Baalbek, Baalbek, so good they named it thrice.
First came Baal, and then Alexander decided to show how great he was by changing the name to Heliopolis, or Sun City, but then the Arabs changed it to Baalbek.
One clumsy sentence cannot, of course, summarize the 3,000 years of history that molded this city, let alone the 5,000 lost years before that, but it is convenient to divide its past into the Hellenic, Roman and Arab periods; and although all three are visible, it is the Roman heritage that is paramount, and it is to the Roman ruins that tourists flock; or rather trickle, since there were a mere handful when I visited. Well, three handfuls actually, but you know what I mean.
Visitors were deterred, perhaps, by Hezbollah’s stronghold on the region, since the very word ‘Hezbollah’ is so tainted in the west that no westerner dares revel within a hundred miles of the ‘Party of God’. It is one of the new bogeymen, a ‘here be giants’ cartographic warning, a radioactive waste sign. As to what Hezbollah really is, I cannot claim to know, but everyone I spoke to described the region as perfectly safe, so off I went, travelling back in time to the ruins of Heliopolis, a city already older than my native Dublin at the birth of Christ.
I was looking forward to visiting a world that did not text; a world that measured history in millennia and not in microseconds; a world that would sacrifice 100,000 slaves’ lives in the building of temples. I wanted to see the past because I was growing weary of the present.
And did I find it? Well, let’s begin with the journey, which I always confuse with the destination.
We left Beirut from the oddly named Central Transport Hub. I say ‘odd’ because is not central, there is little sign of mass transport and it does not appear to be a hub of anything much. In short, it contained nothing that one normally associates with bus stations, such as ticket booths, or the dusty halls and hangers of the harassed and hopeless. I have not seen Hell and will never see Heaven, but I have seen Limbo, and so have you. Limbo is a bus terminus, but in the post-mortem version, you will never leave.
I looked around me, squinting at the thirty-degree sun to show my displeasure at its atomic furnace, and searched for the junkies, the homeless, and the flotsam of society, who will never inherit the earth and have claimed bus and train stations instead, but they were nowhere to be found. For a moment, I assumed the taxi driver had deposited me in the wrong part of Selim Salam, so normal was its appearance.
But then an unshaven man with a football trapped inside his stomach approached me and shouted ‘Baalbek’. Assuming he had not mistaken me for someone of that name, I replied ‘Baalbek’ and dressed my destination with a smile; and in return, I won his hand, which pointed me to a broken minivan.
‘Ce ca?’ I asked, reverting to French, as I always do here, and pointing at a four-wheeled rusting hulk of imperfections.
‘Oui!’ he replied, with an accent even stronger than mine, and in we climbed. My wife and I, that is, not the fat hairy man and I.
‘A quell heure bus go?’ I enquired, determined to show I was multilingual.
‘Oui’ he stated again, and returned to shouting ‘Baalbek’ at passers-by.
Already we were travelling back in time, since the minivan itself belonged to a different era and could well have appeared in an early episode of Scoobie Doo. Once the minivan had filled up, which is how the time of departure is ascertained in these parts, the driver ignited our chariot and off we sped, hurtling into the smoky highway, accelerating to infinity, and seven seconds later, screeching to a halt, locked in a traffic jam.
Lurching out of Beirut, we headed upwards and onwards, but mainly upwards. The Lebanon Mountain range is steep and my ears popped as the air cooled. Soon enough, we were at a thousand metres and climbing, swerving through winding roads in the clogged outskirts of Beirut, only narrowly missing the houses and apartment blocks clinging to the mountainside.
I looked behind me and the whole city lay at my feet. I tried to think of something poetic to say, something profound and insightful. Nothing happened. The muse did not arrive, perhaps left slightly sea-sick by the white-knuckle drops on the left side of the road and the millimeters of space thought sufficient by cars hurtling down the hills to our right. On one side, a crumpled barrier and a fall into a ravine that would offer us a couple of seconds of free fall followed by an almighty splat; and on the other, the union of metal that is a high-speed car crash. If I were a muse, I’d stay well clear too.
So, I was left waiting, and then, as if in sympathy with my stalled imagination, the van came to a halt. We were off the road and reversing into something. I looked nervously at the other passengers, but they seemed perfectly relaxed, so I decided I should be too. More hairy masculine men opened the back of the van and started filling it with animal feed of some kind, and above that, fresh vegetables. They said something to me in Arabic and laughed, and I laughed too. I’m like a chameleon, you know, except I always stick out like a sore thumb.
My eyes were then caught by some truly massive watermelons, which rested precariously just behind our heads. Being a worrier by nature, I wondered if they were hard enough to cause concussion or even death, should they fall onto us after a sudden halt. ‘Death by watermelon’ is not the end I have envisaged for myself.
Fully loaded, and almost certainly overloaded, with people and vegetables, the journey continued. The smell of animal feed started mixing with that of diesel, dancing a chemical cocktail, a nitrous samba, but above it all, the smell of fresh air streamed in through the opened windows. The fumes of Beirut were behind us and the mountains in front of us.
Soon we were so high we were passing through clouds, and I felt an absence of heat for the first time in twenty days–I’m excluding air-conditioned cold, which has an abrasive artificial feel, like someone from Los Angeles. My pores were closing: I had ceased to sweat, and the hairs on my arm raised themselves to a standing ovation.
I was in Cloudland. As a child, living on the coast, I often wondered what it would be like to be in clouds, and if you could dissolve into them, should you want to. ‘What’s happened to Phillip?’ they would ask, in my imagination, and someone would reply, ‘oh, he’s dissolved into a cloud’. Well, the nearest I ever got to travelling through clouds in Dublin was walking home in the smog, and it wasn’t the same thing at all. It just made your snot black.
But here I was, The Clouded Man. Behind the mist, bleak denuded mountains stood as testament to what happens when man is placed in sole care of an environment. In Roman times, the mountains were covered in cedar forests, but cedar is useful for shipbuilding and general construction, so over the centuries–or the millennia to be precise, since even the ancient Egyptians coveted the cedar forests–the woods were mined to exhaustion, and now only bare rock and the ghostly dandruff of topsoil bear witness to man’s enterprise. Even goats, a scavenger of vegetation if ever there was one, are absent. I wondered if our entire planet might soon look like this moonscape as the uninhabitable swallows the habitable as we prove the dictum that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it.
A surreal touch was added by the billboards we passed: one advertised ‘Elissa’ lingerie, through the use of an almost denuded female; and the other ‘Beit Mist’, a housing estate that is, the advertisement proclaimed, ‘a piece of Heaven on Earth.’ Heaven can’t be up to much, I thought, if it resembles a housing estate.
Everything that goes up, of course, must at some time, descend; and it was up there in Cloudland that I felt the inclines become declines. I was saddened to leave Cloudland, but all mournful thoughts vanished with the vaporous cumulus when I saw the Bekka Valley stretch out beneath me.
