Out-and-Outliars; PART 2, FALLACY. Hillary, Tenzing (Chapter 1, Part 1)

                              

                                           Hillary, Tenzing

       

                            “It was obvious he was likely to die. It was not the mountain’s
                               harshness that almost killed him, but his own hubris”.

 

In May 29^th, 1953, on the southeastern ridge of a mountain at an altitude of 28.776 feet a very conscious Norgay Tenzing stretched out and, with Herculean effort dragged a semi-conscious Edmund Hillary to the summit of Everest; there is no reason at all why the route leading up to the summit of Mount Everest is today called The Hillary Step.

Before two of Hillary’s frozen toes were sent back to England to Queen Elizabeth II on Coronation day as both present and proof of gallant ardour, the summit of Everest did not, like America and Australia, need to be discovered by short-sightedly grandiose caucasions; it was already there.  Indeed, at least two hours prior to the moment Norgay made the decision to help his dangerously ungrateful and eternally whiney climbing companion to the top and stick the flag of Empire through the permafrost, Nepal’s own flag had been fluttering away merrily at the summit of the world making a curiously mischievous tittering sound as it did so. It has been mentioned in subsequent largesse at The Royal Geographical Society lunches, that the two men hugged each other on simultaneously reaching the top; this was an out-and-out lie, Sherpa Tenzing hugged himself.

Due to a mix up in the boot department leading to the loss of nineteen toes even before the team had left base camp, Sherpa Tenzing was already au fait with the unBuddhist  Western doctrine called The Hierarchy of Death, traces of which are still flagrantly on display in such recent Soft-Power-point entertainments in supremacy in the film Impossible about the Tsunami in Thailand in which we are invited to believe the survival of one white family is worth pursuing and rooting for, over the factual deaths of two hundred and forty thousand among the Thai population;  Norgay knew, if any of them made it to the top, where he was supposed to stand . Some initial deaths among the Sherpas occurred as some returned along a narrow icy- ledge burdened with yet more more luggage; the white climbers simply did not know how break the rule of White of Way and would not, could not stand aside for their coloured helpers, it was deeply ingrained ; loss of luggage and the death toll among the Nepalese was deemed lamentable; but strictly in that order. Hillary, a remote and strange temperament was as yet unknown to the world around him and might have remained considering the lack of bonhomie -Hillary and Tenzing-did not get along.

The patriarchical claim Hillary had on the climbing glory of human endeavor was to be seen and loudly heard. At Camp II at an altitude of 21,240 feet a summary court house and jail was established to allay paranoid fears of insurrection bought on by thin air. This jail house was where the Sherpas were forced to weather several days of storm and without trial while the legitimate climbers enjoyed the shelter of an improvised tavern and the relative luxuries of a general store. Sherpa Tenzing had escaped imprisonment by dint of taking refuge inside a dead sacred cow a climber had shot dead out of bloody-minded boredom and in order to incite...well, an insurrection. One of the Sherpas complained about their conditions. The climbing team had an effective if somewhat brutal word with him. To the Nepalese helpers the trashed store was indeed a reminder; these were not pleasant people.

One night, in order to sharpen their Anglo-Saxon wits, the team devised a game of strip-poker heavily rigged against their porters, at 25,938 feet it could only have been an acute sense of sadism which overrode common-sense as prerogative, snide laughter laced with Schadenfreude emanated from the roof of the world. Half frozen, the Sherpas accused Hillary’s team of cheating and challenged them to a wrestling match. In a flurry of snow gunshots rang out and as the tiny Nepalese sat stiff in the snow staring at the holes in their chests, the remaining climbers retreated to the general store and smoked roughly hewn Havanna cigars. Tenzing was profoundly insulted and told Hillary so. That night one of Tenzing’s cousin attacked Hillary’s tent. The two men clashed outside. In the gunfire Little Tensing was shot and killed. Hillary’s men then went to Tenzing, their last and only guide, and ordered him to drag the body of his cousin away. He refused, “The most dangerous thing about Everest is everyone who is trying to climb it, you!”, He said pointing up to the peaceful peaks above.

