THE LIT MORTAL BAYNESS

* * *

- 1 -

"To Help Me Stop Smoking"

The Great Lord Jehovah on high gave me a bay mare; fine-boned, with black points that made her look well-dressed. She trotted behind me day and night. If I looked back, she appeared to be coming up eager and brisk, but she never passed and she never drew even.

If I lit a cigarette, she whinnied and stamped her front hooves and snorted. Then while I smoked she would graze – but dolefully.

Every cigarette I didn't have joined a pile on her back, where they were large like firewood.

And she bore them jealously, like a child entrusted with a pretty musical instrument.

Eventually I didn't want to smoke any more. The mare pranced about me on her pretty black hooves and sprang to heaven.

Maybe this was my best friend, loving me. Or the way I touched his temple once in sympathy and brought forth a long period of time in which we were always happy. It could form a vein between people through which good things are pumped.

For example, if I bought a pizza and instead of mushrooms, it had cigarette butts and bottle caps on top –

I'm so hungry, I would eat such a pizza. In fact, I do, and have. I've actually learned to like it.

But say this time I gave it to pigeons. Then miraculously the pigeons turn into human beings and walk away talking excitedly about their best friends. Later, on my way home, I see to my satisfaction that the streets are manholed with new yellow pizzas, clean and very thin, like they make them in France. And no one eats them, though many are hungry. We just walk past, talking excitedly about our best friends.

The Lord Jehovah on high gave me a bay mare. This is really true. It joins a procession of true things that march off the edge of the world. Hand in hand, adorable toys, I see them sing a nursery tune and go jaunty over a brown sketch of earth, and off.

- 2 -

Having given my last commodity to a needy stranger, I found that the order of the world had changed. Now good things were born of themselves, out of the soil on the outskirts of town. After sunset, they made their way instinctively to residential areas and came to our doorsteps still damp and needing a good brush. Those of us who lived in the quarter facing the birthing fields got whole posses of them, and we had our work cut out, throwing the necessary parties. No one got proper sleep, and we were on the phone all day long, relaying good news.

That was the time of self-replicating good things.

Girls grew bay of themselves – there was no need for fancy dyes and vaccines. A man would lift a girl's palm to his lips and smell orchards. Everyone sang on the train.

Some few people, however, who lived on the side of town facing onto the docks, where no good things were born but only fishy winds, had been left out of the distribution. Far from becoming bay and fragrant, they grew anaemic and unpleasantly emotional. They were now made of rubber, and would not wash themselves lest their casing rot. For these people, indoor jobs were naturally out of the question. They worked as carriers, or drudges, or gnomes.

From this imbalance, our town's grievous history began.

* * *

One person torments another. A bright, bay woman with pretty markings tells a dirty rubber woman employers are more likely to hire you if you've already got a job. "You take this bottom-cleaning job for now, you may not like it, but you're then in a position to apply for other bottom work you might enjoy." So blathers on the bay woman; they are in a café.

"You need to be positive. People smell your desperation."

Dirty rubber woman is bent like a cruelly treated banana. No one has given her their magical objects.

Because dirty rubber people are aching receptacles for the magical objects of the free. What one talking loaf or love-bringing pinwheel could not do in such a situation! Do not rest, I say to the misers, do not rest until every cupboard is bare of its objects! Scour the attic, empty the refrigerator, and give up your bed to the weary other!

For we are like those cake machines where for 30 cents you buy cake, and the cake is held in a screw mechanism which turns when the coins are inserted, freeing your cake from its ledge. The cake drops to the trough below. Meanwhile, another cake screws neatly into its place in the display. The cakes keep coming of themselves; that's the way it is. There is no natural end to the cakes. There will be no natural end to the cakes.

Please bestow your things in a timely fashion! Or else:

Once I knew a little rubber woman called Gail.

As a girl, she had been positively maple with bayness, so many pretty markings she had that some bees tried to pollenate Gail, though they knew all the time she was not flowers. Thereby, too, she engendered fondness in children. Even blind children came to her for their pistachio nuts and novelty pencils, I cannot explain it but this is how it was. She didn't even need food, getting by just fine, thank you very much, on regular sunlight. Therefore there never was a toilet in Gail's house.

17 bad people took her pretty markings.