Firstly, valley is a misnomer, since it’s actually a plateau, lying at a thousand metres, and sandwiched between the Lebanon and anti-Lebanon ranges. In Winter, both ranges are snow-covered, but in summer, the bleakness of the ranges above stand in firm contrast to the fertility of the plateau below. This 150-kilometre long stretch of green and brown was farmed long before today’s great civilisations could even be dreamed of, and today the area is noted for the quality of its wines and the potency of its hashish, but just about anything that can be grown, is grown here.
Our van descended and my ears popped again. And soon we were on the floor of the plateau, slicing its middle and passing through towns which I couldn’t pronounce, like Chtaura and Zhele. Lebanon, as I’ve mentioned before, is small, but one only really appreciates just how small when one cuts through a plateau and can see both sides of the country through the windows. To my right, the ani-Lebanon range and on the other side, Syria; and to my left, the Lebanon range, and beyond that, Beirut and the coast. How can something so small contain so much history and something as large as the United States contain so little, I wondered?
A couple of hours later and the Scoobie Van deposited us safe and sound in Baalbek, and behind the rusting hulk, the remains of the Roman world stood and waited for me.
After paying the gatekeeper about five euro, we crossed worlds and entered the past. I looked up a flight of steep steps to the temple ruins and felt something burn me. Was it the past, I wondered? Was it the ancient Gods of Jupiter, Venus and Bacchus, bent on hellish revenge? But then I realised that it was probably just the sun; and at 33 degrees and with a sky that looked like it was a stranger to clouds, I was forced to apply liberal quantities of factored white gunk to my face. Armored thus, I climbed.
The remains of a portico greeted me and a colonnade that had seen better days supported parts of a roof. Beyond them, the Hexagonal Court, the Great Court and the Temple of Jupiter. On their left, the Temple of Bacchus, oddly intact, stood proudly proclaiming the power of pleasure.
The Hexagonal Court was the last Roman structure added to the Temple complex and marked its zenith. After this, there was nothing but decline, plunder and gratuitous state vandalism. Oddly enough, it was my namesake, the little-known Emperor Phillip the Arab, who added this hexagonal court, and I, his unworthy twin in name only, looked first over this court floor, since only the floor had survived.
Emperor Phillipus Augustus only lasted five years, and he was not in the vicinity to advise me on historical matters. Moreover, unlike in Italy, there were no gelled centurion photo props to be seen, no film scenes to remember and reference, no hordes of snappy tourists posing in front of objects of note, and no guides pointing sticks to lead them; and so I had to try to conjure up the past on my own. My eyes saw rubble and concluded that I was looking at a half-finished building site, and they delegated to my imagination the task of trying to create a metropolis whose temples were once said to outshine those of Rome itself.
I went back slowly in time, and began by imagining Kaiser Wilhelm’s visit here, the first big-name tourist. In the museum, there were photos of him rambling about with his retinue, in the days before he came to be regarded as a demon with a funny moustache who buried the dreams of Victorian rationalism and empirical progress in the slime of the trenches of the Great War. When he had visited, parts the Byzantine church still dominated the Great Court, but it has since been pulled down for not being old enough. In fact, all structure built after the Roman era, and there were many, have been removed to other locations in an effort to keep the ruins Roman. The past here is pure.
We walked around the Great Court’s edge, seeking the shade and admiring the pillars: some still stood but supported nothing; others had crashed and parts of them lay strewn hither and tither; others were gone entirely and could well be dust at the bottom of the Pacific by now, so untrue is matter to the uses we set it, when aided by the inconstant Mistress Time. We are stardust and these ruins stand as both defier and witness to the temporality of all things. How weary my life and how puny my struggles, I thought, when set in the context of the eternal law of entropy.
The work of time is slow but sometimes it jerks forward, as it did in the earthquake of 1859, which took out three of the pillars of the Temple of Jupiter; and Tamerlane, the Great Mongol ruler of just about everything, sacked and looted his way through the place in 1400, seven hundred years after the Arabs had ransacked the place. We build and others destroy, and sometimes we even crush our own creations. The Romans themselves, under Justinian, anxious to enforce the love of the new God Christ, destroyed parts of the now-pagan temples and shipped the eight biggest pillars to Constantinople, to be used in the Hagia Sofia. They are still there now, but support a different God.
But even Roman Heliopolis was built over the wrecked Phonecian temples and those who came before them, their names lost in time. All Gods are grafted onto their predecessors. Jupiter replaced Baal and Bacchus assumed the mantle of Dionysus. Gods evolve with our collective psyches.
As one goes back further and further, our Gods become more bloodthirsty. I tried to imagine the horror of the courtyard when it was the locus in quo for the human sacrifices of the Phonecian and pre-phonecian world. For 9,000 years, humans have worshipped here, and prayed and preyed for all manner of Gods; and if ghosts exit, then how crowded this complex of ruins must be, and how odd I must appear to them, wondering through the rubble and avoiding the sunlight: I who worship nothing and no-one proclaim the victory of reason, but I am an unconvincing conqueror, and the hold of western empiricism on the world is weak and could crumble at any moment. Sometimes I hear the rumbling of a civilisation quake that will flatten this age of reason, and I heard it then.
When my world lies in dust, what will be its legacy? A text message saying ‘sucks 4 U’?
Today, only about 70,000 living souls call Baalbek home: one third Sunni, one third Shiite and the remainder Maronite Christians. The glories of Baalbek are dead and gone, and with the Romans in the grave.
In honour of these dead, I conducted my own strange ritual, and took a cuddly teddy-bear cat from my bag, a mascot of sorts whom I have grown strangely fond of, and I filmed him in the ruins. Dr K Katt was curious but as non-plussed as I by the millennia that had passed and the souls long departed.
I looked at him and he looked at me and neither of us knew what to make of it all.
Part 1
And what will they say about me afterwards? What will know about me? What can you say about a ghost no-one has ever seen or heard? Silent in the lonely level plains, without remains, in the forest of the dead and the deaf.
There will be theories, of course. Conspiracies and conjectures, no doubt, but both start with ‘con’ and they’re both just polite words for guessing. University graduates conjecture, crackpots conspire and the working stiff guesses. The wise man is dumb.
No-one will ever know me. And yet, this index finger of mine will change the course of history. For a moment, it will stop time. Everyone in this whole wide world will remember right where when my index stops time. An inch, and inch, your Camelot for an inch. I pull my finger one inch closer to my palm, and in this movement, this slide, I release my one-million-dollar payload.
But no-one will know who I was or what I was. History, they say, is written by the victors, but as far as I can see, it’s scribbled by the blind.
Oh dark and dismal digit! Oh wicked smasher of skulls! Look at you know, tapping on the keys, with no greater concern that striking the ‘n’ and the ‘e’ and then the ugly ‘x’ and finishing with the ‘t’. Each key means nothing to you, and a trigger? A trigger’s just a vertical key that you pull slowly rather than strike. Easier than slamming the period … . See? The numbness of touch.
And who am I writing to, I ask my fingers and the keyboards they talk to? To the future, maybe, like that whiney stiff in ‘1984’? To a safety deposit box, keeper of my locked-away thoughts? To myself, whoever that is, or to my conscience, whatever that is?