Things quickly went from bad to worse. In a burst of altitude sickness Hillary became murderously delusional; he was convinced his friends were out to ambush him and turn him off the mountain-he flipped - killing them all. In the ensuing gunfire he shot off the two toes received by the Queen on the day of her coronation. While reloading, Hillary heard Tenzing coming after him. In the fight Tenzing’s respect for Hillary died. While Hillary rode upon Tenzing’s back tugging at his beard with one hand and firing into air with the other, a group of journalists at base camp were fleeing an avalanche, in vain. There were places on earth, far below at sea level, where people strove to live in harmony; Hillary and Tenzing were not among them.

“ Stop”, Tenzing shouted in a voice that resembled Hillary’s mothers’. Tenzing grabbed the gun from Hillary’s frozen dead fingers and tossed it over the side. “It’s not the mountain’s harshness that kills, it’s your own hubris, ”.  Sherpa Tenzing was to be first in a long line  to become acquainted with the ring of gunshot; the job would hereonin come with the expectation of a certain percentage of insanity-induced suicides. Hillary decided to say nothing and live. The rest, as they say, is history. 

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.

Out-and-Out Liars: Of Ice, Fur and Fire (Chapter 4, Part 9)

                                                                            

                                                                                 9.

It is  none of these. A shoe found at the water’s edge, caught between not-quite night and not-quite morning in search of the author standing in a killer rain. In a London black fog-shaped buses thrown from steep hills passing. Homes call him as non-memory assails his homeless cries.

The smog, or London Particular shapes a group of exotic animals and carves also a twin-set limping woman breathed hurriedly in and out. Waiting for the life-blood goods shimmer awake behind membranes, sleepwalkers rush bleary-eyed to be reunited with half keys jangling to release dreams in design. The author does not notice the fog give way along Oxford street. In the gloaming Delftware blinks awake, a gross Lavazza expresso machine yawns in a corner shelf, sofa beds concertina themselves upight and the chandeliers wipe their myriad eyes for new misdirected lies as the draughtsboard, an early riser, spins out the designer into a studious chair, he vainly pats loosely-hanging hair back over his bald pate.

 

Night crawling shamans, still hungover, danced by music and drums, drunk by licensing laws, sensually stroked and prodded by promises skid through reverberating skeins to the otherside. The sun is coming over the edge and over the edge  the twin-spirited ones hunted by the denizen of daylight, called by their respective departments, jump out of form into lampstands, Le Creuset cookware, bales of cloth, a nubian queen owns Egyptian cotton as haven, the night’s DJ high-fives a hi-fi and disappears, an uppity queen recharges in a tiara his best friend a jade necklace.

Animal wet foot prints seek out unvacated caches, a saddle in the sequestriana, a supple haven takes Karen Smith, the leather creaks a sighing relief. A dainty coffee cup sings Floy in, Zelda consumed by leopard skin shoes.

A chorus sings in the dawn arrivals; the workers will arrive soon. John Lewis fills up, then empties, opening time has yet to be. All along Oxford street, the restricted, sung into Tie-rack, the parochial and patriotic sung into souvenir shops and tea rooms, the natty and prissy sung into suits and cashmere coats, the mincing into stilettos, the street is still silent, and a thousand muffled sounds as a thousand doors are drawn shut form inside wardrobes, dressers and the making sure they are all safe inside.

The author wakes up in a dream to find himself home, the objects and furniture are overjoyed with gratitude; A knocked door, the house lets them in. Unseeing the revellers, old friends, pass through to apartments he does not recognise, a new space, not hostile but indifferent. A party of friends to uninvite him, conversations to ignore him, plans to exclude him, children who make no attempt to place the author.