1.) Borrowed her fingers and never gave them back.

2.) Held Daddy up just out of reach.

3.) Sowed her room with nettles.

4.) Wouldn't let her use the alarm when she needed help.

5.) Gave a map of her beloved to ghouls.

6.) Didn't tell her in time about the last boat.

7.) Put her lamps all out in the snow.

8.) Pissed on her wonderful mittens.

9.) Sang a beautiful song from a deep well.

10.) Shaved her luxuriant fur.

11.) Flew vampires noisily overhead.

12.) Shone lies in her face from curiosity.

13.) Supported other, less scrupulous Gails.

14.) Taught shoes to follow her around the house.

15.) Pumped her full of glue.

16.) Broke 17 locks in a sequence traditionally signifying new rubber.

To make a long story short, the girl was raped. It was the Lord Jehovah's scheme to extract her mapleness for use in other sectors. This is all very well for Lord Jehovah, who we know has some plan of his own. But we should have given her our magical objects in a timely fashion. Because we failed to do so, the world began to empty out its goodness and we free people had to go live beneath the earth, where it's unlit and one moulders. We did not even get to keep our past! Certain different things had led up to this under-life, and so we could never remember good things any more.

We were left there and made to live forever. This is what will happen to you, too, if you are greedy and do not expeditiously pass on your magical objects.

- 3 -

The Times of Fashioning

I made one in the bathtub (where I used to keep my mud). It was a moist fidgeting kewpie with no whites in its eyes and no nose. Its name was Hidden. When I carried it in public, people were alarmed to see it move its limbs and raise its spherical head towards them. I always kept Hidden with me, and by virtue of that fact was unemployable. Hidden and I walked round the stores during the day, with the elderly people and single mothers.

I lost Hidden finally by making a wish.

Before that I had an orange that was much the same. I didn't make that one, though, it was made for me by my friend Anthony on his Nordic Track. It took him 17 hours on the fitness test setting – not consecutively, but as his other commitments allowed.

He gave me other things, too: a rug that had veterinary properties, which was a cheerful period of my life, people always dropping in with their pets; a ring that you could put on your finger and someone else's finger at the same time; two useful cows that gave electricity instead of milk.

Anthony was also the one that was buried in my clothes.

He had been at my house and made a mistake which landed him in the bathtub. Then, of course, he was saturated with mud. We were the same size; I gave him one of my boiler suits. He stepped out in the snow and was immediately mashed by big trucks. Nobody could put him together enough to change his clothes.

I used to tell that story to men in their cars. That was when I was working as a passenger, just before I made Hidden. Somehow the wind through the car window… then you're thinking, the landscape, the blue field and the green field with all their details, will blow in on you, too, and when it doesn't you are puzzled like when children fall down but haven't started crying yet. How it stayed very far away, as if it pressed itself back against a wall to let you pass.

Hidden did not approve of my passenger job. That's how we started roaming the shops and markets together, like I said. We met a lot of nice people there, though we talked rubbish to them which was really in the end misleading. "Here I've got a corn like an apple, and two kilometres to walk to the nearest organic doctor," I might complain to a group of boys. All the while I did not mind walking.

I didn't tell anyone about Anthony's clothes at the time because Hidden didn't like me to talk about that. If the subject came up, it put its chubby two-fingered hands up over its whiteless eyes. Everyone understands then that this is a bad subject.

When I made my wish and nobody was dead anymore (this is what people generally want to ask me about) – you won't believe it, but I knew immediately I had made a mistake. Everything was perfectly rhythmic after that. The trees all swaying in time, and the water going push push push to a beat. Also the fact that Earth had now become flat disturbed me. It was then that the good things started marching off the edge, singing.

I was so sorry, but if I'm honest with myself, I'd known. I realised that would happen, but I was in a very fragile state and pretended that I wasn't sure. Then it was too late and Hidden was gone and Anthony turned out to be a heavy drinker who used his intimate knowledge of me as a means of extorting money. That was his frustration, of course, of waking up in this world where people go on dirty rubber wheels instead of the spic and span intelligent mares we both seem to remember.

Anyhow, Hidden is gone. It has joined the procession, where it belongs, marching away to a chipper tune. Sometimes I go out to look at it, the frail line of good things that pass and pass. Other people go too: we are quite the club.