Ah, the ‘C’ word. Deliver me from the ‘C’ word. Conscience is a one-way ticket to a six-feet box in Wormland. And heaven knows, and hell too, how many pieces of flesh I’ve sent there over the years. I could be a maggot God, but in the end, the congregation will eat their God and they will know my taste.
Does a man taste different after he’s killed? Does he feel different, look odd, sound peculiar, not hear the way others hear? It’s a strange question, but one I’ve asked myself twenty eight times. Twenty eight. Twenty-eight hits under my belt and counting.
Is that conscience that made me sigh and change paragraphs? Or is it pride? Twenty eight is quite a tally, you know, and I don’t think there’s a single shooter out there who could honestly claim to have matched it. Twenty eight in twenty years and not so much as a single police dog sniffing round my crotch in all that time. That’s why they call me ‘The Ghost’, and a dozen other aliases, but ‘Ghost’ I like the most. Those goons who hire me have no more idea who I am than the fools who chase them. Wops and cops, all fighting over slops. I don’t know which I hate the most.
The trick is, you see, to hand the cops a patsy. The swine that man the thin blue line are as lazy as they are stupid. Hell-why else would they be cops?! What kind of life is that? Protecting rich folks stuff if you’re lucky and hanging out in ghettoes if you ain’t.
So, take your average dick. You shovel him up some stinky patsy meat, wafting guilt right under his very nose, and then you stuff his snout right there in the manna from Hell. He’ll just gobble it down, and he certainly won’t go looking deep in the woods for shadowy sprites afterwards.
Give a man what he wants and he won’t keep looking for it. Simple really, but it’s something most killers forget, so the pigs get all riley and go sniffing round the undergrowth, hunting for the killer truffle.
And as for the patsy de jour, I’ve found myself something truly presidential. A meal fit or a king, for a king of kings. An Ozymandius of an Oswald. Look on this patsy, ye mighty lawmakers, and despair.
Saviour Turns Souce in Alternate History
Churchill, some historical revisions claim, was a chronic alcoholic, and spent large parts of the war in a drunken stupor; and many of his famous speeches, were, in fact, delivered by an actor to hide this fatal flaw. It would be interesting, I think, to speculate what might have happened if he had refused to let the actor speak for him and had gone on air to address the nation, as drunk as the proverbial skunk.
In this alternate history, Churchill would deliver his ‘this was their finest hour’ speech as a slurred travesty of the original and this would precipitate a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons and the return of Chamberlain, who would then sue for peace with Hitler.
Churchill’s seeks solace in the bottom of a gin bottle and following a near fatal fortnight of complete intoxication, he is taken to hospital suffering from hallucinatory visions. In one of these, he speaks to the spirits of famous English leaders, from Cromwell to Lloyd George, and is told that he will lead the nation through its darkest hour. Following this peripatetic moment, Churchill suffers a moment of clarity and in this anagoresis vows never to drink again.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of the turmoil that ensues following the peace treaty, with Britain a house divided against itself and on the edge of civil war, with a dissolving centre unable to hold right and left factions together, the Wermacht invades. Caught off guard, and with much of the aristocracy and significant elements of the officer corp sympathetic to the Nazis, the army is quickly overrun and Britain falls.
Churchill, however, refuses to surrender and goes into hiding to lead the resistance.
“Oh gawd, he’s sozzled again!” Lord Beaverbrook exclaimed.
He held up the brandy bottle to the light, noted it was nearly empty and then shook his head at the rotund figure, slouched over his writing desk, drooling over his papers and snoring loudly.
“Better call The Voice, and make it snappy. He’s due to deliver a live radio broadcast in just over two hours and the last thing Britannia needs to hear at the moment is him in this …condition,” Beaverbrook said to Sawyers, Churchill’s valet.
Sawyers left quickly and Beaverbrook pulled some papers from under Churchill’s face, grimacing a little as he did so. He walked nearer to the lamp at the other side of the study, not so much for the light but to avoid the stench of alcohol that rose from Winston’s gargantuan frame. He spoke to himself as he flicked through the papers.
“Hum… ‘fight them on the beaches, fight them on the shores: fight them on the fields and in the streets… we shall defend or island, whatever the cost may be’. Not bad, not bad at all.”
“Not bad! What rot! It’s bloody genius, you young whelp,” Churchill announced and went to rise from his chair, but finding his legs unwilling, slumped back into it.
“Ah you’re back in the land of the living, Winston, I see.”
“I never left it, and never will; for the land of the living is the best place to live, and I have never heard anyone speak well of the other place; not from first hand experience, in any case. Now, where’s that confounded valet of mine? My glass is dry, and my tongue in sore need of lubrication.”
“I say, old boy, don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“Nonsense! Quite the contrary, in fact, I think I need to drink a great deal more, for I must now drink for two.”
“For two, Prime Minister?”
“For two, I say. France, as you may have noticed, has fallen; and I must therefore also imbibe for our Gallic friends, in their absence from the sodden field of battle. Oh heavy burden! Now, in the absence of my missing valet, please perform your duties as Minister for Munitions and furnish me with a brandy forthwith.”
“But Winston, Bush House expects us within the hour and…”
“And they shall find me willing, ready and able; but before that time, I must lubricate my parched vocal chords. Now, for the last time, I ask you, nay I tell you, to silence your tongue and pour me a brandy.”
Beaverbrook ground his teeth and pursed his lips, but in the end, he did as requested. Tipping the decanter slowly, he poured a small measure of vintage brandy and went to add a larger measure of water to it, but before he could even touch the water container, Winston interrupted him.
“Do you mean to drown me?! If I had wanted water, I would have asked for it. Now, return your hand to the elixir I did request, eons ago, and fill me a proper measure. I must say, Lord B., that if you plan to manufacture this realm’s munitions so slowly, we might as well surrender now, so poorly furnished shall we find ourselves.”
Grudgingly, he filled the glass half-way and handed it to Churchill, whose eyes fixated on the glass as a baby’s eyes would a milk bottle.
“Very well, Winston. Now, if you will excuse me, I must get this speech of yours to The Voice. Do you have any special instructions for him?”
“Yes, that he should stay at home and listen carefully to his wireless set.”
“Sorry?”
“I plan to deliver this speech myself, Lord Beaverbrook, in person and in situ. To that end, I would ask you to kindly return the notes to me so that I might finish them, or were you planning to ask The Voice to write them as well? Perhaps you would rather he prosecute the war too and that I retire to the life of cheap impersonator.”
“But Winston…”
“Get thee to a nunnery factory, and be a breeder of bombs rather than my distemper!” Winston hollered, rising to his feet and staring straight at Beaverbrook with angry bloodshot eyes.
Lord Beaverbrook left, his own eyes cast down, and Winston drained off the last of the brandy and moved to the other side of the room to fill his glass up again. He gulped two more glasses down in quick succession and brought the bottle back to his desk before returning to his notes.
“I shall drink brandy in my study, I shall drink brandy in the bars
I shall drink brandy till my eyes pop, whatever the cost may be.”
‘You’ve never had it so good’ Grandpa Rat said to us, in the pile of rubble that was once Mrs Bleachdale’s house.
