Out-and-Outliars. Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 11)

                                                                              11.

Floy, the Macaque-crested monkey who invented the 0 1 binary code used in computers all over the globe, could no more retain the shape of the teacup, saucer and teaspoon into which he had been sung than he could keep from mischief-making. Having leapt through the membrane of an Oxford street store during the magical witching hour with the escapees from the exotic pets department, he had merely followed the commuters of liminal London attracted to and guardians of beautiful things.  He had had the requisite whimsy and desperation to conceal himself, Karen Smith and his exotic cohorts, in the various gleaming designs on display in John Lewis, but in the cold light of day he found he was struggling with his shift and there was the very real threat that at any moment he would burst, fully formed from the teacup, saucer and spoon and scare the customers away.

The liminal twin-spirited queens who inhabited by day the shiny objects within the famous shop had been practising concealment since the realization that they were different came crashing in on their developing minds like a sudden surge of migraine, and it was this difference in shape that they had each and everyone, become watchful for shades and nuances that might betray in the world of the ‘’normals, though the innate opportunities for making a difference and balancing the brutal polarities of an otherwise mediocre world with beauty remained an undimmed imperative. An inherent knowledge of the ‘Designer’, earlier witnessed being sung out of his draughtsboard into his revolving chair, offered instant refuge for individuals who, in former times and cultures would have had such a position of prestige as to have been detected as special from inside the mothers’ womb three month prior to birth, and even earlier and cause for much jubilation. These beauty-makers, were impalpable objects of desire signifying desire itself, sign-posting the correct direction of male towards female, female towards male and the proto-mythical direction of the tribe itself. Now, after two thousand years of vacuous religious and colonial patriarchy, initiated and sustained by the rampant and dunderhead jealousy of a fist-wielding brother plotting tirelessly against the atmosphere of specialness showered upon his sibling’s…well, specialness, in a consumer society, the only refuge of that specialness was in beautiful things.

Floy’s shape now strained against the very porcelain in which he was constrained and it was only good fortune that the black woman browsing the shelves with her husband and her husband’s best friend, who was also secret her lover in tow and the store's security not far behind- for curiously the liminal shape-shifters, though they were themselves in constant flight from persecution, exuded from within their designs a blinding snobbism which betokened fear- the woman purchased Floy just to get the suspicious store detectives off her back and regain a modicum of self-respect. As Floy, in the form of a now packaged teacup, saucer and spoon was carried out of John Lewis he was aware of the pandemonium that was unleashed within the store as Karen Smith, the young lady who had auctioned off the UK, concealed within a saddle in the equestrian department, an elephant wearing the skin of a Lavazza Coffee Machine, a female Macaque-crested as leopard-skin rug, and various alligators disguised as Le Creuset cookware, a giraffe blinking within a lamp stand… under the strain of metamorphosis all burst into their true identities sending customers screaming for the various exits while the old boors in a nearby gentleman’s club, on hearing the breaking news, raided the gun room declaring open hunting season.

At home the teacup, saucer and teaspoon were unpacked and placed in the centre of the coffee table while the two men sat down best of friends. This amicable state was not to last. The woman was in the kitchen preparing food and was blissfully unaware of the trouble brewing in the other room. Floy was aware that the follicles of his hair were bristling dangerously and threatening to sprout; he was desperate to find an opportunity for a diversion. It came when the husband got up to put some music on the stereo, his back turned to his friend.

“Your Mama’s so fat I took a photo of her two weeks ago and it’s still developing”. Came the voice, an exact imitation of the seated friend.

The husband swung round. “Well”, said the husband, taking up the challenge, “Your mama so poor, I saw her kicking a can down the street, and when I asked what she was doing she said ‘Moving’! ”.

 “But I…” The bewildered bestfriend was about to say the voice had not been his but instead he smiled. “Well, your mama’s so fat she went to KFC to get a bucket of chicken, they asked her what size and she said ‘The one on the roof!”.

The husband laughed and retorted. “Your mama’s so poor she goes to KFC to lick other people’s fingers!”.

“Your mama’s so fat when she sits around the house, SHE SITS AROUND THE HOUSE!”

“Your mama’s so poor your family ate cereal with a fork to save milk!”.

Meanwhile, during this exchange Floy could feel the tips of his fur beginning to grow out of the cup, saucer and teaspoon.

"Well", said the best friend. “Your mama’s so fat she jumped in the air and got stuck”! Both men laughed.

“Your mama’s so poor I walked in your house and three cockroaches tripped me up and tried to take my wallet”!

Pulling himself back from the bestfriend's returned. “Your mama’s so fat when she was born she gave the hospital stretch marks!”

