{125}

The day stretched before him, free and terrible;  daunting as an unplayed musical instrument;  inviting him to fill it with some smattering of melody.  Warming to the laughter in the discords which it promised, he felt a restless unease.  And so continued about his meagre routine:

Fresh bread at the bakery - a daily goal.  Daniel felt the brown packet crumple in his hand.  Sweating through the paper bag came the smell of dough.  Open it a fraction;  inhale its offerings;  then break off a corner of the loaf.  At first just touch the lips with the aroma of life.  Then let it role into a ball around your tongue.  Taste each second of your life in its perfection.  Now, , , only now.

Painful shod-feet scuffle the pavement, glistening with the remnants of rain.  Inadvertently kicking into a stone, which skids off the kerb and lands in a puddle;  sending out perfect ripples from where it lands.  Goal!  Memories of village football  fame echo outwards like ripples of applause from a generous crowd.  Now, each painful step seems to be its own goal.

“Daniel!” - He starts out of his reverie - almost dropping the loaf of bread into the gushing rainfall gutter.  The voice rings out again.  Too familiar.  Young and old together.  Its youth echoing from some distance in a past season.  A balding face reveals itself behind the voice, smiling back at him like a drunkard in the mirror.

Grey patches seem to hold the brown beard together.  Skin seems wrinkled in the grasp of time.  But mockingly, the laughter in the deepest shade of blue, strips back the decades - and for a moment Daniel sees the clean-shaven face of youth;  sun-bleached uncut hair, then falls into the delicacy of a timeless, age-old embrace.

{126}

“Daniel! ‑ you're old!” he laughed at me.  Questions then thundered through my head about whens and wheres and whos - the next question overpowering the last one even before the first meagre word could find its way to my lips.

So instead we stared ‑ our hands still on each other's arms and shoulders.  Sentiment, thickening the air like some exotic essence.  His look flickered around my face as if he were searching every crevice for some clue to the mysteries that the years had blown between us.

The winds picked up and raised the volume of our wailing voices on their gales, so we retreated our way to a Tavern.  He ordered whisky ‑ I had coffee.  We had been discussing old enemies while walking and dead friends were avoided for a while. Now that the outside world and its incessant cacophony had been shut out ‑ silence crept its way between our talking more and more.

His whisky became a beer as my last coolish sip of coffee vanished.  His voice dropped a tone.  “Daniel ‑ you're a terrible poet...”  (Is their any other kind?)  “...you should have stuck with mathematics and computers.  You're just too precise to be a poet ‑ look at you ‑ old and dishevelled; living in a council flat.  When was the last time you published anything?”

Sometimes you can see when people are lost in their own visions ‑ their eyes glaze over ‑ and the mouth slowly drops open.  From the outside it can last a few moments.  But, when one lets one’s mind drift into itself ‑ then time can unwind completely as the event is relived.  Everything that is said, is actually said to some person in their past;  as if the moment is somehow super-imposed with another, vaguer time in history.  Like a wave of time, reaching a peak, and then breaking over, back onto our lives.

I had heard this same old lament over the years from strangers and close acquaintances.  I looked to where Leon's countenance had frozen:  Wise Professor.  He had held several distinguished posts at Universities around the world ‑ delivered lectures to the young artists, actors, and playwrights of the future.

His hand aimed towards me like a baton ‑ trying to conduct me ‑ trying my conduct.  His fingers curled, and his arm twisted in a gesture of appeal;  like he was trying to purchase my soul ‑ or discover some great cosmic truth.  The eyes hungry ‑ as though I had some knowledge he wanted, some precious possession which he could extract from me in a desperate academic plea.

“You were the best, you know?”.  Now he looked down into his beer. 

“How many times people had told me how you had stymied your professors - in your first term.” 

“Leon.  The academia you are involved in is an illusion.  Science is one thing, but all that ‘post-modern arts and humanities’ crap resembles a medieval hocus-pocus circus.  You’re all so caught up in your own delusions of grandeur.  But even most of the ‘scientists’ don’t have a clue at all about what they are doing.  It would be funny, if it weren’t so pathetic. 

“I remember vividly the first few maths lectures.  It sort of resembled a religious ritual.  A little man with a nervous voice, in a dark suit, , , reading from a book, in meaningless mathematical monosyllables.  And the class;  avidly scribbling down what the mentor has scrawled across the blackboard.

“So someone asks ‘Please sir, I don’t understand the second line.’  So the professor smiles knowingly, ‘Of course you do my boy, of course you do.’  Then he turns to the next blackboard, and carries on scribbling in his obscurely half-readable dialect.