In fixing the lock he breaks the key, the door is now open. He jumps into an antique set of quills the tip, a wine barrel ink-stand qlimpses adventures had, between the quills the sharp-toothed pike's head guesses at concealment; the author now vanishes over the edge. They are planning their day; the shops will be open soon and the sleepwalkers will descend on Oxford street where behind vast windows mannequins also abstain from the spree settling into regained poise and unblinking fear. Crouched, shiny, chrome, metal, steel, plastic, teak, oak, cedar, walnut, ceramic, bakelite, Beautiful Things, as still as Christmas night, hopeful for a new life.  A cyclonic junk yard fathoms deep, in a murderous watery dance, whirls towards Oxford Street beneath a rising sun.

 

In a Greenwich vintage shop nostalgia queens hang back behind the empire line, taken care of by the security of fur; the young twinks beaming from tiny-sized bright thick pullovers eager to be taken home to snuggle up warm to the firm bodies of youthful men and leap from bar stools and cloak rooms. “Without us you’d be on the rag pile or the shredder”, they taunt the rows of cardigans and suede fronted Cecil Gees on the railing below, “We pay to keep you faded old wall flowers”.

It was the foreign imports who were being picked on especially tonight.

“Coming over taking our rail space”. They were Indian Sweat Shops dresses discarded off-cuts from larger international companies, vintage copies, they hung in identical twins, triplets and quadruplet, bottle green, floral, burnt orange and black stripes, newly placed in the window that day, sweeping down like new arrivals off the Empire Windrush.

“We don’t want you here”, said a malevolent Philips 1950’s record player and went back to humming  A Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square

“Why, do you try to look like us?  I knew the genuine article, swingers back in the sixties”, said a sweaty faded queen haunting a canary yellow viscos dress;

A Brazilian flat-fronted pipes, the latest thing in raised hemlines said  “ darlings, my rise is your fall. I’m going back to Brazil.”, Against the Made in Englands protests, the India Sweat Shops and the Made in Chinas concurred.

A huge black red-silk-lined Cromby concealed a Churchill-loving-back-in-my-day professional preditor said. “Shut it, I’m the Oswald Mosley of opinion around here. We got a consignment of redundant uniforms coming in, to bulk things out, now if they don’t find a place to sleep…well. I know for a fact, cos, I was in the store room with one  just arrived from Afganistan, well, he said they’re all English Defense League, so you imported cheap shit will find yourselves dead or back where you came from”.

A liberal pollar-neck concealed a brooding waspishly frail thing said “ It is my observation that once  the foreigner is removed, “every last one of them” as you are constantly saying, the English we will be left behind with…well  the English, who will simply turn on each other... again. Remember, we weren’t particularly nice to each other before the Made in Elsewheres arrived”.

“You're making more noise than sense!” barked a parliament of middle-management double-breasted suits.

“Well, we’re going out… Better than  listening to you boring misogynist lot", said a trio of mini-skirts scantily sheltering three heavily made-up Cilla, Sandy Shaw and Lulu drag queens respectively, and with a three-part harmony rendition of Downtown they stepped through the membrane into the night.

“I’m not being funny”, said a nicotine-stained crochet knee-length cream top whose refrain was a bitch to sing in or out. “ I’ve just arrived and though I am glad to be here, I miss the up-to-date gossip of the IndianSweat Shops and the Made in Chinas. I mean. I was bought by a Lithuanian girl and though I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, we were always out and about, and although she got peanuts she worked hard,  harder than the last lazy old cow who wore me before…always on the moany old sofa on her moany old fat arse”.

“Taking our jobs”, Said one of a group of old coats in a dark corner still smelling of old tobacco, these housed the regretful queens, forced by fusty convention to marry with memories of a first world- war army chum ;a  love to burst the heart,,,and make it sour. “See those trouser’s over there?”

“You’ve already told us!” Intoned the whole shop.

“Belonged to a pole in Dagenham undercut some of our local lads on a building job”. Continued the old coat. “Took ages to get the bloodstains out, didn’t it Polack, where we knee-capped him” The trousers in question withdrew into itself.