Again both laughed. “Hang on, hang on, my turn next, just let me put some music on". The moment the husband’s back was turned Floy mimicked the bestfriend’s voice. “Your mama’s so fat when she was having sex her partner he didn’t know if it was in her butt or her boobs”!

At this the husband swung round, and there was only a faint smile on his lips. “Your mama’s so poor the last time she smelled a hot meal was a rich man’s fart”!

Once again bewildered and a little anxious and insulted the husband’s best friend tried to declare the game over. The husband agreed and once again turned to choose some music. Once again, no sooner his back turned, Floy threw his voice around the room, this time louder and with urgent vitriol. “Your mama’s so fat we’re in her right now!”

The husband took hold of the stereo system and yanked it off the wall, swinging around on his heels he hurled it at his best friend, who defended himself with his raised arms, the hi-fi, crashing against a wall landed on the floor in smithereens.

When the woman came running into the living room she found her husband and his best friend dealing each other open blows to the face to a volley of ‘your mama’s’ emitting from a teacup, saucer and spoon that had grown a full coat of fur. She screamed and at that moment and for a moment only they stopped fighting and stared at her.

 

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you I've been sleeping with him earlier !", she yelled. "I TOLD  you not to tell him!" the bestfriend had just enough time to look bewildered again, before the husband dealt him a blow that broke his nose and knocked out his teeth. In defence of her husband the woman joined in the affray.

The police were called by a neighbour and entered the flat with the customary disproportionate force, prized the best friends and woman apart and giving the strange furry object on the table a cursory glance lead the blood-bespattered party off to the station for questioning.

Out-and-Outliars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire, (Chapter 4, Part 10)

                                                                          10.

“The sky is never as brighter than when a mighty ship goes down; the chaos of flares to the background of creaking metal mingled with the panicked screams of its passengers, the sudden increased brightness of the gas-lamps illuminating the elite rigid at tables barking ever louder the ship’s invincibility as the whole slips away and the screams of the poor rise under a brilliant moon and are jettisoned into the shimmering sea".

"Before one astrological signs moves towards its end within the five day period of the cusp, it will characteristically, on the dying days display one last surge of power, a blazing ember before its fire goes out. The land you come from is in such as period”.

Eyes blinked down at the Geo-Astrological chart spread out on an ice-blue table made of…well, ice. “You see, right here,” he said while Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse who had travelled to the Arctic in pursuit of her pet chihuaua Mitzy, braced herself for yet another onslaught of dire emotion.

 

We left Mary Mary and Mitzy standing side by side in a flotilla of crying angels flying towards tens of thousands of isolated and atomized individuals, couples and families who found themselves foul of the hot and fetid breath of a dying toothless mastiff and its own particular delusional whimper and were now, unbeknown to Mary Mary and Mitzy, dancing on the air below cold-stiff-upper lips in the pin-point after-glow of the 2012 Olympic Games .

 

Mary Mary and Mitzy, content in each others’ company had suddenly realized they were freezing  and might in fact die now that the fervour of the chase was wearing off. Mary Mary scaled a sloping but high glacier to better see what lay ahead. She scanned the tundra. Directly below and on the other side from their former position sheets of vertical ice gleamed back at them. Each of the walls that made up the maze reached over three metres in height, each frosted, and although the day was bright Mary Mary could see that as her gaze traced a zigzag and serpentine path back and forth and eventually towards the centre of the glass maze the light diminished so that its centre was bathed in permanent dusk. Housed within the tenebrous and oblong  space Mary Mary could make out two huge orbits, obscuring what must have been the means of propulsion, a rhubarb and custard coloured streak, or squiggle an artist might make with a brush of medium thickness. The circumference of the huge eyes, for as far as she could see, almost reached the ground; she estimated, at a distance, to be approximately metres in diameter. A wide white perimeter framed a pair of irises and pupil of an tensely depressing chromatic blue from which emanated, nay irradiated the most wretched despair Mary Mary had ever seen.

Between the sheets of ice in the corridor’s of the maze the celebrity chanteuse and her pet noticed that it was not only becoming darker as they navigated the twists and turns of the labyrinth, but warmer; whatever lurked at its centre was warm-blooded.

“I’ve been expecting you”, said the eyes from apparently no mouth at all.

“Eyes,” the vision said.

Mary May did know what to say, so said nothing. It was hard not to look pass the configuration of veins and the general whiteness and marble smoothness but it was especially hard not to be washed way by the waves of melancholia flowing from the blue irises and soulshaped-blackness of its pupils.

“Eyes, that’s my name”, said eyes in a tsunami of sadness.

“Oh yes,”, stammered Mary Mary remembering her manners. “ Mary Mary and this is Mitsy”.

“In my charts,” Eyes continued looking down on an icescape of lines and circles. A table that had hitherto been invisible stood out as Eyes seemed to rise as he seated himself on an equally invisible chair.

