Pale light, dark shadows

On a morning with the promise of another warm day, I have taken myself off to a small town in Dorset, not too many miles away. And there, when I arrived at the industrial estate on the heights above the town, I left my brother's car to be serviced. I stood and chatted with a woman in the dingy reception area while I waited for a mechanic to take the keys from me.

She was possibly just older than me, dressed in slightly faded clothes, and her long brown hair had fine wisps of grey in it. Not grey roots showing beneath dye, but genuine single grey hairs in amongst brown. And her face was seamed in one or two places, a tanned complexion to her skin which made me think of the gypsy ladies who try and sell you sprigs of lucky heather in the streets. For some reason I found this woman quite erotic to be with, and we flirted mildly as the cars moved in and out while mechanics juggled spaces and places. Spring was here at last, we both agreed, and we were flicking our tails and rubbing our horns together in glee, until we both had to go to our separate affairs.

And so, on a morning with a firm promise of another warm day, I took myself, on foot now, into the small Dorset town.


"So we set out with
the beast and his tail,
and his crazy description of home..."

I posted a small parcel to New Zealand, and then my missions were accomplished. I was free to do whatever it would take to fill in the hours that the car would need to be serviced. This is how my life has become now, setting for myself each day a task, a reason to be, a short spell of playing at being a useful part of a working economic system. And then, I am adrift on the sea of fate, rudderless in the head and all three sheets loose to the winds of whimsy. My hair was long, the winter was gone, and I thought to have it shortened. ("Reef all sails, Mr Christian, damn your eyes!")

This small Dorset town, not too many miles from where I live, is well-stocked with hairdressers and barber-shops. There is a reason for this, which I shall not mention to you, for if I did, you would be able to place the town, and I wish to keep it comfortably anonymous. I like it like that. And so I strolled about the streets and thought how best could I choose from all the hairdressers and barber-shops which one I would enter?

I have become fascinated lately with how one comes to make decisions when there is either too much or too little information, with which one would otherwise easily decide. I read recently on the BBC website that researchers believe that we make trivial or unconscious decisions using emotions, not reason and logic. They have based this conclusion upon observation of the behavior of people with no emotional faculties left following accident or psychotic trauma. Such people cannot go to a restaurant and grab a table, because they cannot make up their minds which table they should sit at. We, the un-traumatised, will choose to sit facing a wall in our favourite colour, or with our backs to a person in an un-aesthetic dress, often unaware that we have made such a choice. They, without favorite colours or illogical prejudice, cannot make a decision.

And so I circled around, passing shop after shop, offer after offer, (cut two heads for the price of one, bring your radiation-mutated family here and save on haircut costs), letting my sub-conscious choose for me. Until it did, and my circling ceased, and I stood outside a small salon in a side-alley, whose owner's name was feminine, unlike mine, but had three syllables, like mine, and I remembered I had once loved a girl by that name, and wondered if she was still alive on this bright spring morning with its promise of a warm afternoon.

And when I stepped to the door and found it closed, and read the hand-written sign which said that she or they had gone to the bank, I still felt at peace. The old Camel would have huffed his way off to another alternative, but today, I had let myself be chosen for, and I once more went off on my circling tour of this town.


I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

(Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati.)

And found myself by the riverside, looking at the signs of spring, thinking that it would soon be April


April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

And it seemed appropriate to me to remember that two years ago, at this same time of the seasonal cycle, my sister-in-law died, and we bade our farewells beside the sea not so very far away. The sea, which I now have not seen for so long. The river beside which I stood and thought these thoughts was going there, running away from me as fast as I tried to pick a single spot on the surface to focus on. And underneath the ruffled surface, hidden from the sunlight dancing and dappling up above, lurked dark subconscious fishes dreaming in the deep...


Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Fear death by drowning

"Full fathom five, my father lies,"

My dead father, who went so quickly, that I had barely opened the telegram and sped off towards the other side of the country before he muttered his final words to me. (And, remembering too the moment when I was blue-lighted as I sped through Reigate or Guildford, who could tell? Showing them the telegram in response to their questions, told to "slow down sir, else someone will be receiving a telegram about you." Remembering too that this was when my own spell in the Wasteland began, when I felt as though there was no-one in the world to whom a telegram could have been sent should I have stumbled by the way.)

But, jerking my head to break the river's fatal spell, I thought again of the lurking darkness that is always at the edge of our camp site, waiting, watching. My mother, under sentence of death twice now, once for being old, the other for having an inoperable tumour, is in that state known as remission, where it has gone and hidden out of sight, and is counting up to some unknown number before the game begins again. Is this what springtime means? Is it the cruelest time?


'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

And I think too of the threat to my favourite cat, after I spotted blood in the mess in the litter tray, and wondered "not her as well?" Blood in the toilet, the forerunner of my father's fate. That which was within is now without.

I felt I understood my father better when I realised I had a favourite amongst my three cats, but knew that I didn't love the other two any less, I had to give this one cat more attention than the others because it needed it. So too had my father often spent more time with a brother or a sister than with me, but then, I had felt it was because I was not good enough, or nice enough, or one of the things I had furtively done had been found out. And now I know that there is no way in which one can manage to love all one's pets and friends with an equal love, because they do not have an equal need. I feel I understand God now, if he were to exist. And, as I think of my dead friends and father, and might-be-dead mother, I realise that God could not love all of us with any of the intensity I feel, because his heart would break so often as they passed away, he would soon be incapable of feeling love for anything. He could not love, only do.


Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

But God does not exist, and I should get away from the water.


Fear death by drowning.

And I should get away from God as well, because I have come to think that, for my own agnostic and atheistic beliefs, there is not one shred of scientific proof.