“Now I’m sure that the math they teach does mean something. . . somewhere.  But they repeat the mantra after him unquestioningly, all pretending to understand it.  You can see that nobody has a vague idea what it is actually all about, and no-one wants to appear stupid, so nobody asks any more questions.  And the little man carries on until the bell rings, and then stops writing on the board in mid-equation.  Marks his place in the text book.  And walks out.  And those that progress beyond this, are those who just memorise what is in the book.

“The doddering old fool that runs the ‘Arts and Humanities’, can only talk about administrative issues, unless blind drunk.  Of the papers he is expected to give to students, the lucky ones get about half of them.  And he has this curious bloody habit of emptying his ashtray into a clean new piece of A4 paper, then folding it up neatly, before throwing it into his desk-drawer.  And he does this after each cigarette.  Like he is trying to hide something.  And what a scrooge?  He only keeps the lowest quality coffee.  Not quite what one would expect from someone who is supposed to have a grasp of aesthetics.  His ‘criminal investigating unit’

has suffered more ‘thefts of expensive computer equipment’ than anyone else in the university.

For real femininity there is of coarse the old red-haired dragon-lady-from-hell who teaches Art History.  A bit of a mix between Pink Floyd’s mother, and Norman Bates’ old lady.  And if you ever do have an administrative problem, take a friend with you, because people have been known to ‘go to the admin to sort something out with my fees’, and they are just never seen again.

And you say I ‘stymied my professors?’   A duck-billed platypus with a lobotomy has more gorm than that bunch of quacks and crooks.  If they hold doctorates, then I swear I’ll never want to have a doctorate.  And I would certainly never want to belong to the same little beurocratic meaningless world that they do.  Have you become like them, Leon?  A frustrated incompetent beurocrat without a sense of life or spirit?”  Sucking money out of the taxpayer to fund your life-long pyramid scheme?

{127}

After Leon and I had said goodbye, and shaken hands in frowns and smiles, my feet ached their way down the road.  I had trudged slowly along for some time, before a horn HOOTED behind me.  I dropped my bread into the gutter - and watched helpless as it floated away down the street;  way beyond pursuit of these tired feet.  The brown packet and its yeasty aromas, swallowed in one gulp by a storm-water drain.  I turned to see who had hooted me.

The car that pulled up, was a new model of some or other European variety.  Leon called out to me and offered a lift.  I was enjoying the rain ‑ even enjoying the aches of pain in my heels, and was wet already, but accepted the ride anyway.

The door opened and I clumsily stepped through the gushing rain into the gutter-drain, before climbing inside the vehicle.  More of the storm splashed its way in with my heavy coat, and I could see the irritation cross over Leon's features like a cloud of dampened sky across the Sun.

As the windscreen‑wipers thwapped the drops off the shiny new car, the silence grew into a bubble and I spoke:

“Did you ever get to find any of her writing for me?”

“No.  But I told you it was crap.  Not worth anything really.  But she still brought it to me to read.  I told her what I thought of her scribblings, but she carried on bringing them.  I really don't know why.  But she died decades ago.  In a car crash was it?”

“Ever hear from the other cute one?”

“Not for a couple of years.”

“This is it” ‑ I motioned for him to stop.  He turned off the engine, then turned to me;  his grimace turning into a grin:

“So this is it” - hand gesturing towards the lone sombre violin, out on the edge of the orchestra.

“This it is!”  I chuckled back.

“i‑z this it??” ‑ the 'is' droned out long with one eye open wide, one half-squinting, and the head nodding in a drawl.

“It is.”

“Paah!  too predictable see?  ‑  you're far too mathematically minded for words.  You should try singing, you’ve got a good voice.  But you can’t write.”

{128}

My knees ached suitably as I walked the flight of stairs to my room.  I languidly sat down deep into my chair, and listened through the thin wall to the young couple making love in the room next door.  They were competing with each other to see who could make the horniest noise.  They would do it in turns, then occasionally chorus it together.  It was all quite touching.

I wondered if Leon still picked up young prostitutes - probably.  I'd still never tried a prostitute - could never really get to afford a decent one.  It all seemed a little too easy, too sleazy.  In a way poets are intellectual

whores.  Giving the essence of one’s being to one’s work, with no security for the future.  A slave to passion, living in the slums, surviving off the spice of the moment.

Lunch-time arrived and I remembered the fate that had befallen my loaf of bread, and so ventured out to get more.  The rain was certainly lighter now as it resoaked my clothes.  My trousers felt heavy and clogged, chaffing at the inside of my thighs.  I waited my turn at the bakery, humming an old popular song, and remembered the girl I had first heard it with.  I paid for my bread, and broke off a corner of the loaf - sucking out the salty flavour as I watched the torrential fury outside.  Tucking the paper bag under my jacket, I opened the door of the bakery and stepped out.  The road resembled a canal by now, for the furious weather had turned from rain to wind and back into rain.  It was a great effort to fight off the oncoming storm - which seemed easier to do by pulling the hood down over my eyes.

