Lee Morgan's Blog

The truth is I want to write myself away from this story. I want to move on because spring is coming. I’m sick of playing the melodies of grief, sick with the aged flavor of regret. Yet I can’t see a way out of this except through the bleeding centre of it. I try to say yes to this rushing world and let the new stories gate crash my synapses. I want to write about things that have nothing to do with any of this, nothing to do with me... On that day when I am through, rather than out, I will occupy myself with writing about the outliers, the rag and bone stories of the forgotten and the marginalized. In doing so I will no doubt find my way back to myself, my own wound still bleeding away under all the lives of strangers I tried to lose myself in. I see myself looking for the heart of darkness at the source of a wild river. Or giving up the pen young like Rimbaud to become an enigma of the inkless type forged in flying sand, one who no longer explains themselves. For now I know I’ll never be out of this and that’s why I might be through… I still have Hemingway in my head telling me: ‘write hard and clear about what hurts.’ So I must finish what I’ve begun, because nothing real ever goes away. Nothing real is vulnerable to destruction or loss, -including grief. Somehow I must go back from where I’m standing today into the raw anguish that is Love’s other face. I wont dare whisper a word about where I’m speaking to you from in the future, lest such a breath of mine disturbs something in the fate threads that brought my current reality into being.             In retrospect I see there is a kind of cleanliness to lack of hope. A graceful simplicity like that of the stark Northern Hemisphere landscape in snow, when all the trees are faerie skeletons and the land holds her lungs on empty. When the person you love is gone, irretrievably lost to you, there is only the next breath after the one you just took. There is no planning for the future. At the bottom is not so much despair as simplicity and mindfulness. You survive because you do. I shall stay alive, not because (as Pablo Neruda put it) above all things you wanted me indomitable, but stripped and pure of because and all excuses for myself. As Neruda also said, I am no longer a man but all mankind. And for us, for me, for us, for me… as a species, because of, and despite, what I’ve seen and known, I choose yes.            ‘…leaves will fall in my breast,            it will rain on my soul night and day,            the snow will burn my heart,            I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,            my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping,            but I shall stay alive…’Yes.The world beyond the horizons of hope is pristine and breathless like high altitude. When you lose the thing that mattered most underneath the crush down on the rib cage, beyond the desperate constriction of the windpipe as you fight for the next breath, there’s a sudden wispy white exhilaration. The beast of the apocalypse turns out to be a lamb with seven heads that pops open your seventh seal as casually as a jam jar. Come and see.When you’re beginning from the starting point of having lost your entire era in time, you’re not afraid anymore. Even when you hear that the dark satanic mills, which the sensitive among us in the nineteenth century already knew were an ill, have clogged up the air and broken the wheel of the seasons, bringing with it the thundering hooves of the horsemen. All I think when I hear them riding isn’t fear, it’s only: I shall resist. With every power available to me, I shall resist. The ones that come for the trees and come to take apart the chain of life itself we all depend on, what can they do to me in punishment that has not already been done? When you see beyond your fear you realize you are not indeed a man or woman, but all of mankind walking. Along with your brothers and sisters you have already been beaten, raped, poisoned, imprisoned unjustly, murdered, silenced, forgotten, oppressed, expunged, mutilated and scorned. You have disappeared in an instant along with a sky-bludgeoning explosion that leveled the streets for blocks around you, evaporated to dust by a brain scorched distortion of faith. You have been spat on and vilified; you have been in chains before and executed before jeering crowds. And until your brothers and sisters are all free, you are still.  The power of being mankind surges through you like some ancient serpentine force waking in the cradle of the hipbones. Because you are no longer afraid you instinctually know you can do anything. Fear is what they’ve always used to tame us, after all. To turn the wolves among us into dogs... Fear of the master’s boot in the face, fear of not having enough if we bite the hand that feeds us, fear of an empty belly, fear for our young… But when you invested everything in someone once… When that is ripped brutally from your hands along with the whole world you knew and everyone in it, there’s nothing left to keep you a dog. There is a no longer any disincentive to disobedience. For the desolate there is nothing to beat or threaten us with, to hold over your head and say I will hurt this one you love if you do not do x, y and z, -how every bully has won against better men for all time! No. They keep winning because of fear. Yet you let it in at the same door as love, and what is the point of us as a species without opening that beautiful and terrible door? Where would you be now if you didn’t love your family and therefore fear for them? If you didn’t think of their immediate needs, what tree might you be chained to? What bull-dozer might you have stood in front of if you didn’t know your poor family couldn’t afford the fine they charge us for protesting or the bail to get you out of prison? What vulnerable person might you have helped if your children weren’t in the car with you?What you learn, when you’re suddenly standing in that place of quiet desolation is why you should never, ever be so unwise as to create a powerful sorcerer with nothing left to lose. If such a one set their mind to your destruction, or put their will behind a cause you don’t like very much… You back such a person into a corner at your own peril. There is a single way to disturb the ancient repose of one who moves from breath to breath in the way mountains endure, to return such a man who has already lost everything twice over, to a state of vulnerability wherein he might be attacked by an enemy... To one who has ceased to feel fear the most terrifying thing, is hope…
Dear Carmen
In retrospect, considering you no longer need to conceal any of your thoughts from me, could you write down what happened? I want to know what your genuine impressions were. You were so cagey when you returned from the meeting, and I remember the strange feeling it gave me. Like something was coming for me and I didn’t know if it was good or bad. Something I as yet had no name for…
-Henry
Inside Jack Green's in HobartWell, you know I’m the one into keeping records of everything, which you say is 'very Allport' of me. But since I’ve been hanging around witches there's people that aren't so easy to explain, you know? ‘Witch’ is the right thing to call it, isn’t it? Alma uses that word but I notice you don’t. I guess in your day it was still not a safe thing to identify as.             Anyway, with you people I have to get used to the fact I can’t just slot you into a type. Like Alma and her dreadlocks with designer clothing, this guy was the same, but different. Like you weren’t sure if he was hipster or outdoorsmanish? I know you reckon stereotypes are intellectual laziness, but most of the time I found, before I met you folk, that after I’ve boxed and labeled most people they seldom surprise their way out of it.             When he sat down in front of me, very casual and unassuming. I think because of how he carried himself I didn’t notice how attractive he was right off the bat. I guessed he was over thirty but couldn’t place his age exactly, and that his hair was on the darker side of blond. The main thing I noticed (I’ll admit it) was I thought his beard was hipsterish. He wasn’t man-bun levels of hipster but I was still calling it. Then I spotted that his pants were probably from Kathmandu and were designed to be practical outdoors wear. They were clean but they’d taken some shit in their time, as had his boots, so I found I believed he’d grown that beard on a long stay outside the city. Whether this was true or not it wasn’t immediately possible to tell. I was just sitting there because Alma had said I needed to meet him while he was in town.             “Hi, my name’s Carmen,” I said, as I sat down in front of him. We were in Jack Greene's down at Salamanca, and he’d chosen a couch to sit on. He looked like he was lounging back casual and at ease in his skin, but I could see he was noticing everything going on around us. He wasn’t obvious about it. But Maddie and I’s dad was a bouncer, back in the day. He used to talk about it a lot. So I grew up learning to appraise men as fighters and to be able to tell the difference between bluff and the real deal. Suffice to say there were signals from early on in the conversation that I didn’t want to mess with this guy, and I don’t altogether know how I knew. Was it the scarring on his knuckles or his wary eyes, back to the wall, always scanning his field of vision every thirty seconds or so… There’s a warrior strain to this magic you people do, I know that much just from sniffing around him.             “I’m Kit,” he said, offering me his hand to shake. I noticed pretty early on his accent was English like Alma’s, but it was fainter, less distinctive, more generic, as if he'd moved around a bit.             “As in Kit Marlowe?” I replied as I shook it. His handshake was firm in a reassuring way that didn’t seem to patronize me as a woman, but it wasn’t hard enough that he made a point of it. In fact, you could basically tell almost nothing from it beyond a certain egalitarianism. You could tell something from the way his eyebrows jumped up at my mention of Marlowe though. His lips curved at the corner in a half smile.             “Yes, as in Kit Marlowe,” he sounded casual as he said this, reaching for his drink and taking a sip from it. It wasn’t until he was done with it and set it back down that he glanced up at me.  I was discomforted by him, I’ll admit it. God knows Maddie is the imaginative one in the family, but I swear to god I saw some gleam behind his eyes like the intelligence of a patient wolf. Maybe it was just me noticing for the first time that one of his eyes was a slightly different colour to the other. “Are you very familiar with Renaissance theatre?” There was a dry quality to his question but it was so subtle I couldn’t accuse him of taking the piss. I was floundering in the water of my own assumptions about him. Because he wasn’t quite a hipster, and he wasn’t quite a down to earth outdoors guy, I knew he could handle himself physically but he wasn’t a thug. I had a fairly strong feeling he did know his way around Renaissance drama and he’d catch me if I tried to bluff.            So I laughed. “Nah. Don’t even know what he wrote, mate. I only remember him from the movie with Shakespeare in it when I was a kid. It just came to mind because I’m living with this guy… like as a flat mate I mean. He’s nerdy, you know literature and the arts type nerdy?”            That smile was there again, so faint you could barely see it. “Yes, I know the type.”             He gave away no more than that so I plunged on courageously. “It’s about him that I came here, you see. I guess you could say...” My palms were sweating as I went through my handbag to find the photographs I’d taken of your wounds and your torn clothing, and of the labels and the opium bottles and all the proof I had. “I’ve witnessed a miracle.”            He nodded soberly. I didn’t feel like he was bracing himself like Alma, who always acted as if she’d seen far too many of those already. There was instead a bleak calm in him, I felt. As if it was going to take a lot to surprise him and even more to unsettle him. “Okay. Hit me with your miracle.”             Not knowing what else to do I thrust the photographs into his hands. “This is our Henry. He came out of the ocean.”            It sounds like a stupid thing to say in retrospect, but he didn’t act like the statement was silly at all. He just took the photos from me and went through them slowly. “He says the last thing he remembers it was 1874.”            He raised his eyes brows and nodded slowly while he continued to examine the photographs. If he was surprised by someone coming back from the dead, doubted it or immediately believed, he didn’t let on. “A few things have changed since then,” he murmured in studied understatement. He stopped on one where you could see your face and looked at it for quite some time. Finally he folded the pictures back up and placed them on the table, passing them across to me. “And you believe him?”            This wasn’t the question I had expected but I surprised myself with the strength of my conviction. “Yes. Entirely. There isn’t a shadow of doubt in me after some of the things that have happened.” I pushed the photographs back across to him but he seemed to hesitate to pick them up. “You keep them. I’ve written Henry’s email address on the back in case you want to investigate further.”            He grinned. It was the first time his smile had seemed to contain real humour and it drew my attention away from feeling intimidated and towards being charmed. “A nineteenth century gentleman with an email address? What is the world coming to? Even our zombies are using social media.”            “If I was my mum I’d say something about how especially our zombies are on social media, but she’s still eating up what Murdoch’s newspapers peddle.”             “Indeed,” he agreed quietly.             “Henry’s a quick learner. And he’s not a zombie. I mean… Those wounds healed up he looks fine now. His blood pressure and all vitals are normal. I'm a nurse,” I added.             He nodded. "Same."            "Really? You're kidding?"             With an expression of confusion at my incredulousness he shrugged. "If you don't believe me I've probably got a picture of myself in scrubs on my phone?" He took another long drink, one that emptied his glass as if he required the alcohol immediately to fortify him for something difficult.               "No that's fine, I believe you. It's just you don't look like a nurse."               He shrugged again. "What does a nurse look like? I'm ER trained in the UK but I haven't got my registration to practice here. At the moment this is what I do,” he explained. “I investigate the extraordinary. Nine times out of ten it’s fake, but I don’t do it to find those. One time out of ten it’s not fake. If you just keep looking long enough, go up enough blind alleys, make enough wrong turns…” He seemed to get distracted in his chain of thought then, and he broke off to order another drink. I had the dizzying feeling for a moment that he wasn’t okay. It seemed almost certain, all of a sudden, as if he had something seriously mentally wrong with him, and yet it didn’t stop me trusting him. It makes no sense to write it down like that, but there it is. I thought he was a bit mad by the end of the conversation, but my gut was okay with that fact. “How did he die?” “Who?” I asked, because the question came out of nowhere. "Your miracle."“Suicide.”“Why?” he asked immediately, almost abruptly. I frowned. The question sounded almost confrontational, and it didn’t go unnoticed that he’d already almost finished his second drink while I was still on the first half of mine. “It was complicated,” I muttered, feeling defensive of you somehow. “But it was for love. He and the man he loved… who was my ancestor as it turns out… They were under threat of what we’d now call anti-gay persecution. He thought his love was safer with him gone.”“I’ll bet his love disagreed vehemently,” he muttered, before swallowing the rest of his drink. “I’ll talk to your Henry,” he said at last, after gazing out the window for a period of time that I would normally consider rude. “Someone I used to know accused me of having a thing for tragedies… Just in case he’s number ten, all right? I may as well be dead if I stop believing in the one out of tens… But not via email, I’ve had some bad experiences with that sort of thing over the years... I’d rather his phone number, I need to hear a voice. These days I pick the cases I’ll deal with very carefully. I want full names and phone numbers, but you don’t get mine. I’ve got my reasons, I can’t really tell you what they are right now though. If you can trust me I’m a man of my word, and if I can help you I will. I’m heading up to the Tarkine for a bit, not sure when I’ll swing back down as yet, but when I do I’ll look Henry up. Are you going to trust me? It’s your call. ”I gazed into his eyes for a long time before I answered, narrowing mine. Always felt like I’m a good judge of character, but never had I felt in the position to have to take such a big risk on that belief. He could have been anyone. And yet… Already I was going through my bag looking for paper and a pen. Without answering him I sat there and wrote out my full legal name, and Henry’s, and both our phone numbers. With one finger I slowly passed it across the table to him like a symbol of my leap of faith.               He nodded once in acknowledgment. “Thank you for trusting me.”