“Up until last week, I worked in the House of Common’s, security, sixty years”, said a shiny buttoned uniform who housed a deferential cottage queen into geriatric parliamentarians before being finally gazumped by his own increasing age. “The second-hand rags are all being moved up north, Saudi’s and wealthy Nigerians don’t believe in wearing other people’s clothes’.

“So what are we?” asked a bewildered halter-neck.

“We’re vintage dear”, consoled a tie-dye flared-sleeve tee shirt. “We don’t do class tourism”.

“Choose whatever allegiances you want; we’re all second hand now, no matter what airs and graces”. A collective whimper rippled around the shop, a 50s lampshade gulped.

“Westminster, that House of Drunken Managers, for that is what it is, is managing us out of London and all up north” The uniform went on,  “I hear from some of the new Made Elsewheres that people are walking into supermarket up there, in gangs and just taking food, clothes and walking out without paying. Other uniforms tell me, they can’t do anything about it…too many of them. And some of the uniforms are on their side, especially if they are single mothers!” Here, he chuckled “Once all you Nylons, Orlons, Viscose and Arcrylics get into the mix, it’ll all spark off…literally”.

“We don’t care about anyone or any thing except parties and fun. !” Chanted a rack of cream floral 1920s silk ball gowns pointedly.

 The suede fronted Cecil Gee kissed its teeth, while two tribly hats headbutted each other and screamed "Ouch!"

A time-set lava lamp in the window sung in by a mercurial shape-shifting queen, announced, as it had done at the same time every night before switching off,” Omies and palomies, I am the centre of the universe, and when I close my eyes, it is night!”.

As they stepped from garments and vintage objects through the membrane to regale themselves or simply water plants, feed cats or catch up on gossip until the gloaming, or ecoup in a deep armchair, on the counter a beautiful pin cushion that had seen more pricks than …well, a pin cushion and concealing a new breed of passive-aggressive queen, called out “Can I come too?”

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire. (Chapter 4, Part 8)

                                                                                    8.

Five minutes after he had freed  Zelda, a female Crested- Macaque, from The Exotic Pets Department in Harrods, Floy realized he had done the wrong thing; she was a consumer addict with not the slightest idea of how to delay gratification. She launched into the various halls of neatly arranged luxury goods and demanded, in a tone she could only have picked up over the years from ogling visitors to her department and from a entitled clientele ranging from as far afield as Highgate and Golders Green. “ You’re not going to buy for me that its-so loverly –everyone-will-say-what-a-caring- husband-he-is- lime green floor-length Zandra Rhodes coat?. You want I should escape in rags?”.

The fact they were not married and not likely to ever be, notwithstanding, when Floy pointed out she could have anything for free as it was the middle of the night and that her companions were already marauding through the hangers, more by accident than by design, acquiring incongruous bits of out-fit and had collectively acquired a ‘look’ that wouldn’t have been out of place at a grunge party had they not been wildlife, his new potential mate protested. “So, you want I should become a thief. So, you're an expert on prison manicures all of a sudden?". Then, " Now give young Benjamin here your most expensive smile, or I’m speaking to management". This last sentence was delivered in a clipped entitled High Clapham voice, for the culmination of watchfulness and long periods absorbing speech and behavioural patterns of the wealthy had left Zelda with more personalities, all of them insufferable, jostling within her than nature intended. “If we pretend we slipped on this puddle Lizzy dear, we can sue this place.  Yes Richard, we have somewhat drunk our wealth away.” It seemed Zelda had picked up a tad more than terms of endearment and bescreeching requests.

Floy used a system of designer ties to get all the escapees and now colourfully dressed menagerie out of the store. A single driver, drunk enough to think he was sober enough to drive was the only soul about who, (the Highway Code being the gossamer thin line between civilisation and utter barbarianism,) slowed to a halt at the zebra crossing to witness an ape leading an elephant in jogging pants and tweed stalker hat,  two lions in gold and silver sequin boob-tubes, a Crested-Macaque sashaying in lime-green coat and Russian fur hat, a snake with a rainbow Cashmire Pashmina, and two bonobos in hoodies and top of the range pumps. Three alligators took up the rear in an assortment of bangles, one whose mouth was clamped shut by a Rolex and Giraff with a Gucci handbag dangling from its neck and a foot wedged in bespoke toaster.