We gathered around him, the whole colony, ready as always for one of his bedtime yarns; and behind us, in the distance, the East End shimmered in a rosy incendiary glow; and from the sky, the Rat Gods dropped more exploding poisoned pellets of revenge on our human torturers, splintering their world and turning it into our world, fulfilling the Prophesy.
“You remember what this place used to be like, don’t you? You remember what it was like to live in fear, don’t you? You remember Mrs B., don’t you?”
He paused then for effect, and let the image of the ogre grow in our minds, and our eyes grew large and our whiskers trembled in remembering the giant of a woman, who was said to be a hundred-rats-high and to grow a rat taller with each of us she sent to rat heaven. When he had raised the ghost in our minds, he went on.
“For she was a terror of a woman, Mrs B., and I for one hope she lies howling down below, ‘cause she had it coming. When it wasn’t traps she was laying, it was poison she was putting down for our young innocents. Do you remember the rat mortality rate before the blitz? Do you?!”
He stood on his two back legs, lifted his front leg and sniffed the air with his pink nose to drive home the point, like some sewer orator; and when all of us were looking at each other and nodding in agreement of how bad things used to be, he continued.
“Time was when only one rat in ten would make it to adulthood in this house, I tell you. One in ten! And they’ be a scrawny, skantering, sniveling kind of animal; all bone and fear, they was. But now … now: well, look at yourselves, now, my fine furry friends. You’ve got meat on your bones and a twinkle in your eye. The future’s as bright as an the search lights that light up the sky at night and show the Rat Gods flying high above us!
We all looked up, and there they were, our buzzing vengeful Rat Gods, smoking out the humans, filling the air with strange new smells.
“And look at this fine house of rubble we’ve got for ourselves, with more hiding places than we know what to do with, and a cracked larder full of food, and all for ourselves. Admittedly, it’s getting a mite smelly now, but that only adds flavour, if you ask me. Good food is like a good rat: the older the better!” he said and chuckled at his own witticism, and we pretended to laugh too, but in truth, we’d heard this joke a thousand times since Mrs B. died.
“And it’s like this all over the city, my comrades tell me, from Lewisham to Neasden. More and more rat communes are taking what’s rightfully theirs, and declaring Rat Rubble Republics. Decadent human civilisation is collapsing and history demands that we seize this opportunity to establish the dictatorship of the rodent, in accordance with the laws of dialectic materialism.”
Thus spoke Rarathusa, a political rat who often went on forays into the wider world, and was developing quite a following among some of the younger more bookish rodents, but he was ill-at-ease with Grandpa and the senior rats.
“Tell us about the cat, Grandpa Rat!” one of the young ‘ungs demanded, never having seen the fearsome beast herself.
‘Ay, well might you shout the word ‘cat’ out loud now, safe in the Ratopia of the blitz world, when men hide in shelters and rats rule the roost. But t’was a time, young ratty, when you only had to say the word ‘cat’ and the mean ole moggy’d appear; teeth sharp as kitchen knives; claws bigger than your paws; and yellow eyes bigger ‘un your head. A pox on the mangy rogue, for she slaughtered me own flesh and blood, a dozen times over, and I was never such a happy rat as when I saw her, dead on the dusty floor, skull smashed in twain, fallen masonry all round and a shard of glass straight through her evil feline heart.’
‘Say what you like about Killer Kat, Grandpa, but she did make fulsome good eating in the end!’ Grandma Rat interrupted.
‘Ay, she did that, I’ll grant you … even if the screamin’ and hollarin’ and whailin’ of old Mrs B. wasn’t exactly appetizing; lying there, trapped under her precious mahogany table, bleeding from more holes than she had orifices.’
‘Ay, but she was fairly tasty herself, I thought, considering her advanced years,” Grandma Rat said, “and she was no spit of a girl either, was she? She kept us going for weeks, the old witch, and sixty kilos ain’t to be sniffed at, even if she did get a bit whiffy near the end.”
“Better wiffy food than no food, I tell you. You’ve never had it so good!”
No-one would wish to return to the womb if they could remember what it was like.
And you know why they can’t remember anything about it? Because there were so bored they spent the entire nine months asleep. Oh, occasionally they might wake up and jiggle about a bit; kick their legs and whatnot; suck a thumb and so forth, posing for the sonogram; but that can only keep a mind occupied for so long; and after that, it’s off to the land of nod for little Mr. Fetus.
But not I, oh no! Fetus Phillicus had to be cursed with pre-natal insomnia. Just try to imagine it, all you walky talky creatures out there in the post-natal world. I’ve no idea what you look like, since these womb walls are thick and my eyes are fused shut; but I can hear you, and from these conversations, I have built an image of the world that awaits me.
It is not a liquid world, it seems, since you walk through it, rather than swim in it. And you are surrounded by empty or nearly empty space, and through this you move, from one place to another, free and independent beings, divided from the cord that chains we poor womb prisoners. Oh what a brave new world, with such strange creatures in it!
However, it is not a pretty world, I fear, and few of you seem pleased to inhabit it, but believe me, it is infinitely preferable to the world that preceded it. Imagine, since you cannot remember, imagine a body trapped inside another body; imagine floating in a shrinking pool of amniotic fluid. It’s no picnic being a neonate, believe me, especially one who can’t sleep his way through the tedium of it all.
So, here I lie: waiting, waiting, waiting for parturition. Waiting in the womb. Womb Wide Wait. I will not wait much longer, at least, since the normal sentence is only nine months, and I have already served more than eight of them. Indeed, stolen conversations from my manufacturers and their cohorts lead me to believe that it will be any day now, whatever a ‘day’ is.
I am to be born and I shall cry out at freedom won.
Week 1: Arrival and Disorientation
Beirut: the very word conjures up unpleasant images to anyone old enough to remember the eighties. And the eighties were unpleasant enough in themselves, I know, but in a desperate decade, Beirut was what made you think that things could always be worse.
Beirut meant bombs, militias and civil war. Beirut was what happened when civilisation collapsed. Beirut was a foretaste of the apocalypse to come, or so it seemed to me, a pale teenager, hulked down, low and weary, in a dreary and depressed Dublin, waiting for Regan and Co. to press the button and bring on the Rapture.
As the war dragged on and on, from 75 to 90, and even the might of the invincible USA seemed incapable of stopping it, the world was learning a lesson. Beirut was where western peacekeepers found out that peace could not be made; that peace could not be expelled down the barrel of a gun. Peace, like happiness, comes from within and cannot be rendered. It was a lesson they have since forgotten, but the ragged tedious wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will eventually make them relearn it. Peace is not a pizza: it cannot be delivered.
Images of a war-torn Beirut flitted in and out of my mind as the plane flew over the tip of Cyprus and we began our descent. I began to wonder why I had left the staid beauty of the City of Light, why I had bid adieu to gay Paris, the supermodel city, whose beauty is only matched by her vanity. Why had I signed myself up for a two-month stint in the ‘Paris of the East’, as the tourist brochures used to call it, before the war, when the only Paris it could be said to resemble was a post-apocalyptic one? Why had I sent myself to the place where Middle Eastern conflicts came to fester and die, to a testing ground for the clash of civilisations to come?