I realise now to keep a good thing is more important than saving all the people you love. But that is how you learn, I suppose – by making mistakes that can never be rectified.

- 4 -

I cried when Jennifer was unhappy. I took a long train journey to leave fresh pears in someone's kitchen. People gave me their old clothes when I was cold. I had a place to sleep when I really needed it.

There were holes which everyone set about filling.

And seagulls stopped to watch, and flew away to try their first altruism.

Though all knew the eggs were cuckoos, hummingbirds raised them as their own. And peacocks folded showy tails to let the wrens pass.

This was the time of manufacturing good things.

Cruelty was turned into a feature-length movie, which no one ever rented from the video store.

Merchandise was wrapped in clean paper and neatly packed. We went outside without it to enjoy the wind.

The word "regret" joined the words "martingale" and "Sopwith," used only when we took the children to sad museums.

When we fell in love, we didn't have to tell anyone. They were the lyrics to the song of frogs, and trees came into bloom in answer. Reciprocation qua reciprocation we found sickly. Anyone, though, apart from our beloved, was good for holding hands. A common evening pastime for us all was sitting in a meadow with a business colleague, holding hands and scanning the horizon. Every now and then, far in the closing darkness, the frail silhouette of a new good thing would rise and shake itself. Then the sky flashed bright purple two times. And in the resulting blackness, the good thing would start its long journey towards us, walking funny like a beaver on dry land.

Sometimes we took up all the carpets in excitement. If you saw someone barefoot, you would tell them disheartening news to calm them down. I am not saying we fainted, really fainted, with happiness, but it's no wonder if we had.

So we were careful not to be too greedy, and, for example, took only luke-warm baths and wore cheap synthetics. We knew the need for moderation always in good things.

Our children had no memory, though, of the earlier times. They were not careful as we were. Sometimes we considered we were over-cautious and their daring would bring new marvels. There was something grand in them, a bright daredevilry we lacked. Thus we allowed ourselves to be besotted by our foolish children.

They began to make good bigger things. Then they made decorations, wrapping and storage cases. There was repeat manufacture of good things once necessary but no longer apt. The first just plain things, too, were made, things which our children named after themselves.

Soon good things were wandering, unwanted, through our back yards, and in our kitchens, useless tongs and melon ballers gathered dust. Men fell askew and stuck. Girls did not know what it was to stand exactly, carelessly upright.

At last, one day, infants began to cry.

At that moment I looked out my window and saw a group of superfluous good things joining hands. They were playing in a ring, singing and kicking their feet. And one of my household good things had scampered out, ducked through the cat flap to join them on the lawn. It clamoured, wanting to play. They made a space for it in their circle.

And I knew we would soon see the string of them, dancing and chirruping, heading for the edge of the world.

* * *

Look, Gail, honey, you've got to pull yourself together. It's not going to do you any good if you lose your flat. I know you're feeling rough.

I know. I know. she said.

But really.

I know.

You're saying this as if you're determined not to do anything about it.

Well, I can't. I can't do anything about it.

It's not going to do you any harm to go back to work. Really. You think it will but it won't.

She just sat there shaking. I sighed.

I said, You've got to be positive and drank my beer from the chill can which felt very sharp on my lips. I looked away at the sky. We were sitting on the bank of the Thames where everything is concrete. The sun shone on us the way a plate glass window shines when its display case is full of things that no one can afford.

I wanted to tell her she was losing my friendship. I wouldn't give up any more afternoons to her blubbering.

She lifted one hand to her face fleetingly, as though by force of habit checking for her beauty, which was actually all gone. I felt punitive and glad at her distress. I felt punitive and glad at the grimy concrete and the water birds' moth-eaten appearance.

I'm actually relieved Anthony isn't along today, I said. I can't deal with him any more. And for a moment something chipper tweaked in my stomach. I was now inviting her to join in my pitiless gladness. We would again be friends and next week too I could meet her and then too we could discuss our pathetic drug-dependent Anthony and the many small things he had stolen from our bedrooms, under cover of hanging up his coat. There were really many things we could discuss, if I would only try harder to think of them. We could also go to the movies.