Meanwhile in the Arctic Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse presumed dead, had caught up with her beloved Swarovski-collar wearing Chihuahua. Their respective modes of transport had run out of fuel, the septuagenarians and bankers having, to a last man succumbed to the rigours of sub zero temperatures.Clad in knit-ware the bearded drag queen and her toy dog now stood blissfully content side by side in the tundra. Blissful indeed not because they were finally reunited but because, immediately above  and all around them they were treated to a most wondrous and awesome vision:  the dazzling sight of tens of thousands of beautiful young men of all hues borne along by giant white wings where arms should be. In slow motion the white angels flew gracefully and soundlessly overhead with the focus and determination of migrating swans; they were going south.

It would be a while before Mary Mary would make the connection between the unending fleets of white angels that sailed, unseeing, passed her and the utter distress of her country-men, -women and -children back home on their knees praying for the next meal, heat or both. Now standing there in the snow, a single feather fell in a slow gyratory motion and landed in the palm of Mary Mary’s outstretched hands, anchoring the vision in reality.

She realized she was crying, her tears washed by what she initially thought to be rain; the angels were weep, their tears comingling with her own amid the vast, silent, light snowfall.

Out-and-out Liars;Of Ice,Fur and Fire, (Chapter 4, Part 7)

 

                                                                                7.

 

 

At the breaking news that the United Kingdom was about to be relinquished to an overseas bidder in the Christies auction and be dismantled and used by its new Saudi owner as a museum and series of studios for costume drama and finally an aircraft carrier, this agitated the already demoralised inhabitants out of their food and poverty sequestration brought on by the over-reaching of basic instincts of the few at the expense of the many; they hit the streets to face the well-prepared crush zones and kettling well rehearsed by an army the Prime minister, in a zeal to be go down in history as Winston Churchill mark 2 at any cost, had irrationally suggested at the last mass outing of the housebound poor.

This was the hapless leader’s vanity project and it had been in the pipe-line for some time; since he was five years old. He was not so much predestined to ruin the country as propelled by a demonic  and sadistic sense of humour stoked and epitomized by George Frazer’s  tales of Flashman a hero whose only quality was a skewed colonial slave-owner’s world-view of egotistical Schadenfreude; a malicious joy at the dire misfortune of others. This misfortune had now peaked along with the uncontainable glee of its arch manipulator.

 

No mercy was shown as the army and police cracked the skulls, broke the limbs of, and tazered grandparents and children alike with a relish hitherto suspected of the armed forces and police but now in full sadist flow. Squashed against the empty Jessops, Comet, Boots, Waterstones, Currys, Thomas Cook, HMV. Superdrug, Tesco, Sainsburys. PoundLand and other defunct franchises, the bloodied and battered staggered into Starbucks to be treated like their American counterparts on September 11^th, near the toppled Twin Towers and charged for bottles of water with which to wash their open wounds.

 

The Prime Minister however was not the only person who had a ringside seat paid for in advance, Plan B was to divert attention from revolution and his own personal and obvious failure by inviting a coalition  of VIP generals and arms dealers from Russia, ‘How can I get more money…before I leave?’. A Doomsday chant then and now, was permanently perched on the Prime Minister's mendacious lips. His dark shadow lurked in the bowls of Westminster, an addict in dragon-form whose greed could not be slaked and whose misery over his hoard was all eyes. Plague would no longer be sufficient to reduce the population, especially a querulous one; medicine had become too good, but there was profit there too; people were always secondary to commerce, (The alcohol industry was already cashing in on politically induced atomized despair; a dragon no Beowulf would step forward to slay this time.) and now another war was what was needed and with the leader at the helm of the most winsome arms contracts; Winston Churchill Mark 2 was within sight.

