was not supposed to say what her mom was doing and her sister didn't want anything to do with anything at all. Ann didn't want dad to tell any more ghost stories.

We were devils in it those years ago. We burned. We hated one another's innocence and stupidity. We expressed this as love. We adored each other's drying souls with angry hostility. The result became great hunts after one another relying on the greed each had for the future, the greed that masquerades as submission to ideas and fantasy. There also was an aesthetic. This was the best group ever. Each of us was the best as us. We believed. Except for one traitor. The total effect of all this was to create an energy which cut through the past and celebrated tension. We had to do something to pass the time in that little place. Or was that it?

Years later, now, the house has a guide. My daughter quite fancied him. He wanted, as all professional guides do when talkative ghosts revisit, to close the doors. He wanted to bind the house in the castle walls and shut up the house for another night. I flew into the grounds past him and around the house. I raced into the reconstructed gardens. He followed telling me the rules and the times. My daughter was near to tears. But this was because this house was not the house of her story. I told her she should not have begun it before she came here.

It was bigger of course and much, much stronger. It was more complicated but that should not be frightening. It had a castle around it with a shadowy tower. Who expected that? It had courtyards and outbuildings. It stood in a perfect rectangle in a large stone courtyard. It had a majestic tall carved door in the very middle of the first of three storeys with stone surrounds. It had dozens of sunset lit windows and an arching roof full of chattering birds. It had a guide that now remembered her father as a myth mentioned in the guidebook. It had on the second floor the windows that looked out from the first room in which she had lived.

The guide began to enjoy guiding the returned ghosts. Ann’s father was waving his arms and pointing at the past. Unfortunately the house was closed to him but the guide didn't mind telling him what was now in it. Yes, they were now showing again the wall of framed political cartoons arranged eclectically in random squares with no apparent theme or chronology so that the eye leapt from place to place looking for sense in the surrealism. Had the ghost done that?

They had moved the exhibit of the work of hopeful women forced into compulsory government schemes and some similar private utopian co-operatives dedicated to the manufacture of fake traditional products for sale to wealthy and guilt-ridden bourgeois whose houses were later burned down by insurrectionists. They had moved it to the green room.

The paintings by the sex mad farmer impressionists collected by a bad priest, a poet, and never exhibited but kept for private viewing on the walls of the staff quarters were gone into storage as was the famous painting of the Satan Club which showed the House's founder against the statue of Pan. The staircase from the seventeenth century the guidebook said was restored at the time of the ghost was pristine. He told the guide he had done this by employing a builder of wooden boats from the Shannon river village who reconstructed the unique carving with ease using what had been thought to be extinct skills.

The guide pointed beyond the iron gates to the town. The town, before the house was restored, had smelled of its slaughterhouse and of permanent despair. It had developed the perennial rot of resentment and historical excuses. It had been destined to join the network of grey drug estates hidden behind the treed tourist trails. It was a nasty little place with pub vomiting and curtain peeping.

Now look at it. The house had put the dirty little place spanking new on the main road at last. The pubs were now painted and jolly. They had blackboard menus outside and tables on the street. There was a candle shop. The school was new and the clinic had two doctors. They had brochures and were twinned with Germany. There were countless gentrified bed and breakfasts. Other attractions had emerged from ruins and mysteries. A wonderful round tower with a good restaurant. A monastery free from allegation and infused with romance. They even had a large map for tourists with a 'you are here' arrow in an enormous glass case on a high iron stand right in front of the house. People came on Sundays.

They had done this all without minor royalty or famous London antique dealers like the other towns. Well that was not entirely true, the ghost said. He told the guide how the gang that had worked on the house had befriended the then bitter and defensive aristocrats skulking in the neighbouring towns.

There had been the sister of a boyfriend of the princess, a wife of a war hero without testicles who often entertained both major and minor royals hiding out to conceal their idiosyncrasies. Her castle and gardens were now developed to be a linked stop in the chain of attractions across Ireland. The town was fixed up with Victorian gee-gaws. That had started in the time of the ghost. She was the one famous for saying that one royal looked like something rolled up in a carpet. That had been to the ghost. He had thought it was a marvellous reference to both the politically promiscuous Cleopatra and present unofficial obesity hidden from the London press.

Another nearby place, a larger castle, had extensive grounds. The aristo in that had been an elegant diplomat before inheriting the place in a chain of circumstances that included someone packing it up in their Daimler on an ancient oak. It was the stuff of dreams, unbelievable. The guide knew all that well. He knew it was true. The daughter was amazed. This was not what mom had told her. The stepmother was silent.