But Gail straightened up. Her face looked wet now even when she was not crying, but she said imperiously as if still beautiful

No. No, I miss Anthony. I wish he were here. I always wish he were here. I always always care about him and I wish he were here.

In the New Year, Anthony and I followed the good things off the edge of the Earth. Gail would not come with us, saying she had things to do. I still remember her face when we left, wet though she had not been crying – in my mind she is waving a scarf, a blue and green printed scarf, like a person in a film saying Bon Voyage at dockside. But I think she actually just watched us with her arms crossed, calling goodbye in an encouraging voice many times.

PART TWO

In the Underworld

So the good things came into being and passed away, off the world's edge and underneath. And we, too, bereft, passed away off the world's edge and there we remained, in reverse, for all time.

Everything, it seemed, carried on, though if you looked up fleetingly at a window you might spot nothing at all, stretching beyond eyeshot. Nonetheless, if anyone mentioned this, it was just "Oh, Suzanne, and her eccentric turn of phrase!" And Anthony and I soon settled in the underworld. We made new friends there. We got a little apartment near the rail link and both of us found prestigious work.

I was the one whose job it was to tell the slug whores to die. They were gorgeous creatures: lympetescent, pale and vocal. Should they resist, I was authorised to salt them. This they feared more than anything in the world. So they suffocated on purpose and ate bad tacks and drank lyeÉ all of them died. I met my targets and I was a great success. So this was my role in my new environment.

Anthony had a role as an investment container in a downtown firm. He had changed a great deal in superficial ways; as had I. In the morning we donned our modish Compulsion Suits; all day long we misinterpreted into powerful computers; and by night we dined on soylent green at our exclusive club. If we sat very still in the workings of a batch machine, you could not spot us at all, without finders.

We were not bay, but bay's exact photo negative – on purpose – and, we preened ourselves, that was just the same as bay, but our invention. Thus more smart. And envied widely on account of the many posh magazines in photo negative, in which we expected some day to be featured.

Our feelings for each other were poor; our thoughts about each other tailed off. If I came upon Anthony taking his siesta in the moss, I said "Good day," in a grating voice. He responded with used drivel. I did not even remember having any feelings apart from these low, toilet feelings.

We made our peace with the Purveyors.

These were the consequences of our march off the world's edge.

We had found ourselves, in pursuit of good things, to have come to the flip side, where we must walk upside down. It was confusing at first, because so many things were done upside down, but not all, and there was no rhyme or reason. Flinging, for instance, was always reversed, but ducking was only at 90 degrees, and catching could lean, but only in some directions.

People there were mostly mathematically constituted. Instead of greeting them and asking how they did, you totted them up on a form. There was always fierce competition for the higher ratios. People made out to admire your arithmetical prowess, but substracted from you whenever you dropped your guard.

I grew a penis in response. Anthony, not to be outdone, sprung antlers and a long spike. Often we roared and roared. We polluted streams and joined unfriendly clubs where we tippled, boasting of our gadgets. Nonetheless, our lives seemed empty and meaningless.

Our mothers lived on yachts in the Dissolute Sea with men who did not like their company. Sometimes they wrote to us, but only in phrases from the computer spellcheck. Or they simply sent us photocopied fruitcakes and sweaters.

No one could love us, for our ratios were too low. It was all-important to add to our ratios. Then we could be like the metamorphosed slug whores in the magazines. So the desperate chase went on, from day to day, garnering ones and twos with adrenalin-burst elation, only to lose them next day to a were-salesman.

It was not until they told us we would live forever, because of the invention of a new genetically laundered basis, that I understood I'd been imprisoned here because of my immodest wish to never die. And I remembered Hidden and saw it with a fresh orange in its hands. I was sitting on my bed alone and pictured this very clearly although I also saw very clearly my cheap striped wallpaper and the gilt-framed pictures of flamenco dancers.

And Anthony came into the bedroom, having overhead the commotion from the counting floor, and he too stood watching as Hidden hugged the orange and mysteriously pealed and enhanced and raised and countered, as if with lunar bandages. And we hung our heads.

We wanted to cry then but our eyes were like radishes.

We wanted to call out but there were no words in our chests.

We dared not go back to the lit mortal bayness, for were we now to die, we would surely go to hell.