However, as soon as the plane came within sight of the city, I saw that the past was not the present, and that Beirut was actually a rather beautiful place. The blue Mediterranean looked ever-so blue, like it does in brochures, and even from the plane, I could see tiny creatures frolicking in it. If this was Hell, then why were people swimming in it?
A set of ultra plush hotel swimming pools were also visible along the coast, hugging it like a miser cuddles gold coins in his hands, and beyond them, the city proper. Downtown, I saw, was high rise and gleaming, and could have come from a mail-order catalogue. I assume downtowns are now mail ordered, from some Acme Acropolises Almanac, and I wonder what city planner do nowadays except ask each other how they can make one city centre look exactly like another. From the air, east and west Beirut were indistinguishable, and since it was so near midday, and the sun so resolved neither to rise nor to set, I was unable to tell which was which.
The runway must have been built on reclaimed land, lying as it does out of the city and on the sea, and to a worried passenger, who could only see to his left and not straight ahead, it did feel as if the plane was going to land on the water, and trust to Neptune to sweep us on to land later.
Needless to say, the plane touched down on dry land, and the captain was awarded a rapturous round of applause for doing so. I wondered if he had, unbeknownst to me, managed to dodge some heat-seeking Israeli missiles, but then I remembered that this used to be common, this clapping when a plane lands, but, in the poisoned realm of the rancorous Ryan Airites, in an age in which flying has become a chore and cut-price cut-throat budget airlines charge extra for everything from coffee to civility, one now normally feels more inclined to spit at a flight crew rather than to clap them.
But the effusive Lebanese clapped and smiled, and promptly ignored the captain’s entreaties to remain seated and to leave mobile phones switched off until well inside the terminal. Instead, they jumped out of their seats, clogged up the aisles and called all-known living relatives to inform them they had landed safely.
Normally this kind of thing puts me into a sulky bubbling squirming rage, like a ghetto worm with a migraine, but on this occasion, it did not. I was instead quite enamoured with my fellow passengers: their clothes, their perfumes, their joie de vivre; and most of all, their individuality. This is something we have lost, I fear, in the antiseptic septic skeptic lands west of the Levantine. If you seek evidence for this assertion, note the shuffling gait and the dead fish eyes of the average plane of westerners as they embark and disembark the next time you get on or off a plane. The Lebanese seemed to do it with panache, and I felt warmly toward them. First impressions of a country, it seems to me, are often made on the plane journey, before one has even set foot on the soil of the country one is about to rashly judge. My first impressions were positive. It boded well, since positivity is not a trait that marks me.
So, it was with an unusual spring in my step that I made my way to passport control, and en route, I kept both ears pricked up, and they twitched excitedly at the post-Babel world around me. I noted the ease with which Lebanese switched languages, from English to Arabic to French in the flap of a tongue, and it impressed me greatly. Having to switch from English to another langue is an irritation to me and I do it under sufferance. The Lebanese, however, do it with gusto. These are polyglots extraordinaire.
Languages are how I make my living, or rather the teaching of the world’s dominant one, the language of the Angles and their Norman conquerors. However, I have no real talent for foreign tongues, and have, to-date, only mastered one of them, Spanish; and smattered myself with a functional ability, of sorts, with others.
I can mumble my way through most French sentences, but half way through them, I suffer an existential zeitgeist and lose the will to continue. I can get drunk in Russian, get lost and then ask directions to get home again. I can order vegetarian food in Chinese, and explain that fish, chicken and puppies are precluded by my own strict brand of vegetarianism. I can do many things in many languages, but the point I wish to make is that I speak foreign languages as a cow might roller blade, with an awkwardness that robs the language of all style and grace. I butcher foreign languages, I despoil them, I pillage them. The Lebanese, it seemed to me, loved them.
Approaching passport control, which always makes my bladder contract and my mouth dry up, I thought again about languages, and wished I hadn’t procrastinated my study of beginner’s Arabic. The CD’s were in my suitcase, but that wasn’t going to help me much. I always try to carry at least a hundred words on arrival, 20kg of verbal baggage, but on this occasion, I didn’t have a single word in my possession. I had gone beyond travelling light and was now travelling naked.
Words like ‘Hello’ can be extraordinarily useful in situations that require verbal interaction, and without them, one is left with only a gaping mouth and a nervous smile. Dogs must feel this way when humans talk to them and ask them a question, I thought, and considered woofing at the passport officer, but decided it probably wasn’t the best course of action. Pretending to be a dog rarely is, even with other dogs.
The drive to say something foreign was sublimated and came out in the form of my poorly manicured French, a mangy poodle if ever there was one, but with a ‘voila’ and an odd ‘merci’, I was through. I was now in Lebanon and had the passport stamp to prove it. Or, to be precise, I was in the airport, but that, like the downtown area, had been purchased in an Acme catalogue and was indistinguishable from every other airport. Soon nobody will know where they are because everywhere will look exactly the same.
I was met at the airport and brought to my accommodation by a man I shall henceforth refer to as K, not to promote a sense of mystery, nor as a homage to Kafka, but merely to try and keep my professional and my blog life as separate as possible. I have often regretted using my name as the address of my blog, since it makes it so easy to find me, with the speed-of-light Sherlock Homes that is the Google monster, but I have done so and must live with the consequences.
The consequences for you, as reader, should you continue to read, will be omission, since I shall refrain from describing in any detail the people I work with or the company I work for. They shall be ill-drawn ghosts who lack all character and appear and disappear without apparently having said or done anything. This is rather a pity, since they already appear to be very interesting people, and their diaries would no doubt be more interesting than mine, but this is my story and not theirs, and I will not draw them. This means, of course, that part of the picture is missing and there are gaps in the narrative. I can only ask you to direct your eyes to the parts of the picture that are finished.
Anyway, to get back to the tale, I was in a car–a plush Land Rover that was about the size of a tank–with my wife, K and a driver. We passed first through an area controlled by Hezbollah, but apart from a few posters of guys with bushy beards, you would never have known it. The check points and armed militia that so characterized my last summer school in Sri Lanka were absent, and I was glad of it, since I try to avoid boys with guns in khaki.
I am, I must admit, even afraid of hairdressers, since they are in possession of a potentially lethal weapon, their scissors, and they could plunge it into my jugular at any moment that takes their fancy; and so, as you can imagine, I dislike being stopped by sweaty youths with rifles, since they could, should they deem it appropriate, beat me to a pulp with the butt of a gun, shoot me in the testicles, and bayonet me with more holes than a tea bag. The fact that both of these events, death by scissors and death by soldier, are very unlikely, does not stop me from imagining them, and when at all possible, I prefer to keep myself out of the line of fire and away from the snip of scissors.
After an uneventful journey, without soldiers or scissorhands, we arrived in my new neighbourhood, which sounds a lot like ‘I’m a Rou May Ni’, and is just off the Damascus Road. It’s near enough to what used to be the Green Line that separated Christian East from Muslim West Beirut to have several building still peppered with bullet holes. I examine them sometimes from the terrace, and imagine what life must have been like here when it was so fragile that any stray bullet could have ended it.