This aristo and his wife, the young, thin flighty countess, the one who had written to the ghost for years after when he had gone to the savannah and was living in a hut teaching under a baobab tree, she had written with advice on how to get servants based on her experiences as the chatelaine of the Ambassador in the same African country; this aristo had invited the ghost for dinner, not to a dinner around their dining table for fifty but, as an act of special grace, to a barbeque in their forest as they knew the ghost had come from Canada. They wanted to talk to the ghost about how he had done it, made the house so famous.

They told him their family had once had a butler from Canada. For him a grandfather had built a log cabin in the castle grounds. Or was it was the aristo's father, the one who had invented the magnetic mine, who had befriended the locals so that the place wasn’t burned down? He was very diplomatic.

Before dinner, before they all motored in land rovers between the rows of cypress to the cabin, they would have drinks in the library. Seated around a fire built in a fireplace the size of his bedroom as a child in Canada, they were all startled when a piece of plasterwork dating from the fifteenth century fell from the ceiling onto the head of the dowager countess shattering, as it bounced onto her gin and tonic, leaving dust on the headrest of the white leather chair, on the dowager and on a puddle of gin near the mouth of the polar bear. The dowager countess, mother or grandmother to someone, had just been telling of her tremendous bed wetting fright again last night on seeing the phantom of the maid murdered in her bedroom years ago for the love of a peasant.

Their big castle too was to be part of the route and vibrating system of cultural regeneration of the area envisioned by the gang. And from their garden came many of the cuttings for the plants for the gene bank garden of ingredients for ancient witchery they had made in a courtyard at the house. From cookbooks found in the vast attics of the countesses' castle they found the names of herbs and weeds that were authentic. The countess offered to take her guitar and sing in the reconstructed garden wearing the veils she had purchased in the market of a desert city during one of her husband's assignments. Did the ghost want to see them? They were in her room. He ruled that out. She offered to make jam for sale instead from the herbs in the garden to sell at the castle gate.

The guide told them on tours of the house grounds and castle of the European awards the restoration project the house had won. He told them of the heads of state and ministers who visited. The daughter said she had never heard of this from mom. Wasn't there a dark room somewhere?

We had other visitors too some from my past and some for the others on staff. None came from the future at the time, God bless us. Although that has changed now. There were visitors from the maturity that I had before I went to Ireland and before some betrayals by people and by ideas. My visitors looked on my madness and were contemptuous. They weren't the only ones. The people from the past couldn't understand my speech and mind. No one could understand the others either. If my daughter had returned then what would she see? She would not find her mother. I knew that.

The guide said that the tiny blue-eyed cultural man from the nation's holy drinks family was generally given credit for the accomplishments at the house. The ghost seemed to be saying different. The guide said that the tiny man and the knowledgeable crusading local historian, the simple teacher born in the bogs but now raised to heights of great scholarship are now said to have done it all. The ghost told the guide that this was all bullshit. He still had the clippings, pictures and one trophy or at least he knew who did.

The tiny man hadn't done much. He hadn’t even raised funds. He had only sent troublesome daughters of the rich donors to his society, mainly daughters of Americans befuddled by Irish heritage and commercial royalty to be the voluntary staff of the ghost. Most of these were weird at home. They drank madly in the local pubs, slept to noon under the impressionist paintings and scandalised half the town, priests and wives. They entertained the other half and were reported to have been lengthening every confession by inspiring references to sins previously unknown even to the priests.

At the same time the wives and other connections of the tiny man frequently came to the door of the house at all hours creating great disturbances shouting to the ghost asking where the tiny man was. One, a German princess of a small house, claimed that one of the American restoration volunteers had stolen her parrot and the curtains from her bedroom window at the tiny man's own castle. Another, the former mistress of the great painter, was simply lost herself; she knew she had been given a cottage somewhere and the tiny man was there but did the ghost know where it was?

The tiny man had entrusted a former Australian diplomat and owner of another castle, the one most haunted, to find someone to execute the restoration of the house project. I think the tiny man agreed with the Australian that I was to do it because of my experience. But I think he just wanted me to restore the house physically, which was not how I ever understood it.

The house had been the basis of the town. It had been the home of the spiritually burning in the boggy darkness. The Australian may have understood me a little. He was the son of a hotel millionaire who had won his first hotel gambling in the outback. I think he had married a Medici. The Australian diplomat was retired to Ireland after a bad innings at running spies and subversives in the gay community in Cuba. He wrote plays. One was about Somerset Maughan.

Before the Australian came to get him the ghost had been writing heritage and history columns for the local provincial newspaper under the name of a woman fish seller in an Irish traditional song. Under the same name he had won the national women's short story of the year award. Under another woman's name he had won the poetry award too. Being neither from that country nor being a woman bothered him. He had gotten some friends of his, women, to do the newspaper interviews prior to the award ceremony. One was a potter. The other trained horses. One told the interviewer that short story writing was like pottery. The other said poetry was like riding a horse.