And I went back into the town. and found my way to the shop, and found it open again, and sat inside with the other men waiting their turn to be caressed by the barberess' scissors. She was dark haired and dark-clothed, black trousers and a black with white-polka-dotted top, and her body curved voluptuously in and out and around as she danced her stately way around the chair with her rapturous barberee.

I was the third in the queue, but the youngest, and so I was content to wait, and as I waited, I wrote upon my small pocket computer-cum-phone. I was as rapt in my thoughts as was the figure in her chair wrapped in her attentions, although I stopped and watched from time to time, and listened to her soft Scottish voice. And when another man came in and sat closer to her than I was, I remained calm, unlike the old impetuous Camel who would often stalk out and go in search of more secluded spots, and I listened to the radio. And when "Elbow" came I hummed melodiously, and heard her say to me, "it's your turn now."

Then, jolting, starting from my thoughts, I said, "I'm not in a rush, perhaps that gentleman would like to be next?" And so he went to the chair, and I settled back, to hum and stutter words into the little screen, and watch again as her feet, in their pointed shoes, stepped lightly through the thinning grey hairs which fluttered to the floor. Clip-clip, tippy-tip, snip-snip-snip.

He left, and I, alone with her, got up, sat down, and asked her how much she charged for shearing Black Sheep in the springtime? And we spoke of grey, and I told her that I had read upon the web that they now believed, (those hordes of scientists who by their faith maintain our world from day to day), that people went grey because they, or their bodies, rather, produced peroxide. The body wanted to be blonde, bottle-blonde, no less.

Amidst the pleasant warmth of words which wafted in the breezeless air, she said, with shocking suddenness, "I'm not this colour really, I'm a natural blonde." I could be shocked, for she had finished with the scissors and it was safe to make movements, and asked her what had made her do the opposite of what most women did. And she said it had been an impulse, a wish to see what it was like to be brunette. Her customers were startled and confused, she said, and were just getting used to it. I said I had seen her instinctively as dark when I had first come through the door, and wouldn't have thought otherwise.

Curious, I wondered, did she feel a difference after doing what she had? And she said yes, she felt that, walking down the streets, fewer heads turned as she passed, and, she admitted, looking almost lonely, she was missing it.

She trimmed my eyebrows, bushy ram's-horns that they were, and offered me the razor to remove the fine hairs on my neck, but I declined. I had a horror of the knife, I told her, and I was not making this up; I could not watch a slicing or a stabbing, or even an operation, simulated on the screen, or real. "You wouldn't manage face-lifts then," she grinned, and tilted up her head, showing me the curves of her throat. She indicated that there should be scarring there, but I did not see it, I admit, not because I was too scared to look, but because I was, instead, fascinated by the soaring lines and curves of her swan's neck. I felt she wanted me to see the price that she had had to pay to be the woman that she was, today. But I, myself, now fascinated by her fascination with herself, would rather see what she would wish the world to see. I would like to be lied to, too. I had finally admitted it to myself.

I had been shorn, and I had been shriven also.

And so I left her, Penelope shearing Black Sheep till her Odysseus should return, and went again to stroll around the town, now deep in thought as to how she had come to make her colour-change, my writer's mind now breeding lilacs out of the dead ground, water-lilies from the thawing ponds, and, by the river, seeing swans, I made her walk there, and stare at a solitary white swan as it floated sedately on the rippled water, wondering why it was alone on such a lovely springtime day, and then, surprised, she saw the darker bank behind the whiteness shift and shake, and saw a black swan gliding on beside her mate.

And in that instant, seeing light and dark, she, on an impulse drawn by the hopes of yet another spring, decided she would play at being dark too, to see what it should feel like.

And as I wondered at her daring leap, the deliberate trip to the shop to get the bottle, and clearing out of children from the house so she should not be disturbed, I walked uphill from the river until I found myself standing on the bridge over the old railway line, now derelict. As I saw her dabbing off the last few spots of colour that had splashed upon her skin I walked, on impulse too, along the remnants of the railway, the greatest change that ever hit this land over two hundred years, and which was now no longer. It had seemed so big, so strong, so impervious to wind and rain and enemy bombs, and yet it was no more.


And yet, we are still here.
And, yet we are still, here.
And yet
we are
still here.

And she too, wondering why the daylight men would only glance at sunlight women, has yet to learn the secret of the dark-haired, (which she may never learn, for I fear that she will wash the colour out to get the glances back,) and that is that the dark-haired ladies are the creatures of the moon. They are to be appreciated in the shadows, not the full heat of the sun.

"Fear no more the heat of the sun..."

I still weep in grief for those who have departed and not left me a pointer to their new address.

And so, leaving the remains of the line behind, and walking uphill steadily to where the car might now be ready for me, I made her, in my writer's mind, go shopping, go round the town, go in and out of doors, considering this and declining that, until she found, with much deliberation, a soft cream leather jacket, with a matching soft cream leather skirt which ended just above the knees, and soft cream leather boots which came to just below the knees, and, putting it all on, watched her walk through the streets, turning heads as she passed, hearing them all, in their minds, arguing amongst themselves as to what colour might her underwear be? ("Oh let it be black; no, let it be white, or none, choose scarlet, or green, or lilac even.")


April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs...

And she will be walking in the spring, making the flowers lift their heads and watch her as she passes, they wondering to themselves "Am I her favourite colour, will she choose me?" ("No," from another, "it is not you, she will choose me." ) Sweet-pea peacocks cock-fighting over a chance to mate.

And I know that, in my writer's mind, she is laughing, because she, and she alone, knows that her favourite colour is...


this, today, and
that, tomorrow, and
the other, whenever
she chooses.

(The italicised quotes are from The Burial of the Dead, The Wasteland, by T S Eliot.)