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Dear Henry,
 I thought I’d leave you with something to do, just in case you fall into one of the boxes of his old correspondence and we never see you again! You know I want you to write about what happened when you went to see the collection, but this quote came up in my news feed today and I can’t stop wondering what your opinion of it will be. I’ve thought I was in love a time or two in the past but it’s always been a big disappointment. When I think about great, grandfather Cecil putting his grief towards leaving a beautiful story like this… Makes me wonder if in some fucked up way you two weren’t the lucky ones? To get to keep this perfect image of your love that might have been, -though you may hate me for saying so. Anyway, the quote…
"You will not know this for some time, but the longing for something--for someone--is vastly superior to possession. The strain of desire is the greatest sensation, the ultimate folly of God. I believe this is why we are always dissatisfied with art and life and people and experience: nothing can compete with our imaginations and our strength of desire. It is wise to always desire something, to keep something of a flame, an energy, to one's life and heart."
—Tennessee Williams
Thoughts? Maybe I just leave this here because sometimes I’m scared for you, Henry. I joke about you falling into one of those old boxes and not coming back, but it’s not all a joke. I'm scared for you in this crazy world you've emerged in and I'm just scared for all of us because I'm modern and anxious so deal with it. 
Love, Carmen
 Dear Carmen,

I’ve wrestled with your question through a few patchy sleeps, because I must, when someone takes the time to ask a question about something real… I must give it the time such a rare eruption of frankness deserves in this world. Rather than hating the bearer of the question I'm more inclined to take it out on the question. Yet I’ve come to the conclusion I’m hopelessly biased in this area. Because I will not, cannot, believe that more isn’t possible. That we live in a world so hopelessly cruel and cold that love is but some chimera placed before us to trick men and women into breeding, where wires simply got crossed and confused inside people like me. No, it serves some greater purpose than mere lure. I believe that Fate is cold indeed, but not monolithic like the standard notion of God. I believe Fate is dynamic and that you can find loopholes if you’re cunning, persistent and brave. Through the kind of patience that exhausts every possible numerical code, the unbreakable safe is opened. Of course my perspective alters my judgment. I can never be sure it’s possible to leave the era I was born in. Part of me is, perhaps, ever Victorian? A wafting scent from the Age of Innocence caught like thistledown on that first breeze that smells like spring. Do you know that smell that's not quite so much a smell but a sensation inside the nostril? When it’s still deep into winter but the quality of the air changes and you don’t so much as yet smell spring, but the taste of its promise?Maybe this is one of the quintessential questions that any person of intelligence must come to on the matter of desire. Maybe this is one of those questions people from different centuries need to ask each other across the semi-permeable membrane of death? Because our answers won’t be the same. Humanity needs the dead to keep speaking with multiple tongues and answers, or our world becomes narrower and more lethal than a knifepoint. Only what is silenced dies. There is simply too much evidence of the failure of the first flame of early affection in any age for the question to not arise. Especially for the people of your time… Where hushed nighttime rendezvous, once only witnessed by a disturbed horse and some curious marsupial rat, are lit up with electrical lighting and furious text messages. What a nest of paranoia, a flashing screen-mind of parading faces and rapid-fire response, requiring regular reassurance that the other is still there on the other end of the pixels, because the scent of a person can’t yet be digitalised... In relationships you do not chew your food.Even in present context, despite all the noise and rush, I would have to say I consider Tennessee Williams’ quote to be both true, in that it describes the most likely circumstances, but not infallibly true, -in that it does not describe the outlying possibilities of life. It doesn’t describe the loop holes that the cunning may discover. I cannot speak with total authority on the matter, never having experienced the ‘possession’ of the subject of my longing. From outside the consummation barrier I would argue against the desirability of the word possession. Perhaps this is what makes the feeling of longing superior, for this Williams man? (I assume he’s a new writer of some note whose work I should look up?) That the alternative for him is framed as possession? What if there is a dynamic state in between these two extremes? Where the beloved is neither unobtainable nor possessed? Is a total collapse of the personalities, space, and expression of two individuals not the very death of passionate attraction? It takes strong imagination and interpersonal skills to convert the friction of difference to sparks of passion, to learn to feed off what is different as well as what is same in the Other. People think they don’t have the time for it anymore, but really it hasn’t yet found the time for them.            To me the ultimate outcome of love, the outlying possibility, is the coming together of two highly developed personalities, planetary-sized worlds coming into conjunction, both confident enough in the emanation of their own truth that they feel no need to diminish or restrict the other. Love of this sort between two or more parties creates a nexus of force that draws like powers into its orbit. Neither yields his disposition to the other, yet both grow in sympathy and wear away at the discomfort of antipathy. I cannot quite explain yet much beyond that. But I know what it feels like, this purposeful keeping of the edge, keeping a little tension, a little room for meditation upon creative, self-chosen non-satisfaction (which is never the same as dissatisfaction). For it requires that both separate and pursue their natural learning and self-improvement in the manner that suits their temperament. When they come together they do so enriched and bringing fertile difference to the interaction. It is my belief there are many sharing their bodies on a nightly basis that have never shared their minds the way we did, or their hearts. I would say many who share a bed nightly never put half the thought into how they please each other with their bodies as we did with our minds. Not that I wish to suggest celibacy to anyone! Fundamentally I cannot accept that our love would have lost anything in its piquancy and sweetness had it been consummated. After all we’d have had to fight hard to be together, had we managed it, I can’t imagine letting a day of complacency pass by me. Perhaps you are right that we were the fortunate... Our enemies don’t plan to gift us with anything, but even in the foul poisons of their bigotry we would have extracted something beautiful. A gratitude for each other’s touch that most, loving unopposed as they do, will never be able to imagine. So we win really. Quietly. Not the kind of victory that comes from legislations, but the kind that sings its victory to the stars alone. Crying out mutely through its own poison-converted beauty: we deserve to be.