Before the ceremony he had confessed to one of the judges, a famous feminist novelist. She said she would kill him but he didn't believe her. He had heard that kind of thing before. He asked her how she liked the story. It was about Africa to which he had never been before. It was confessional like everything he wrote. The poetry was about betrayal, loss and sometimes birds. She only said she would kill him. He would never write again. He said he had done it to prove feminism could work. They had to pulp a hundred thousand copies of the Country Journal which had already printed the interviews.

The newspaper writing was only one of three jobs he was doing. He taught literature to the sons and daughters of protestant farmers destined to go to good universities in England. Their parents all read the Country Journal. He managed a youth hostel built in an old Norman tower which had a well-known kissy ghost that appeared in his room one night before turning into a bird. The hostel collected people from all around the world. He gave Zionists beds next to Palestinians. He used to drive from job to job on a little scooter through the rain and the mud. It had seemed like a few miles as he composed in his head but he saw from the map now that it was dozens. The school now was a four star hotel beside the river that he dreamt about through the window while teaching the magical realists. His students were waiters and his bookshelf was on display in the gift shop with the books on the local witches and phantoms and other period artefacts.

The well-known and legendary international tiny man had heard of his articles, his management of the hostel and had sent the Australian spymaster, one of the first in the country ever to die of aids incidentally, the other being the priest and editor of the short story magazine who used to visit the youth hostel to discuss literature with everyone, the tiny man had sent the Australian to recruit him for the House project. He was perfect to lead it.

But if it hadn't of been for the friends of the ghost, the ones he'd recruited from staff of that parochial newspaper, none of the work would ever have gotten done. The other volunteers were useless. It was the group of friends who came up with the vision and the themes. The sports reporter, who later became a national investigative journalist and who unfortunately suicided last year for reasons of spiritual confusion, the guide may have heard of him, did the research for the projects. His brother had been involved in a famous prison escape involving the blowing up of walls, so he also was assigned in the work liaising with the department of national monuments. He once asked the ghost not to ask who was staying in the staff quarters. The ghost didn’t ask but asked in return that the sports journalist not inquire much into the backgrounds of the very happy rich German girls who visited, one of whom knew all about dynamite and techniques of kidnap. She had talked international politics with the journalist far into the night. He had talked to her about his brother the real man of the family. He himself was frightened of girls but liked ideas. The step mother's predecessor, a former stewardess, hated him.

There was the women who later became an even more famous journalist herself working for many international papers including one in San Francisco. She was also now a genuine historian and a campaigner for Asian democracy against dictatorships. She had written for years from Thailand but had come from the town. There was another woman too who helped with the work in arranging lending from the national gallery, the displays of art, the design for rooms, museum displays, who later became a mid-wife in San Francisco. And why not?

The local historian had actually opposed all the work they did. Bit by bit and part by part. He opposed every display and every change. He wished to use the house for his lectures on bogs and rocks and little people. He did not even want the outbuildings to be used for music evenings with soda bread and onions. That had been a great success. He didn’t want the house newsletter to print poetry. He opposed the volunteers, although one woman, a dancer from Chicago, had complained about groping at the time of the Viking exhibit. The local historian had regularly slandered the tiny man behind his back. He pointed out that he was probably the illegitimate son of a dictator and that his elder brother, now the chairman of most things, had rented him out at Oxford for pocket money. But this may have been historically accurate.

Those journalists-to-be, and I, found the cradle for the daughter in a country cottage. We slung over it chains of African plastic birds and I opened the window to the crows outside in the tower. I made her pâtés in the kitchen and fed her crushed up lobster meat from the countess’s kitchen. I sang to her in that room until she was asleep then telling her about the time they tried to kill me at home, all of them, first the government, then my comrades and finally my loved ones.

The guide said he had always suspected the local historian and the tiny man of being chancers. And why not? That is how things are. You never know. Anyone can be a gombeen man; anyone can be the real thing. He was glad he heard the story. It would help keep his work interesting. He offered the ghost for approval the analysis that not much had changed since the ghost had been there, not in the displays, not in the rooms nor in the gardens. Nothing had changed either in some of those people. But the town was fine now. The house gave it life.

The daughter began to cry as we left for she had discovered she could not remember her room. She could not remember her birth and this was not what she expected. I thought it was worse now that she had come and we had no time to come back tomorrow.

As it had been just after her birth I had to go on for other things or not make the time. The stepmother looked forward to our next stop. Tomorrow the river she said.