My neighborhood is a frenetic place–like all of Beirut, I suspect–and silence is as rare as moon dust. It has only been a few days, but I have never known a quiet moment here. As I type, in the relative seclusion of a back room in the apartment, the air vibrates with car horns (at every possible pitch), there is the dull rumble of constant traffic, the occasional screech of old tires, and above all this, like the cream over the trifle, innumerable yells and hollers of indeterminable origins and purposes. All around me there is an absence of inertia, or to put it another way, all around me there is life: raw, vibrant and vital.
There are times when this city feels like it is going to explode. The one example I have witnessed, curiously enough, involved the passions brought about by watching men from many countries kicking a ball around a field, in a competition that occurs once every four years and excites so much interest and attention that if even one half of this energy was devoted to relieving world poverty, our planet would be a much fairer place. I am talking, of course, of the horrorfest that is the Football World Cup.
I had imagined that since Lebanon is only half the size of Wales and has a population of only four million that it would be relatively free of football fever. Without wishing to denigrate the nation’s sporting prowess, Lebanon has about as much chance of qualifying for the world cup as I have of being selected as a player. This, I assumed, would rob the spectacle of its appeal.
However, this is not the case. It turns out that the Lebanese will avidly support a team depending on how many of their relatives have emigrated to live there. Since families are large and the Diaspora has left the Lebanese on so many many shores, there are a lot of teams to support, and it seems to me that whichever team wins, the Lebanese will be celebrating.
The extent of their celebrations was brought home to me when Germany beat Argentina 4-0. The city truly went berserk following the victory, and I have never, never in my entire life, seen people to make so much noise. Car horns competed with air horns to see which could scream the loudest (it’s air horns, by the way), fireworks split the air in explosions that shook the surrounding buildings, convoys of cars clogged the city’s roads for hours, all stuffed with celebrants, many sitting on the car doors and waving enormous German flags. I am sure that the celebrations in Germany itself were a lot more muted that in Beirut.
When the streets are free of frenzied football fanatics, I have made deep forays into the neighbourhood, which is far from downtown and well off the tourist trail of Hamra and the Cornice, and therefore ‘authentic’; whatever that means, in an age in which malls are ubiquitous and Californication has replaced all the ‘isms’ of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, I have not seen any other foreigners in these here parts, and like a camel in a flock of sheep, I eat the air, promise crammed. Hampered by skin that burns as easily as it blushes, pores that sweat at anything above 20 degrees, and a complete absence of Arabic, my explorations have been sporadic and less than logical, all the more so since there are few street signs here, and even if there were, my map doesn’t seem to consider them worth mentioning. I am a stranger in a strange land: blind, deaf and dumb; and I haven’t had so much fun in ages.
To return to el barrio, it appears to be a largely Christian area, to judge by the stenciled graffiti crucifixes and the occasional poster of an angry-looking Christ on the cross. I’ve seen more than a few Madonna statues and La Pietas too, and headscarves and burkas and such are few and far between here.
The cross, like all symbols, can mean whatever you want it to mean, and while to me it is a symbol of a dying and discredited faith, I suspect it has an altogether different meaning here. It seems to confer a sense of identity on one tribe and marks them as different from another. It is the cross of the crusaders, and the Romans and Byzantines before them. If not an instrument of war, it is at least a territorial marker. This is Christ’s turf, not Allah’s, it seems to say.
Oddly enough the Christians here, the Maronites, are closer to Rome than any orthodox sect, and firmly monotheistic, seeing the human and divine sides of Jesus as being one and indivisible. This region of the world does seem to be very attached to monotheism, and it is rather a pity that the three great Gods of the region can’t seem to get along; but as an atheist and a pacifist, all holy wars and jihads are so anathema to my nature that I cannot understand them. To die for something that does not exist seems to me to be even less logical than to die for the abstraction of the nation. People do seem very keen to die for things, if you ask me, which really doesn’t make sense, because we all die in the end, so one really should wait until one’s deathbed before deciding what to die for. It should be kept as a secret, in order to provide an air of suspense at the funeral, and add a little life to what is usually a very dull affair.
But I digress. I’m actually looking forward to attending a Maronite mass, as they are celebrated in Aramaic, the language of Christ, and I’m quite keen to hear what it sounds like.
Our initial thoughts, however, were far from Aramaic mass and inter-cultural conflicts. Rather than our barrio and the peoples we now find ourselves among, we focused instead on our abode. When we first arrived at the apartment, we were amazed at the size of it. ‘Amazed’ is an over-used word these days, but ‘gobsmacked’ is too ugly; ‘bowled over’ is too American, and ‘like, totally wowed’ is about twenty years too young for me; but believe me when I tell you that after four years in a cluttered and cramped 33-metre apartment in Paris, suddenly finding yourself in a hundred-square-meter apartment is a wonderful experience. The universe must have felt like this, a few milliseconds after coming into existence, upon finding that it had trebled in size.
Size, the smutty innuendo of ages insists, isn’t everything. There is almost no furniture here and so much empty space that I often hear an echo. On our first day, we wondered from room to room, like errant children, straying into rooms we had no business being in, wondering what on earth one could possible do with all this space.
We have made one room an ironing room, and there is nothing in it except an iron and an ironing board. I have fulfilled a lifelong ambition and now have a ‘study’. It contains one tiny desk, one miniature swivel chair and an armchair; and of course, one blank white wall, which is most essential item for any would-be writer. I shall sit here often over the next two months, and record my thoughts and actions, whatever they may be.
Often there will be little worth recording, since my attempts to help teenage creatures large and small learn English, which will occupy forty hours of my week, will be of little interest to you, but I have no doubt that the next two months will be more interesting than the previous two, and how many of us can say that?
The other rooms in this apartment are not so suitable for writing, since they contain distracting views of the mountains behind Beirut and the city crawling up towards their peaks. At night, a million points of light electrify this mountain, twinkling in the heat haze; and the moon, turned a golden brown by a warm smoggy pollution, broods over them. Beyond the mountains, the Mount Lebanon Range, lies a valley of fertile farmland, the Bekaa Valley; and beyond that, the curiously named Anti-Lebanon valley, and then, Syria.
Imagine it: I’m on the edge of the road to Damascus; I’m in the capital of a country that lies at the crossroads of dozens of fallen civilisations; I’m at the place where east meets west. I’m here, it’s now, and the past swirls around me; and I can taste it. I can taste it.
A collection of recent short stories in easy-to-read PDF Format. As the real world will no doubt impinge on my fantasy world creation over the next few weeks, I will probably not be posting much, but in the meantime, enjoy the attached short stories:
Download Short Stories
| Jimmy Bender-Licensed to Teach | 2 |
| The Mother of Invention | 7 |
| The Chameleons | 11 |
| The Complaint | 14 |
| Service Station Romance | 18 |
| A Town Called Diamond | 22 |
| The Blood is the Life | 25 |
| Adam and Eve | 31 |
| Hamlet-Who he was and why I sacked Him | 36 |
| Stream of Unconscionable Consciouslessness | 39 |
| Mantle Piece | 41 |
| Three Minds: No Meeting | 43 |
| Proppland and the Trinity of 77-3-1 | 45 |
| Small Talk for Small People | 49 |
| The Three Little Pollpigs | 51 |
| The Writer’s Toiletroll | 55 |
| The Traffic Light and the Compass | 58 |
Part 1
Dear Mr Leesong,
Permit me, at the outset, to introduce myself to you; and to explain, in these few lilac-coloured pages, which I impart to you unbidden, and with as much brevity as I can master, since it is not my custom, the reason for this uninvited correspondence.