The Allport Museum is an era pressed in the pages of a book like an old flower. Each room cordoned off from touching, our time, frozen, kept still forever, silent but for the backing of the ticking grandfather clock. When I paused before the room containing Mary Allport’s harp I stopped and frowned. “Who plays her harp?” I whispered.“What do you mean?” My guide asked. “Oh, now, today? I really don’t know. I don’t think anyone is allowed to play it.” “Instruments are meant to be played.” I couldn’t have explained to her my strong identification with the unplayed instrument preserved as a relic of a bygone time, for seemingly no purpose but that of preservation itself.“It’s for it’s own protection. It’s very old now.” I nodded my understanding yet my words argued the point. “Better, if one were a harp, whose sole purpose is to make music, to fall apart playing when your time has come than to sit unplayed for centuries.”


The cabinet I had to find is stored in a room you can only enter with a librarian escort, and generally speaking only writers and researchers are allowed. The Crowther Collection is separated on opposites sides of this vault of hidden, lost things are stored, because during life the man the world knew as Cecil had a long-standing grudge against Crowther.             “So why do you want to look at the cabinet of curiosities?” the librarian asked.             “I’m writing a novel in which Cecil is one of the characters.” On the spot I decided to do it so it wouldn’t be a lie.             “Why Cecil though? I think Moreton was a far more interesting sort of man. Cecil just appears to have been very good at making money. Nothing much personal shows through with him at all.”             I exhaled air through my nostrils with quiet humour. When you look at your own life and you remember how much you’ve already edited. The things you’ve burned, the emails deleted, the edited photograph albums with old boyfriends removed, should we not see the dead in ourselves? The traces left of a life one hundred and fifty years later are but the ashes of a story fire that’s most pungent truths sometimes don’t make the cut when it’s time to decide what is preserved. What of a father’s life do we preserve to show to grandchildren? What of a grandfather’s?“How do people know that yet, if no one’s written a proper biography?” I asked gently, not wanting to appear defensive of a dead man. “Surely no one with such a fine eye for beautiful things could have been so straightforward?”            “True. Who knows what he was up to in his spare time, I guess?”
            Me. But I refrained from articulating this as we rode the elevator up to ‘11’ (which you can’t see on the visitor maps and is only reachable by staff that have a particular level card to swipe) we met two other librarians. They spotted where we were heading.             “Are you going up to 11? I’ve been here five years and I’ve never got to see 11! Are you a writer or something?”            “Yes.”            “Oh you’re here for the grisly medical equipment!”            -Clearly I have come to look like someone who is here for the grisly medical equipment. “No,” I muttered self-consciously. “Just… shells…”
           “Here it is, the whole thing’s Huon Pine,” The lady explained. As she opened the drawers the smell of my century poured out and I tried to breathe it in like it was snuff. The cabinet contained a great deal more than shells. Small packets of powders in red and white, little viols of dirt… “What is anyone going to do with little bits of dirt like that?” she asked. Fortunately I’d tucked away the very similar glass vial of dirt from his grave hanging around my own neck at that very moment.“Nobody’s really catalogued this properly,” the librarian remarked. “They were basically 19.th century hoarders. Moreton started keeping things even before Cecil carried it on. Moreton was the interesting one, with his photography and everything. Or Mary and her painting! What got you interesting in old Cecil out of all the Allports?” she queried again. “He just seemed to me like the rock who held the family together and lived only to perform his duties to his family, if he had a fun side there’s no record of it. Other than that he eccentrically pottered away collecting stuff in his spare time. What does a novelist do with that?”            “It’s hard to explain,” I murmured, running my fingers reverentially over the tiny vials and boxes. Beyond all the tiny containers full of my century my eye was immediately drawn to the small spiral shaped white shell which is identical to the one I found on his grave. When I lay my fingertips on it and felt something jolt through my body. I picked up one of the cowries and held it to my ear. “Did you hear the ocean from the nineteenth century in there?” the librarian joked. “I'm not sure, but one has to check.”
As I left the library I found myself walking behind two young men close to the age of Arthur and I myself  when I left. They were walking arm in arm, one of them wearing a suit and the other dressed very casually. The coincidence made the hairs on the back of my arms stand to. I thought it lovely, taking it for a friendly gesture as it once would have been in my time, but I smiled when I saw them shift to holding hands and realized they were in fact lovers. They were going the same way as me and I couldn’t help observing them as a slightly uncanny manifestation.As I had not yet once seen two men go hand-in-hand up Liverpool Street with the blithe happiness of these two. They were gawked at by every second or third passerby, I’m sorry to report, even today. One old lady visibly jumped a little when she noticed they were both male. But something inside me flared up in rebellion and defiant elation even at this. I felt such an aching sorrow-softened species of happiness to see how unaffected by it they were, as though they neither noticed or cared. And why should they? Despite what we've all heard in the news the law of this land allows them this basic right these days. See how that better world you promised me has partially arrived, my dear? I thought, feeling the gentle tap-tap of his grave dirt vial against my chest as I walked.
This is why we need to tell stories outside of the happy ending model made to end with a marriage, because nothing ever ends, and if it does it doesn’t end happily. Things continue to unravel even after death in a parade of signs and omens, an unfurling of banked meanings we stored for the ear that might listen one day, the heart that would understand. For many of us the ear to hear us and the heart to understand haven't been born yet. So we leave traces. A letter still unopened. A journal with subtle encoded meaning. A story unhoused at last. The echoes of their voice are still reverberating. Whenever someone catches the signal they come alive again for a moment. Nothing is ever truly over, just deferred. Ours is a story yet to be told, always to be told.