Everything we heard and saw until the dead rose was false

2005-07-08T15:32:00.000+01:00

Everything we heard and saw until the dead rose was false. COBRA, the state agency for control of imagination convened in a bunker under the parliament buildings a moment after the first bomb, some a moment say before, and authorised the implementation of the play that had been written for the occasion of the inevitable attack.

The first lie authorised was that it was only a power surge in the underground. Next they shut down all the mobile phones. After the next bomb members of the government came on television to say how well prepared they were. The television crews interviewed some people, some a little sooty, who had emerged from the stations. They were very attractive people. But behind one, several ambulances rushed by and a fat man came out covered in blood.

The media sought out a new cliché. They found an enraged couple who had been caught in a subway car for several minutes. They had considered breaking a window and said that the other passengers were uncomfortable. Everyone hates the tubes. No one likes minor officials. There hasn't been enough investment.

A woman in glasses behind the angry couple had a bandage. The interviewer turned to her. People did scream, she confirmed, but then they became quiet. It all sounded right. Then she added 'we settled right down when we heard those people in the next car'.

We didn't hear from her again but the complaining man was played for about half an hour.

The chief of everything said after an hour and after another two bombs that people should not move and that the situation was controlled. There were no troops on the street.

By now the city knew what was happening. Traffic emptied from the centre and gridlocked on the periphery. Hundreds of thousands walked silently from offices and shops towards the river, or past the parks or to the north. They were not speaking because of any self–consciousness. They were not speaking because everything was obvious. Some of the silent walkers went over bridges without traffic under which floated empty tourist boats. There were some troops. They were on TV and outside my window.

On television more sooty people were still talking of dark, some small panic and routine rescues. But several deviated from that image. One spoke of a fifteen minute walk in a dark tunnel after leaving a screaming car. There had been a bang first. The tunnel was dust filled.

She came to a station which was lit. Naked people, all black, hairless and burned came towards her the other way. They all went up stairs together to a station where police asked them to sit. After half an hour they were put in a bus and taken to a hospital. After awhile she was given a pamphlet and released. She asked the television man 'what is going on?'

My own orientation was by now completed. The bus blown up had been in front of my son's university. He was to be there to get his marks but wasn't. His friend is missing and is missing still. My love was impressed into a team to do trauma counselling. The first ambulances had just arrived.

A new complainer was on TV. He didn't like it that the firemen had led him out past the bodies. He could have been taken another way. He was weeping.

The hospitals would not speculate on casualties. The purpose of all their spokesmen was to convey how rigorously scientific they were. They would only admit to things confirmed. They would confirm only what they could of what statistics were authorised, how many ambulance trips for example. They would not confirm how many had walked in. They could confirm the number in theatre. Objectivity was spreading like a panic. In front of bombed stations the police could confirm that no-one was still in the station, nothing else could be confirmed. This left a silence. How many were underground? It turned out later that they had meant no-one intact was left in the station. No-one alive was left underground.

An expert came on the television to fill time before the Prime Minister spoke. He would sum-up the situation. In the background clips from an hour ago were playing with the caption 'live'. The expert surprised the cameraman with a visual aid. The shot blurred and cleared. He had brought along a diagram of the pattern of body part dispersal in a bus bombing in Israel. Another diagram showed disintegration of the brain from pressure. He was replaced in a few seconds next sequence by a doctor. The bus had exploded in front of the Medical association offices. The door was blood splattered. It was where statistics were compiled. He could not confirm casualties. A woman behind him shouted a question 'how could they do this to my daughter'.

The prime minister spoke. He particularly wanted to point out that the terrorists were trying to disrupt his important meeting. He called on everyone not to change their lives. He would return to his meeting. He was very upset. He later made two more statements. They were more eloquent. One had at least three world leaders, maybe more, who some considered to be terrorists standing behind him expressing solidarity. They seemed grim. The other statement was more eloquent in iambic pentameter. He was alone. No-one mentioned the war.

In the hospital of my loved one the children's ward was emptied of its present occupants. Small pyjamas were laid out on the empty beds. The city children did not come. They had already been in school. They had survived. The mayor pointed out that the attack had not been on world leaders but on ordinary people on their way to work.

One man in parliament mentioned the war. He was called a serpent with his tongue in a poison pool. That seemed excessive. A placard at the parliament building linked the bombs here with the bombs there.

The spokespeople sought for a cliché to organise the images around. Returning to normal was a good one. The brave city goes on as usual was another. Clips now showed shops opening, the stock market was rallying.

E-mails and text messages were read out on the news. They all were sympathetic and brave. The event had great significance. One sounded awkward. It said 'everyone enjoys terror.' Phone calls came to me from abroad. They wondered about the bodies underground. But there were no more bodies underground. Everyone had been objective about that. There were only parts in their patterns.