The Swarovsky diamonds in  Mitzy’s collar fractured their new companion’s reflection into a many-eyed gorgon of a grief so deep that the diamond’s natural sparkle retracted becoming as lacklustre as an oligarch’s final moments.

‘You think I look funny’ Thought Eyes as it watched the rat-like dog and its strange bearded bee-hived, eye-shadowed companion who was removing five cardigans. Eyes was a tad short-sighted which had the effect that when Mary Mary spoke he thought the words came from the being lower down on the ground.

“Sadly”, and Eyes emoted this sentiment so succinctly that, once again, the travellers were in tears. Eyes warmed to his guest’s ability to empathize and  made a mental note to take them to visit The Vale of Dead Explorers. “Sadly, it’s over”, Eyes continued, “the end. Look again , this is my geo-astro chart and the land from which you have travelled…no, escaped rather… lies on the sign of Capricorn and its time has run out. See here, the last period period before your period is the Sagittarian lands, geo-astrologically here”.  Eyes indicated Italy on a cobalt blue map imbedded in the ice beneath the table. Its last period, the period of the Hell-Raiser..the slaughter, extinctions, self-sacrifice, the fractured and desperate indomimtablely last stand”.  A tear formed and in its centre appeared Hadrians wall, north-facing; a lament issued forth ‘We weep, We weep, They will not let us home, We weep, We weep.They will not let us home'. 'Ah, homesickeness", Eyes said relishing the ache of that particular debilitating emotion “Only the Aborigines of Tasmania matched the Celts for homesickness”.

Mary Mary, who was surprised she was experiencing only a mild nostalgia for her garden patio, hadn’t a clue what Eyes was talking about and was even more disconcerted as this prophetic melancholic tirade was being directed at her pet. She looked at Mitzy through the fresh eyes of Eyes and tried to imagine that her tiny skull might conceal a consciousness that might extend beyond a meal, diamonds and polar fur.

Mitzy did indeed seem engrossed as Eyes drew her attention to a cross-section of line, circles and signs. “The combative day of the Generator heralds the first period of Empire. This period here, The Day of the Heavywieght is, like that of the Hell-Raiser before , its swanson.  Swansong, one of my favourite emotions”, and Mary Mary was awash with a kind of scintillating poetic yearning of almost unbearable aesthetic beauty. “That one and Sehnsucht”. Eyes went on picking up on Mary Mary present state.

“The climatic period of the Heavyweight is the end of the climbing glory of your particular climb, you are soon to be back in the onscurity of the foothills, look up at the peak, relishing the idea of another stab at the summit; it is how you navigate this period which decides whether you bow out gracefully or implode for there is implicit in this time all the crimes this period has committed in the name of ambition, and as with old people who walk with the ghosts of their every deed, at times muttering to old friends, resolving unfinished argument, pledging unpledged love, or taking imaginary revenge, yes your land could be seriously harangued by a avengeing jury of a belated truth and reconciliation tribunal in this period of vivid senility.

This is a period where images in the mortal mirror reflecting your lands deeds are at their starkest…and darkest. Here Eyes pupils vertically disappeared, Mary Mary suddenly felt both powerful and at the same time frightened as though the urge for  power were about to sweep her into an unquenchable thirst for yet more power and through layers and realms of violence and while experiencing the utter raggedness of its victims to attain it. “So, much greed and suffering", she muttered to herself as Eyes pupil’s came to rest, once again on Mitzy.

"The Division Bell has been heard in your land and to this tune every man and woman becomes a microcosm, as it were, of its waning dominance; and will brook no compromise of their plans casting family, friends, neighbours, associates co-workers in antagonistic positions against themselves. Class divisions will crack and sub-divied and sub-divide as until…” Here a counting-house loneliness beamed out outlining a crouched shadow play figure in an ivory hovel and the frosted walls of Eyes’ abode moved in and darkened to opaque black mirrors shattering into opposing fragments of imprisoned snarling faces. Mary Mary felt a heady mixture of the apatride isolation of those in solitary confinement mingled with a miserly distrust and a vertiginous panic that she was about to lose power, like a formerly grand and now derelict cathredral and with it a furious sense of losing herself. The overwhelming floodlight of loneliness and ebbing tide of overweening lack of confidence retracted. “Divide and rule is at its most intense on its way back through the prism”.

Mary Mary was at a loss to think of why anything concerning her land and its history should concern her; she was a tax evader by dint of simply feigning her death and being there; and the fact that she was in unstinting pursuit of polar fur was a sign that she had already splintered off onto her own brand of narcissism, an off-off-shore selfishness she, quite frankly resented sharing with a nation; hours and hours of watching Russian It girls swan around in fur on television had set her self-seeking resolve in stone.