What is remembered lives. 

Alma’s Testimony (-requested by Carmen after the fact) 


My original training was in archeology and I’ll admit people are a kind of dig to me. Right from the first moment I see them. I start dusting back earth carefully, sorting through rubble, collecting samples, bagging and tagging… Some of the samples I take through observation skills, the rest… Suffice to say, with Henry I knew he was for real from the moment he greeted me on Criterion Street. When you talk to the dead all your life you get a sense for the feel of a historical period. People from different places and times smell differently, move differently, sound differently, to you and I today. Such as the way there was no self-consciousness to his attempt to pull out my chair. He did it on reflex and then tried to prevent himself just in the manner of someone with a long-standing physical habit.When you really pay attention to other people you start to notice things like that. But today most everyone's too attention starved to learn how to be powerful. All our most cherished secrets are like that, hidden in plain sight because no one can be bothered really doing them. Henry wasn't like that though. Which was another signature of his era. He was watching me just as closely. In my memory I was back in in a prattishly middle class home in West Kennett, years ago now, where quite unexpectedly I met other people like myself… We come in all sorts you see, sexes, social classes, ethical temperaments... Until that day back in Wiltshire, I hadn’t known there were other people who wanted to see what lies beneath the silt and dust strata of things. “Thank you for meeting me today, Miss Alma…”“Don't stress yourself, Dickens,” I teased him with a little punch in the arm to loosen him up. "Alma's cool with me."My practiced eye saw more than his apologetic head ducking. It was clear to me from small nuances in his body language and grey-to-pale-blue eyes that here was someone who usually learns very fast. Someone who makes tremendous demands upon themselves and gets irritated quickly when he doesn’t immediately correctly master a new skill. I could also tell he was used to struggling to fit in and that the fear of not doing so went down to the self preservation level. “My apologies. It is always the interaction between the formal and informal aspects of modern socializing where I trip up. Usually just when I think I have it all under control!” I smiled as I watched him thank the waitress as she filled his water glass and took his order for a pot of loose-leaf black (Milk, no sugar). The stitches on the cuff of his shirt, which showed by about half an inch at the end of his grey suit coat as he extended his hand for the glass, were elegantly hand-stitched. The material was high quality linen. I wondered if this was Madeleine's work? I had already noticed her noticing me noticing her clothing!His hands were long-fingered and fine boned in the way we palmists read as indicating a sensitive and artistic temperament. The fact his fingernails were very closely manicured to the finger, and his hands untoughened by hard work anywhere except around the fingertips led my guess that he was a musician. “It must be difficult for you, adapting to all this.” My sympathy was genuine even though I could not truly imagine his predicament. An old friend of mine back home who is of the blunt sort, would have grunted at me: ‘enough with the small talk’, but Henry had a more gentlemanly style of frankness.“I can see you’re very good with people, Alma. It seems you have kindness in you, which is rarer still. I’m told you have The Sight like I do?” Although he appeared to dodge my question I felt I learned about him from the fact he didn’t answer. There was a feeling of firm emotional discipline around this young man that held in check a brewing storm. At the moment I thought this a glass shattered in the kitchen and someone cried out in shock. Everyone in the café stopped talking for a moment. Henry didn’t jump like everyone else. He looked back at me when I stared at him and raised one of his eyebrows faintly, but almost defiantly, as if to say ‘what?’ I sensed that like poltergeists, the ghosts of the young ones who had never spent the energy of their heart and sex, he had probably felt the swell and ‘pop’ in his chest right before the sound. It wasn't the first time this had happened to him.  Of course I didn’t take the bait by mentioning it. I’ve always found it best when in the presence of strong preternatural activity, the full capacity of which you aren't sure of yet, to never let them see surprise or fear.“I do. Did you ever hate it, being Sighted? When you were growing up?”“Indeed. My mother believed I was a changeling. Whenever I was disagreeable she would threatened to leave me out on the hill for my real family to come and get me. Now, you say you’ve seen a lot of things, S… My apologies,” he cleared his throat. “Alma. For some reason I went to call you some other name and I can’t for the life of me think what it was now?”It was my turn to raise my eyebrows but my expression was more on the sceptical side. I wasn’t buying his attempt to pass his ability off as a slip of the tongue. I figured he was trying to hedge his bets in case he’d guessed the first letter incorrectly, which he hadn’t. “Well, I’ve had a few names over the years, more than one of them started with S. Not many people know what they were though…” I left the words hanging in the air to see if he’d take the bait. He pretended not to notice, like a proud peregrine falcon that won’t take landed meat from your hand but must chase the lure. "It's kind of a 'I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you' sort of deal."“Oh. Well seems best to steer away then. Perhaps instead, you could answer for me what I find to be my most burning current question? Why do you imagine I was sent back when so many were not?”I wanted to tell him I wasn’t the Oracle of Fucking Delphi and I was over people wanting big universal answers to the meaning of things! After some of the bad calls I'd made in the past it was a wonder I was still practicing at all. Sometimes when a seer makes a mistake people get hurt. But sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and be the priestess you were looking for as a younger woman. Table the fact you don't have all the answers. Deliberately assuming that mindset I found myself thinking mythically. “I suppose you were able to make all of Hell weep for you or something, hon.”He frowned as he sipped his tea and glanced up at me over the rim of the cup. “What do you mean?”I smiled to myself. I felt so old under the weight of the piled up meanings around that story… That moment when you realize you’ve made a reference that only two humans left alive would have understood the exact significance of and neither of them are present. With a melancholy sigh I relied on explanation in the place where I missed understanding. “In the myth of Baldr, the Norse shining one, he was slain by the finest projectile, a little piece of mistletoe. Hel agreed to return Baldr on the condition that all the denizens of the Underworld would all weep as one for his sad tale. Everyone did except for Loki, if it hadn’t have been for Loki then Baldr would have been resurrected.”He nodded to himself slowly. “Rather fitting,” he muttered. “I was slain by something very fine indeed. Mere words... I cannot imagine though why I would be wept for by so many. There are an ample number of tragedies in this world after all. Mine was but one drop of salt in the ocean.” He shrugged gracefully, as if the weight of excessive self-importance were something you could slip off the shoulder’s like an old coat, even at his age.