The Achilles heel in the Prime Minister’s hubris was that the invited invaders were intending to…well, invade anyway. Devoid of the Christian concept of ‘Love thy neighbour’ our Slavic neighbours had been merrily waiting in the wings, watching Europe in general and the United Kingdom in particular; as cut-backs sapped the very thing a country needed to defend itself, and as the basic means by which a people need to...well, basically stand upright became increasingly scarce the jobless, half-starved and dispirited population were sleepwalking into disaster and into the ambush of its Prime Minister’s gigantically myopic Master-plan.

Those who had other countries to return to simply returned. Those who had enough money to leave for more lucrative pastures had long ago left. It is a commonly known fact that the UK landmass is not sufficient to feed the inhabitants of that landmass, and a pact of Russo-Moslem ships surrounded the besieged island, this put a sudden stop to all cooking programs as the prospect of obtaining any of the ingredients on show became a wild fantasy. The adage ‘Don’t kick a man when he’s down’, was being internationally flagrantly violated both figuratively and literally. “Nostradamus predicted this!” shouted a middle-class hippy father of four as he was brutally floored by the butt of a Russian machine gun. The sudden sense of belonging the UK citizens felt with Europe came with the comforting knowledge that those on the continent were being treated to the same annihilation.

 

In the place of a male monarch a short-lived sense of freedom would, dove-like ascend into the sky to be shot down in mid-flight. A huge unexploded bomb stuck out of the MI5 building, street-side, like a huge ice-cream cone. Those inhabitants left alive were treated to the view of a flotilla of enemy ships moored in every available space along the Thames. At gunpoint, the hapless Prime Minister, in shirt sleeves, was made to climb the thirty nine steps to the belfry of Big Ben; his bound feet formed the tip of the third hand of the famous clock face.

 

On the radio the customary bravura of the commentators had crumpled into craven jocularity last heard on the occasion day of the 2008 financial crash; it was hard to tell if the loud bangs heard in the studio were the sound-effects of three Champaigne bottles being opened or a short round of bullets.

 

Will Self was the first of the intellectuals to be arrested; he protested with his usual
dry wit, completely lost on the occupiers as were the philosophical protestations of Alan de Boton. Nicholas Shakespeare, Joanna Trollop and Martin Amis would all witness the end of their respective dynasties at the hands of thugs. In vain and in his prison cell Ian McEwan wished to survive to record the experience in his next novel. The invaders loved J K Rowling and only wanted her autograph for their children, requests to which she gracefully obliged while wishing she had Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility.

To add grist to the apocalyptic mill, China’s five hundred million-strong army of over-confident only-child young men and women also waited in the wings to avenge the already beleaguered land for the Opium Wars with a conflagration the like of which has never been seen. An over-exaggerated karmic come-uppance; gross ingratitude one felt, for China’s narcotic dependency and near demise while Britain talked business over tea.

 

Class being now, as always, the dictate of the occupier the feral middle classes roamed the land in search of…well, the middle classes. Fascist groups and perverts of every stripe, who had escaped the scythe-like radar of the invaders, went on an unbridled spree, raping and brutalizing anyone who had hitherto been protected by political correctness. A veritable Tourette’s Syndrome of racial invectives were heaped upon first and second generation Brits caught in the cross fire between two evils. The Jews, who perpetually lived with a little suitcase packed just in case, had gauged the temperature some months earlier and were now setting up market stalls in New Zealand. Gangsters and criminals stood about dumbstruck gazumped by the general base behaviour on display. The gays, those erstwhile ancient shamanic beings untramelled by natural selection and sent to balance the brutal polarities of the hetrosexual world, were now, once again balancing on the edge of a very long knife indeed.