You and I have never met in any physical sense; and yet, through a third party, our lives have intersected. It is often thus, I fear, in a universe in which atoms of matter and photons of energy are constantly colliding and interacting, nay interfering, with one another; in a world in which no man may call his life his own. We are, it sometimes feels, little more than pitiful pinballs, knowing only that the end will come and that the gulley awaits us, but as powerless as the spinning silver sphere to control our fate, once we have been launched into the bubbling cauldron of life. Do not ask the pinball why it moves up or down, or left or right; and to extrapolate, do not ask a man why he does this or that, why he takes this road or the road less travelled. He simply reacts to events. We are reactors. Quark sparks in the night of nothingness.
And so, even I, master of inaction and studied inactivity, am forced by circumstances I shall soon recount, to renounce my own philosophy and to put pen to paper; and in these calligraphic curls and symbols, fulfill my debt to your former pupil, the inestimable, Kev the Vampire; Defender of the Faith of POI and Lord of the Dracule.
We met on the eve of a thunderstorm that heralded the death of summer and augured the birth of a winsome winter. Thunder rolled down the mountain slopes and lighting split the sky, cracking the very air in its whippish intensity. Bilious black clocks, like bilge in a vat, swelled and filled every inch of the vast overhanging firmament. The sky was sky no more, and it was as if hell itself had been released from its chasm and spewed forth from its abyss to infect the heavens.
It is on an evening such as this, I thought to myself, while staring into the infinity above me, that life itself will someday come to its inconclusive conclusion. Doomsday will be an ellipsis and not a full stop, I whispered to the wind; and when the rock we cling to shakes off the disease of life, you and I and six billion other sacks of flesh, will peer into the falling sky with all our questions left unanswered: Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Existential dust will whirl in the choking fumes of the burning atmosphere, but it will mean no more than the mewing of a cat.
This future troubled me and my head pounded in an effort to dispel the nightmare, but the thundering hooves of the Four Horsemen, the equestrian interlopers, pummeled my brain. The ghastly creatures from the other side of the black hole of Hellus 5 tortured me, and even the last drop of whiskey nectar would not sooth my soul.
And from this poisoned door of doomsday, I saw him. Finding myself prostrate and penniless on a pavement, for I should confess to you now that my financial solvency is far from viscous, I beheld this dark stranger for the first time. He was dressed from head to toe in the darkest black, a noir so pure that night itself would anti-shine in envious comparison. There was something more than natural in his garments and I set out to investigate the radiating raiment.
Upon closer inspection, I apprehended the violet aura that surrounded this inky-cloaked fellow, and I knew that he was a man who was only partly adhered to this world; that he was coming unstuck and might soon pass to another place in time and space; to another dimension with laws different.
Conversely, I also realised that his progression might be altogether more nefarious; that he might be a shape-shifter, sent by the Forces Of Evil to corrupt our virgin world, a FOE figment fornicator. The medication I imbibe, you see, permits me occasional methalated spirit visions and allows me to discern trans-dimensional creatures who pass unnoticed by others, chained by sobriety and the soul-crushing weight of tedious employment. Being free from worldly concerns, I may see other worlds.
He floated on the ether of the pavement, his footfall an auditory delusion that might fool mortal listeners, and he made slow but steady progress from one end of the Banhoff Platz to the other. He did not note my presence, but I should point out to you that the philosophy of inaction and the strictures laid down in its completion have enabled me to become largely invisible; and even when I lie immobile in the gutters of the fair town of Füssen, a dozen kilometres from the transdimensional portal of König-Schlösser castle, clothed in vomit-and-mucus-protected rags, I am rarely heeded and never spoken to.
I decided to forgo the shield of invisibility and revealed myself to him.
–Stranger: stranger in a strange land. Strange be thy ways and strange be thy habit. Are you a goblin damned or some other infernal beast? Have you crossed dimensions to bring contagion to this blue green sphere we call the world? I am Inaction Man, Defender of the Earth and Protector of the Moon; and I command you to speak the truth, your soul’s truth, and nothing else forsooth. Swear on this precious liquid!—I told him, holding out a bottle of methalated spirits.
–Enshoedeegum bitter. Ich nine sprechen weckin zie deutsche woitsche.—he replied.
I resolved to try a different tongue, and noted that there was something of the Gaul about him.
–Parlez vous francais?
–Jay neigh parley puss frank say.—he responded, with an accent that would have had any passing Frenchman skewer him alive to defend Frankish honour et le langue maternelle.
–And what foul tongue do you speak, harbinger?—I asked, reverting to German.
–I do not understand.—he said, after a brief pause; and I knew then that it was language of the Angles and the Norman maiden that caressed his tongue.
–Then tell me, Angle angel, what presentment does this gloomy garb portend? Do you seek your noble father in the dust? And wherefore comes the violet aura that so marks you?
–A man has many fathers and this sky is all violet violence.—he said cryptically.
–I’ll ask you straight, one last time; and if I feel you deceive you in your reply, I shall unleash my mighty hose of holy water; and with it, burn you back to the dimension from whence you came—I warned him, pointing at the fly of my trousers, and ready, at a moment’s notice, to burn him with my super-charged urine, which has the power to dissolve all that is not of this world. –I ask you plainly, in the tongue of the inheritors of perfidious Albion, where have you come from and what is your dread intent?
–I have come from Ireland and I am on a quest to find my immortal beloved. When we are betrothed once more, I may be reborn in my ancient form.
–A reincarnate, eh? It is as I suspected. Who claims you?
–I am the last of my kind, the last of the Dracule.
–The Vampire Overlord, transmogrified from Translavanian prince to Hibernian prole. Oh, what a falling off was there.
–Et tu Brutus? How has foul fate bent you into this vagrant form? You call yourself a superhero and yet you wear the apparel of a lowly indigent. Explain this paradox, churlish superhero.
–Only the bums are free. We walk in the world of man but are free of its chains and conventions. In this freedom from forced action, we may chisel the spear of inaction; and in this island of tranquility, where no man wields a whip and no clock has power to charm, we may don the cape of truth-seeker; and through this veil of temporal blindness, we may apprehend the true form of the world. Only the blind may see and only the deaf may hear.
–Your philosophy is new to me, stranger, and I must think on it.
–Thought good: action bad. Repeat this mantra to yourself and sit with me, here in the gutter through which worldly concerns and illusions will be drained from you. We shall imbibe the magic potion of the spirits and share a vision. And in this vision, I hereby predict, will be revealed to you the location of your eldritch mistress.
–Give me the reality hemlock at once, then, so that I might find her all the sooner.