{129}

Daniel had to struggle his way from bush to tree - from balcony to street-side-awning - waiting for the really heavy falls to pass - then dashing awkwardly into the mad rain, , , clutching the hot steaming bread between his jersey, damp with sweat;  and his old heavy coat, soaking rain-wet.  Past him screamed many various types of motorised vehicles, all insulated against the downpour and the arrival of nightfall, as they cut through the storm - hard and fast.  Rows of streaming headlights glittered through the falling water, silhouettes of faces focused on their destination.

He found a half-broken bus-shelter built purposefully without a seat, so that vagrants could not use it as a place to sleep.  By using a wooden crate, someone had adapted it into something of a seat.  It was stable enough somehow, to guard him from the worst of the oncoming weather.

Grey of mist - rain of hiss - twilight of day - slight bliss.

Daniel sat down after a while, and for the first time in a long time ‑ his feet felt light and rested.  With breath pulsing hard through his lungs, and blood-red heart thudding between them - a misty vapour plumed the evening air.

And there it was again:  a dark-blue shape, slick, metallic.  Glowing lights glared into the murk.  It turned off the mainstream, and onto the narrow road;  coming to a measured halt not far from the bus-shelter.  Ruby-gem tail-lights, vivid in the foggy gloom.  The door cracked open.  Leon’s form braved the rain.  He dodged the chasms in the sidewalk, then danced into the bush to negotiate a particularly large pot-hole on the crumbling road.  He seated on the crate.  Their eyes connecting only somewhere in the far distant greyness, beyond the immediacy of buffeting sky-streams.

“Can I do something for you Danny-boy?”

“What you can do, Leon;  is stop being so fucking condescending.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

Their eyes turned on each other, the incessant rain, surrounding their pause with an infinitude of inflections.

“Tell me Leon, who are you helping?   I’ll tell you who:   Only yourself, by choosing to see me as a poor misbegotten sod, in need of your patronising empathy.”

“But Danny-boy, you could have been so much more than this - you might still even have a chance left - instead of just sitting here in the miserable weather.”

“What makes you think you know what I am Leon?  Do you watch every second of my life, feel my thoughts.  Have you somehow seen what I have seen?  You see this, , , and what do you see?  Some poor middle-aged bastard sitting at a broken bus-shelter in the miserable rain.  But this is not rain.  Its not even water.  What it is, , , is texture - living art - look at the greys and the blues and the black.  how their shades and moods mingle, mocking each other, , , and I mean fuck the paintings.  Fuck the poetry.  Can you not just appreciate it for what it is - a momentary piece of living/dying art with no intrinsic value other than its mere existence - its sheer is-ness - beyond what we think of it, beyond the narrow frame of our lives.  An eternal and simple perfection.  Devoid of narcissistical judgement.”

“So you are the epitome of live art, Danny-boy?”

“Living art, Leon;  is about the transcendence of epitome.  Its how each experienced moment, and every fragment thereof, is epitomised only by its unique self.  The only law of nature is the Creator-Mind.  Our minds see things as having separate existence, that are actually fluid with the rest of the world. Their is no such thing as necessity.  All your beliefs about everything, are just beliefs.  Even the laws of science change.”

“Whats your point, Dan?”

“My point is that their is no necessary point.  Whatever point you’re asking for, is whatever it is you are looking for.  You assume I have a point to make - but all the points don’t make up the line.  The line is the line and the point is the point.  But the connexion between all the points, and the line of thought, which has some end-point;  that:  is a thought-form which your mind seeks to impose on my words.  Actually they’re just words;  bits of ideas thrown together, with nothing to connect them.”

“But if their is no connexion between them, , ,

“No! No! No!  You’ve missed the point completely, its not that their is no connexion - but that the connexion is you.  The sense of ‘I’ manifests the connexion.  You choose to manifest me as a misshapen wot-not in need of your compassion, wisdom, whatever, , ,

“You sound like one of those preachers saying ‘just have faith and ye shall be saved!’

“Make me in to what you will Leon - put me in some over-used television category if you like - just remember its you that’s doing it - the forms you choose to create your day with.”

“But if what you say is true - then how come you’re such a. . .

“. . . such a what? Leon;  what am I now?

“. . . a failure Danny.  I love you, but you’re a dishevelled failure. You’re forty years old.  I bet you still haven’t got your driver’s licence.”

“You condescending sentiment is sweet, Leon.  Like tomato-sauce, a  common conde-ment.

“What have you actually achieved Danny?  With your righteous self-creative drivel.  You’re a mousy little creature living in a shit-hole.”

“What have I achieved?  Let me tell you a tale.  Its a book I’m writing.  A true story. . .