“Why did you kill yourself?” I asked. “What makes you think I killed myself?”“The air felt like a held breath when you walked up to me. Suicides feel like that. Used to make me claustrophobic until I got used to it.”“Fear,” he sighed. “Fear that if I refused to do so the man I loved would fall victim to state sanctioned murder for the crime of loving me. His mother made it clear to me that such an outcome was on the cards, and let me know what I needed to do to protect him.”“Wow… Nice mother! And did your man get any say in this, whether he wanted this grand sacrifice in the name of his protection?” I was probably a bit sharp with him, but his story hit a nerve for me. It hit somewhere far too close to the reason the people I most cared about were now scattered all around the world.Pain flashed into Henry's eyes that reminded me of sheet lightning, partly shielded and diffused by clouds that obscure the view of the thing itself. Curtly he shook his head and swallowed uncomfortably. “As to his mother, I imagine she felt she did what she had to.” Quite suddenly he looked back at me. “She had reason enough to be afraid for her son. Times were different then. May I now in turn ask you something personal?”“I guess…”“Alma isn’t your real name, is it?” I admit I flinched. Just wasn’t used to being around anyone who saw past my façade with Christopher AWOL for so long now. “It was once,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”“When we met you said ‘you can call me Alma’ rather than ‘I am’. When I say 'Alma' you exhibit no immediate twitch response, there’s a lag. Perhaps I am strange that I notice such things. Small things. Faerie-sized things… The almost invisible things... But that is what having the Sight is about, don't you think? The Noticing? Who are you hiding from and why does it scare you that you know I'm real?”The hair was standing up on my arms as if I was afraid he somehow knew everything.          “Pardon?”“I was too frank, let me try again," his tone was calm and carried a cool, understated type of kindness which I first mistook for mere politeness. "What I mean to say is this: someone I used to know who had a lot of different names taught me that when people use a different name they are keeping one of their faces hidden. I would like to know why before I trust you.”
Stimulus question: Henry, please explain your thought process after meeting Alma up until the moment you solved his riddle?
One question obsessed me utterly. What kind of fairytale were we in? It was a question I'd lived with all my life but now Arthur had brought it to a head. I had assumed a love story. Yet the genre of the love story, ending with a marriage as they usually do, had never really made a lot of sense to me. My early demise had, in fact, been a result of the world convincing me that tragedy was the only kind of narrative where someone like me appears. So I guess I didn’t really look at Alma immediately and think of her as someone who could help me. What was there left to help with? Everything I half-lived after he wasn't there anymore was an after thought. A postscript of sorts. Surely? It seemed too late for everything. Now was just about picking through the ashes of a vanished flame, trying to make sense of it, and speaking aloud my silenced tale. I already knew the way I wanted to write about love wouldn’t be like your conventional love story. It would be serpentine, winding, crooked, and intricate full of quiet contemplative retreats where he and I would meditate on the mystery of one another from afar. Where we would shed skins and don new ones for each other’s fresh delight. Where we would only seek each other’s company again once we had watered the flower of our longing, only when we were aching for it, so that the sight alone of each other ravaged the senses.  This is how he and I had begun on instinct alone, but we we had never arrived… It seemed as though perhaps we never would. Love as an art form, with all the usual discipline you’d expect from art, rather than a gorged-down, unconscious biological imperative, was something I was born knowing the way I was music. I knew stories about love that didn’t wrap up with a happy ending, but instead bore it out through the trials of life its glory and bravery both untarnished by the corrosion of time. Already I knew how to begin it, and perhaps even how to live it, given the chance, I just didn’t know how to write it yet. I suppose nothing deemed unspeakable easily knows how to speak of itself, until suddenly it does, and the world rearranges to make room for a fresh influx of guerilla narrative.           “What’s the saddest fairytale you can think of?” You asked me while I was sitting in your lounge room with my notebook, trying to crack Arthur’s code. I see now that you weren’t far off leading me to the answer in that question, but clearly this was not the way I was meant to find it.            “It isn’t going to get solved this way,” I replied, getting to my feet and walking to the window. I leaned against the casement and looked out. The window didn’t face the street as those on my family home had done and I felt the loss of it. The front window was where I sat waiting for his arrival to repeat itself, as I had a feeling it would, time after time in different contexts, different streets, different eras.             “Maybe this is something Henry has to do alone,” Madeleine suggested tactfully.             If displeasure had been read into my comment it wasn’t present. I was merely in a state of deep concentration, the type that comes right before settling into the calm at the eye of the storm where all good ideas body forth from. Arthur knows me. This I must have faith in that if nothing else. He would know me anywhere, no matter what, and I would know him. And if that is so then he would have picked something that would fall into line with my most natural impulses, the things I would do if I was just acting normally….             “Research,” I suddenly said aloud to myself. “If I couldn’t solve it off the top of my head, I would do research! Carmen? May I borrow your internet machine?”