As a conflagration of opposing fires swept across the country the animals of the zoos had been freed and now roamed about the city. The roar of lions mingled horrifically with the laughter of hyenas and the screams of monkeys. The wet sleek slithering hiss of snakes made the flesh crawl, especially the flesh of Karen Smith as she dreamed of the demise of the country she had just sold at auction. She awoke from her nightmarish dream as a leathery finger passed across her forehead, to find she was in Hyde Park, in the dark with a Macaque Crested Monkey crouching over her and in the background a menagerie of animals recently freed from Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department.

Out-and-Out Liars; Of Ice, Fur and Fire (Chapter 4, Part 6)

                                                              

                                                                          6.                                                         

 

From afar it looked like a penguin colony, that is what Mary Mary, celebrity drag chanteuse presumed-dead-but-now-in-the-Arctic-circle, thought as she trundled across the tundra  on a sledge of carefully latticed sun loungers off the HMS England, and drawn, at a snail’s pace, by a diminishing pack of disability buggies and their septuagenarian drivers. Yes, that is what is must be, penguins, and where there was wildlife, -like those anthropologists that seemed on the National Geographic Channel first to lurk, then comment and then barge their way to the front of every camera shot to pose condescendingly patting the locals, eventually ruining every remote tribe on the planet by their autistic drive to take over, around this cluster of penguins - there was bound to be interfering Western scientific researchers of every ilk and self-importance.

 

From  several miles closer, Mitzy, Mary Mary’s  pet Chihuahua-who had been snatched by a passing fox, escaped with her life and Swarovski studded collar and now found herself being inched across the ice in pursuit of Polar fur by an equally diminishing pack of city bankers coming down from cocaine-  the sight up ahead was clusters of piled up Self-Help books; for she had seen this image before: Shortly after her attack on her owner who, having fallen on hard times, wanted to take and pawn her diamond collar and narrowly lived to regret it, Mitzy had been dragged along to the first floor of a central London mega book store directly facing Foyles bookshop in the Charing Cross Raod, in the hope of finding clues to both of their psychological problems. Piles of books dotted the vast area, like dolmens, some with readers flicking through and discarding tome upon tome, on their knees as though in manic prayer for elusive nuggets of wisdom. “It wasn’t always like this”, the young male sales assistant had told her owner. “Since the introduction of coffee into bookshops, people come in looking for something specific in the New Age and Spiritual Well-Being section, have a super-strength triple shot Americano and, for several hours their soul-searching enters a period of hyper-drive. There are piles of books, some reaching up to the ceiling and that’s just in the café! At the end of the day we have to return them all to the shelves. The customers become very aggressive and violent when told we’re closing; security has to get quite firm with them; the serenity and spiritual harmony they came in for goes completely out the window. What with soul-searching caffein addicts and the internet we’re losing sales”.

 

Weeks later and on their way to a Chinese herbal remedy clinic Mary Mary had dragged Mitzy past  the same mega-store; the book shop was a wasteland of circling vultures as customers fought each other in the classics section for volumes of English literature at clearance prices. The store had gone into administration and its loyal customers were picking the shelves clean. Through the unsightly scrum Mitzy could make out the prophetic and oddly serene face of the young male assistant while all around him his colleagues looked on in abject horror.

 

In the land of the midnight sun , the sun failed to set remaining just above the edge of the horizon and everything threatened the liminal and magical possibilities of twilight,  a prolonged witching hour as dusk segues seamlessly into dawn. Against the crepuscular light the icescape, monochromatic in stark relief, seemed suspended, permanently on the verge of pouncing, yet somehow held back, coiled, crouched, unsprung…

 