–Cut out thy tongue, naïve innocent, and speak no more blasphemies! The Philosophy of Inaction forbids so rank an activity as fiendish searching. In the vision, you shall find the place where you must wait for her. It is only if you paths cross by chance that happenstance shall anoint your union and call it sacred. So, sit still and wise; be drunk by the spirit of Methalia; let yourself be guided through the fog, and carried by the ether tide to the place where you shall be reborn.
–I thank you sage, for this counsel, and promise you that one day I shall repay this debt I owe you.
–Well said, Padawan. And it would be remiss of us not to note the power that an alliance of our forces might create. For, although you are vampire and not of saintly stature, you are of this world and dimension, and therefore an enemy of the shape shifters and changelings, the transdimensional daemons, who make our world their own. War makes strange bedfellows, and so, let us copulate a platonic bond. Do you pledge allegiance to the cause, Vampire Lord? Shall Inaction Man and Kev the Vampire fight as one?
–I swear it. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Here’s looking at you, Inaction Man—he said, as he took a mighty swig of the Methalated Spirits.
He shuddered then, and writhed horribly in the gutter. He was forced to use all his superpowers to prevent him retching up the holy spirit unction. Soon his body was calmed, and we chanted together the first mantra of the Philosophy Of Inaction, the first law of POI.
–Only the bums are free. Only the bums are free. Only the bums are free.
*****
It was a dusty day in a dusty town. Diamond was a new town but it already felt old, old enough to die. Above the choked air, a tired sun hung in the late afternoon sky and shone on, but it seemed to be looking elsewhere. The streets smelt of horse and the people of stale sweat and farm animals. They were the kind of people who bathed once a year, whether they needed to or not, and town’s streets never seemed to clean themselves.
Sheriff McQuaid leaned against the wooden station house wall and chewed tobacco. Looking at the place where the sun was soon to set, he wished he’d kept going west all those years ago, but now he’d reached an age when change was difficult, and of course, there was the mine. He had to stay near the mine, or else he might end up with a noose around his own neck. He’d seen enough men hanged to know he didn’t want to suffer the same fate.
He tipped his hat and looked over at Mr Feldenberg, the town banker, a portly old cigar-smoker, with an easy smile and a cruel heart, a heart that was nailed to the bottom line. He was a very big fish in a very small pond. He was a fish so big, in fact, that you couldn’t help but wonder how he managed to survive in such a small pond as a town called Diamond, but the town attracted a certain kind of tourist, and they pumped dollars into the old town.
Both men would remember this moment in time, their last moment of freedom, but at the time, neither of them appreciated it.
In unison, they heard the beating of hooves from a horse at full gallop and looked eastward. The horse was moving so quickly that a large furl of grit and dust rose behind him, but the wind was blowing against him, so most of his form was still visible.
The horse was a black stallion, larger than was customary in these stunted parts, and the rider also wore black, but until he came nearer nothing else was known about him.
Sheriff McQuaid undid the buckle of his six-shooter holster and flexed his hand. A rider coming in at that speed, he thought, could well spell trouble. Feldenberger retired to inside his bank and was no doubt checking that the vault was secure and preparing his own horse, tied at the rear of the bank, for a quick exit, should it be necessary.
The horse slowed to a halt at the city limits and the stranger looked at the sign that told him he was now entering the town of Diamond, population 194. The stranger looked up and down the high street of the town. Unlike most strangers, the sheriff noted, his eyes did not fixate on the saloon. Instead, he seemed to be making a map of the place.
–Howdy stranger—the sheriff said.
–Hello—he replied slowly, seeming to emphasise the ‘hell’ part of the greeting.
–You passing through stranger, or fixing to stay a night or two?
–I reckon I’ll stay till my business is done.
–Then best dismount, friend, and tie your horse up at the Saloon and get yourself a room. There’s other things a man can buy there too, if you catch my drift.
–Yeah, I heard about this town’s ‘hospitality’, but I won’t be needing a room.
–You got family here, son?
–Nope.
–Friends then?
–Nope.
–Well, you can’t sleep on your horse, stranger.
–My business won’t take long, Sheriff, and I’ll be gone straight after.
–What’s you line of work, stranger?
–You ask a lot of questions, Sheriff.
–That’s my job.
–Always looking into things, eh?
–You could say that.
–Always peering into holes, looking down shafts…
–Shafts?
–Mine shafts, sheriff. This town’s got a mine, ain’t it?
–How’d you know that?
–From the name, Sheriff. No-one’s gonna call a town ‘Diamond’ cause it’s got a big sheep market, are they?
–Yeah, we gotta mine, or rather we used to, but it’s all shut down. Only ever found one diamond there, and then they found no more, so they shut it down. Years ago now. Ten years, in fact. Ain’t no work to be found there.
–What can be found there, Sheriff?
–Ain’t nothing there, I told you, and you always asking questions about the ole mine is starting to rile me.
Sheriff McQuaid was sweating now and his lip was twitching. The stranger dismounted but kept his eyes on the sheriff at all times. The sheriff scanned him, looking for weapons, but could find none, and this made him even more nervous, wondering where his handgun was hidden.
From across the street, the banker Feldenberger watched everything from behind a lace curtain. In the red glow of the setting sun, he thought, the stranger looked like he was not of this world, and he bit his lip nervously.
–You ever been down the mine yourself, Sheriff?—the stranger asked, talking slow steps towards him.
–Do I look like a miner, son?
–You look like a miner of men, or maybe a miner of women, or maybe even a miner of minors.
–You wanna explain that riddle, brother.
–I was a brother once, but then my sister disappeared. Are you still a brother if your sister’s not above ground no more?
–I’m gonna lock you up for insanity if you don’t start making some kinda sense, stranger.
–My sister headed west ten years ago, Sheriff. Wanted to escape farm life, you see. Everyone wants to escape something, don’t they? Some the future, some the past.
–And some the present.
–Yeah. In any case, she wrote us for a while and then the letters stopped. It’s been ten years now. I was only a boy then, but when I became a man, I set off to find out what happened.
–And?
–And I did some research, hereabouts. I heard tell of a low-life sheriff, runs a beaten-up cathouse. He takes any girl passing through unescorted and then has some brigand rob her and ra… rob and worse. Then he locks her up in the flea pit, drugs her on the Chinaman’s opium till she ain’t really human no more and then he puts her to work.
–You…
–Course, some still tried to run, so to make an example, he took one of them, tied her up and let everyone know he was gonna leave her down the mine to starve to death, tied up and hollering; all alone and going cold turkey at the bottom of a mine shaft, screaming into the blackness.
–Where did you hear this crap?
–I’ve been listening to every whiskey-soaked fool in a ten-mile radius, and I’ve been looking for that sheriff, Sheriff McQuiad.
–How’d you know my name?
–I didn’t, until now.
The stranger took off his wide-brimmed hat and instantaneously a shot rang out and the sheriff fell to his knees. The stranger had not moved.
–How…– the sheriff asked, before blood spewed from his throat and silenced him.
–My sister had two brothers, Sheriff McQuiad. Me, you’ve already met, and my twin. He sneaked into town at sunrise and has been hiding on the roof across the street all day, waiting for a stranger to come in and take off his hat, waiting to shoot the man he was talking to. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an appointment with a bank manager.
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