This is the way fairytales happen in the 21st century… They start with words like: I entered “Fairytale +Sea Shell +Mill wheel” on Google and the top hits were ‘The Little Mermaid’. And they finished with... I still don't know how they finish.  He and I are history's suspension dots.          My heart began to gush a glut of ocean water into my throat. It stung but I swallowed hard. Without needing to elaborate I knew the story. Released in the 1840’s ‘The Sea Maid’ by Hans Christian Anderson was childhood reading material for Arthur and I. But which was the part that had contained an image of both a sea shell and a water mill? I searched for this and found in them in the part of the tale that deals with the sea maid’s journey to the dwelling of the sea witch, where she must pass through water mill-like swirling and over the skeletons of drowned men.Drowned in a flooding Hobart rivulet, which contained multiple mill wheels, through which my battered corpse had to pass, I had gone full fathoms five to the sea witch’s depths where the skeletons of whales lurked. So this imagery brought the hairs to a stand on the back of my neck, to the tune of the pouring rain outside. But that was just only the beginning of my friend's ingenuity and subtlety. As I continued the research I could feel his mind dancing with mine. I was on the blood trail the story was leaving. Finally it was truly pungent with truth! In the story Ariel was a fae creature fallen in hopeless love for a human man. The man hears her singing voice and greatly admires her. Later she rescues him from drowning. She is so enamored of him that when the sea witch offers to trade her two human legs to walk on land in return for her voice, she accepts. The sea witch cuts out her tongue, in later versions her voice is stored in a seashell. The sea witch tells her she can only earn a human soul if she is given the kiss of true love by her prince, otherwise she will simply turn into sea-foam. She agrees to these harsh conditions and the sea witch adds her voice to her ‘collection’. As I read my fingers that itched to play but had not the quality of music in them twitched and burned. What if, as for the sea maid, I find him only to be unable to identify myself without my music? In the story Ariel gets her chance to be human and perhaps earn a soul but the prince will only ever love the owner of that beautiful voice he once heard, and Ariel has cut out her tongue so she cannot sing... This is the central wrenching tragedy of this saddest of the faerie tales… She is locked out from receiving a human soul because he can love no one but the owner of that voice she no longer has. Given an option to save herself by doing harm to her beloved she prefers death to betrayal, and as the reward of an amoral universe is forced to watch him marry another. Keeping her love silent the mermaid turns into sea foam, but her spirit is lifted up by the faeries of air who tell her there is still a chance for her if she spends hundreds of years doing good deeds. In later versions of the story the little mermaid gets her voice back from the sea witch at the end, the sea witch has been collecting voices in sea shells.             As soon as the thought of voices in seashells occurred I thought of the image of the shell inside the ear that Arthur had showed me. It had always been the way he skin-rode people, after-all, going in through the ear… I looked up seashells and ‘collection’ down the rabbit hole of the hidden Allport collection.Suffice to say there’s a whole Huon Pine 'cabinet of curiosities' of which a large part is devoted to a sea-shell collection, probably started by Cecil’s mother and continued on by him and his son Henry… The idea of Cecil’s mother as the sea-witch who stole my voice and prevented me declaring my love made sense. And the idea that Arthur would secret this virtue he meant to support my work with, this magical packed punch he'd brewed in our denial, into something associated with giving me back my stolen voice unwords me utterly.             Wrapped up in the layers of meaning is Hans Christian Anderson’s own unrequited love for a young man, and his pain when forced to keep his love that dared not speak its name silent whilst watching his beloved marry someone else. Tears rolled down my face as I read. Arthur didn’t just know indeed how I think, it seemed to me he was saying: I see you. I know you. I knew you before I knew you. I know and see your silent pain that none other witnessed. For the first time since I’d come back the oyster-cut pain in my feet stopped smarting. As if in the simple act of witnessing the knives I walked over for him Arthur had miraculously closed up the stigmata of it.

            Tears gushed a raw flood of life over my face and I dropped back my head. At that moment in my mind’s eye I saw a beacon light go up from my chest, parting my ribs into the night-sky. The intensity of the feeling made we gasp because it was black hot shot with silver and smelt of burning whale fat. I felt the lighthouse I had become and let even the light tangled into my bones erupt towards the heaven in offering with one message.
I’m here. 







Click here and buy The Christopher Penrose novels to learn more about Alma's back story.  

Stimulus Question: Henry, why did you hesitate to see the Allport collection after you found out about it?

Because: Nothing is ever so hard to recover from as the things that haven’t happened yet… 
So much of life is holding one’s breath for the brief hour we are given to breathe and shine. So comparatively brief. What else then is art but an attempt to shout out over the distances between those moments? To say:  here I am still! This is what I felt! This is what I loved. This is what I lost… Knowing that Arthur’s tendency to collect things was his art-form made me approach with reverence. I wanted to make sure I paid adequate attention to detail. The Allport Collection being just down there at the library made me afraid to break the seal on the moment. To let out all that old dust that had been holding it’s breath for a century. After all, it was possibly the last of his living communications with me, whatever hidden message had been left encoded for me alone to hear speaking, among those mute objects.            His riddle walked with me everywhere. I wanted the answer to it the way I’d always wanted him. This riddle means something beyond finding the answer and getting to the destination of his message. It means congruence of affection and it means story collison. It means his mind rising to meet mine against the backdrop of eternity. I had not expected to be metso completely in this manner, life as I had learned it, was not kind, and the most I had hoped for was his affection. Why should I be the recipient of such an extravagant act of memory and devotion, whilst others died at the end of a rope or froze huddled and forgotten in someone’s doorstep? Yet now here it was, offered to me… What if I failed it? To be worthy of it? When so few are ever given half so much regard? What if I couldn’t answer his question and proved that we didn’t really understand each other at all? After all this time it would hardly be surprising… My mind is still young and his grew and deepened to the age of almost seventy in my absence. Young as we still were in those days… Such things as unexplored love affairs are a great breeding ground for Romanticised notions and illusions…That’s what older people usually say anyway. And one is given to believe they’ve learned something in their extra time in this world, beyond how to be bitter.In short, during this time, doubts crowded in around me in hyena skin, snapping and slavering at the blood trail I was still leaving behind me on the oyster shells.  I knew it, I smelt them on my trail, but I couldn’t will myself to stop bleeding.