 Across this scene back in the opposite direction from which Mary Mary was travelling in pursuit of her pet Mitzy several miles ahead, the Sea Shepherd, silhouetted against the half-light, was marooned once again in tightly packed ice shelves. Through a portal of golden light the Captain, pen in hand, was writing another missive to his beloved Mrs Sedgewick. Beyond, further south through polar winds and the odd milestone of abandoned septuagenarian and collapsed banker, passengers of The HMS England were enjoying the rare luxury and threat of dying of malnutrition and hyperthermia while on a sceptred isle of plenty. The cruise ship singer and entertainer Jane MacDonald had agreed to be ferried off the HMS England, (like all artistes, her loyalties as good as her last gig). and onto to the French pirate freighter Ecologically Dirty Fuel, : .who having discovered the vessel in crisis boarded her, locked up and commandeered its food supplies by placing burly West African security at the entrance to… well secure the food supply, and realising that the passengers did not so much represent a humanitarian cause in need of rescuing but a meal ticket, and an English one at that, Entente Cordial  was made to walk the plank as the ailing majestic oak that was the country’s last fuel supply was dragged splintered from its place of prominence and thrown overboard. A cable was fed into the ship and through a system of metered toll points passengers were encouraged to spend their last savings on heat, the tariff of which, like that manipulated by Enron’s Alfa males, (Now, thankfully on the Alfa Course), rose randomly as warning shot powercuts periodically plunged the bow and the rest of the HMS England into darkness, killing our grandparents in the process.

 

Further out to sea somewhere between the Shetland Isles and Norway the passengers of the HMS Wetherspoons were experiencing their own drought; unbeknown to them with one malign stroke of the pen in apparent revenge for Dunkirk and Waterloo the French company Atos now deemed everyone in ‘perfidious Albion’  fit for work and the amount left to live on did not, sadly, stretch to a cup of tea on the Woolwich Ferry let alone to an oceanic booze-cruise and the revellers now found their source of cash summarily cut off as the on-board ATM machines simply stopped issuing money. This somewhat killed the atmosphere of merriment and mirth dead in the water, so to speak as the last order bell, discovered in the life-jacket cupboard, was rung like a death-knell by an overly gleeful recovering alcoholic who had been forced to accompany his wife on this floating hell. Some remained anchored firmly in the bar staring lovingly at the metal grating securing their beloved internal sunshine. As the HMS Wetherspoons was left by its Captain to mass dementia tremens and the harrowing results of diminishing mental health medication the chant ‘Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!’ could be heard as far off as Tromso.

 

While the ship Russia Today patrolled the waters in search of whatsoever wreckage it could salvage from the economic genocide, Mary Mary, now with a full beard framing faded lipstick and obscuring the blusher she had had dyed onto her cheeks, was, despite her lop-sided and frozen bee-hive, reverting to the man she strove tirelessly to subvert. Her baby-doll nighty, useless in minus 37 degree temperatures, was customized and now peaked out of a veritable riot of knit-ware whisked off the backs of her septuagenarian charioteers as they were cut free. Her/his six pairs of eyelashes had, one by one fallen off in frozen plates and skidded across the ice like skillets in a game of hockey. She was unaccountably depressed; it must be something in the air, she thought hoping there would be something more joyous up ahead.

 

Landscape proves an out-and-out liar as it shimmers and warps dreams and visions erecting demonic towers and spires in the mind’s eyes. The pristine wilderness was having an effect on both canine and human alike. As the gap closed between Mitzy and Mary Mary and as they neared what each had imagined they had seen, the hopeful smiles disappeared as the vision jumped out of view appearing now to the left of their course and further away. The mirage was now a village, complete with church and TV aerials. The landscape, the photos of which on other occasions would be lovingly shared, had become hostile , heart-sinkingly hostile like the loss of recreational sheen a tourist experiences finding himself robed and suddenly penniless.  a cityscape known only to the homeless, luridly desperate through the dirty and broken windows of poverty. Like the deceit of her lovers who’s out-and-out lies had, in shade and subtleties, more angles than a Rubics Cube, Mary Mary found she suddenly no longer trusted what she had hitherto believed . What she remembered she would forget as she glided, lead now by her an awakening intuition across the ice, her eyes cleared, shoulders relaxed for the first time in years, her beard glistened and her lopsided bee-hive was polished smooth by the arctic winds, the aurora borealis danced overhead accentuating her turquoise eye shadow giving Mary Mary an air of royal command.