So I’m writing again… See? Happy? I thought it would have been best for Henry to tell it. I can imagine his atmospheric description of the streets at this time of year. Through the eyes of someone so alien to our way of life, it would fascinate me, plus he’s the real storyteller. Not me. Isn’t that what writers are for? They carry the burden of telling all our stories like a goat with a ribbon tied around it's neck? It was Dark MOFO when I found her. I thought maybe she wasn’t for real at first, just another tourist trap. [Carmen’s edit: that’s the Museum of Old and New Art’s, MONA’s, midwinter festival, for our international readers. If you want to understand what MONA is you just have to imagine that Willy Wonka was real, lived in Hobart, and was more interested in dark, twisted artworks than chocolate] There were fires burning in forty-four gallon drums around the streets and the whole city had started to feel like a giant art installation. A beacon light reaches up into the night as if to send a signal from our strange little city to get the attention of the darkness. There is a huge hand-fish where people stuff paper with their hidden fears inside before it is burned and sent out into the sea. I tried to get Henry to participate in the ceremony, but he was unsettled by the idea of any fish that contained Hobart’s collective fears.He spoke of a hanging he’d witnessed as a child, one of the last public hangings in Hobart. His father told him that ‘such were the wages of sin in this world’ while the man’s body (to quote him): ‘jerked like a marionette whose strings are in the hands of a brutal child.’ That was his first shock of what he called man’s inhumanity to man. To know that men kill other men in violence was one thing, but to see the way the crowd jeered the dying man’s fear was another. I told him that in our era if a child witnessed people hang a man by the neck until he was dead we’d put them in post-traumatic counselling! He just shrugged and said that he’d had nightmares about it all his life. Of course I pointed out that is indeed a sign of posttraumatic stress. He laughed. “If that is a disease, Madeleine, then everyone in my world must have been suffering from it.” “Why don’t you write down the nightmare and put it inside the hand fish?” I suggested.“Oh I’m not afraid of it anymore so I don't have it,” he replied with little sign of emotion. “Fear is a reflex response to hope.”  I didn’t poke anymore, as it seemed a tender point. The feeling I couldn’t do anything else to help him without guidance from someone of greater experience led me on to find someone who was more knowledgable in these areas. When I found the fortuneteller she was sitting on red velvet cushions and animal skins, behind colourful curtains. I noticed her dark eyes, the tattoos on her hands, and the cut of her clothing. I always see the quality of stitching, fabric and the lining in clothing. In this case it was odd, as you don’t often see people wearing designer clothing who also have tattoos on their hands and beads in their hair. I remember trying to work out how old she was for some reason, -like it really matters but what society trains into us can become knee jerk… My guess was she was in her thirties, but I wasn’t fully sure. Sometimes in different lights or with different expressions she appeared much older or younger. “Hi, my name’s Madeleine, -Madeleine Allport.” I’m not sure why I lied about my last name, beyond a general pride in being descended from Cecil, because of course his daughter Eileen hadn’t passed us his name. It felt important to do it though.“You can call me Alma. Can I see your palms?” she asked me. I was pretty sure she was English from her accent but I’d be guessing if I tried to pick which county.  When she touched my hand I felt a charge of electricity from her hot skin. I was really awake in the human contact all of a sudden and it felt weirdly intimate, as if by some magic in her touch she had drawn me down into my womanhood. “Hello there,” she said, acknowledging the fact I was only just settling into my body. I saw the deep old wisdom in her eyes and the warmth in her smile. She was in no hurry with anything and suddenly neither was I. “Hi,” I muttered nervously. I had the feeling I was sitting in the presence of some ancient temple priestess whose warm self possession alone made me feel like she must be judging me infinitely inferior.“You’re here about this aren’t you?” she asked, turning over a card with a heart on a rose bush on it. “There’s an important matter you’re caught up in the middle of, something to do with an interrupted love affair.” Even though she consulted my hands and the cards it seemed more like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear than really looking, much the way Henry appears to sometimes when he sits and rocks back and forth. “What else do you see?”She closed her eyes, which didn’t seem to suggest she was considering the lines on my hand at all. “Love that was interrupted by untimely death, possibly a suicide or even… even a murder… Suicide, accident, murder, all…  It’s weird, twisted threads,” she looked up at me. “There’s multiple repetitions of the same story, all in slightly different ways, rippling out from a sleeper murmuring code, vomiting amanitas… Always close but not quite… The Tower is coming down, apocalyptic change rides in on four coloured horses, brewing storms, a great fire... You’re here on someone else’s behalf but this is about you too… You don't see that yet.”“How can you see all that?” I whispered in awe, because I was already convinced. In any other context ‘accident, murder, suicide’ could sound like psychic arse-covering and guesswork but in this one it was a perfect description of Henry’s three-fold demise. “The heart and the hand have their own archeology, leaving traces and echoes... Someone I used to know told me it’s a rag and bone shop, -the heart…”I jumped at this reference because I was sure that I’d heard it in a poem Henry had read us only recently, or that perhaps he had compared himself to a rag and bone man in some way? Either way it further convinced me of her power.“You’re good,” I said leaning forward and speaking more quietly. “This is going to sound crazy…”“Ha! Oh honey… You don’t know who you’re talking to!” she laughed with gusto suddenly, slapping her knee. She reached out and touched me. “Trust me, I’ve seen some shit.” Looking into her eyes at that moment I believed her.So I took the leap and just said it. “Is it possible for the dead to come back?”“It happens all the time. People just don’t notice.” I felt like I’d heard Henry say something very similar and I was becoming increasingly spooked but the fierce lady crush I was developing on her kept me staring at her. “But I mean… actually come back. Like the kind of end days resurrection stuff Catholics believe in kind of ‘come back’?”She put the cards down then, ordering the cardboard to line up in the deck before sighing as if getting involved in something like this was way against her better judgment. Looking up at me she wore the expression of one world weary of miracles. “You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you? Because I have a feeling I'm going to need one."  

I like what you’ve written about the meeting with Alma. Take it from one of the dead: what you don’t say in life will haunt you in death. It is not the dead who haunt the living so much as the life unlived haunts us. It itches under our illusion of skin until we have to dive back into one to unravel the knots we're choking on. For what else am I here again, I wonder? With all that I loved dead and gone and a new world before me? If not to tell from the other side of the cold, to speak of the urgent life in me, in all of us, that chases the sun and only shows its power on the edge of the dark?             The fact I am good at this, this ordering of signs, this pleasing of the inner ear, needs have no bearing on the matter of who writes what. You and I, Madeleine, are not a competition, not a jostling for space, if we but breathe from the still point of grace inside us, -we are a dance. We are two parts in a symphony who must both learn to play together at the urges of the conductor. This way of thinking was taught to me by a master in the art of Harmony. Your great great grandfather taught me to think of human interaction as one of the arts. Of all of them it is the one most potentially exquisite, why should we not make it, above all other things, beautiful?Words are such despots by comparison to music. This is both why they don’t really matter as much as some other things, and why you must master them at all costs. What is silent is what is victimized in this world, it is the same today as it was in my time. In this world silence equals death. When I made music nobody on the street could refuse me, even if they wanted to. It spilled out into the road, infesting the gutters and the alleyways with a guerilla act of beauty. Had a mob been organized to purge my perceived immorality from the town. those who liked to listen to me might have spoken against them because of it. My piano and my cello spoke for me when I was silent. My skill provided me with beauty currency. Writing is not like that, it’s quiet and humble seeming by comparison and people have to work harder to eke its beauty out, but it is a far more tyrannical business under the surface. After all, we are making each other ‘repeat words after me’ in our heads!  I used to think that because I could see and hear the dead I had to carry the responsibility to tell all their lost and forgotten stories. To speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Now I see that nobody has to carry anything heavier than their own story, which is usually more than enough to shoulder. I am not the sin-eater of Hobart narrative nor do I pretend to be. I am but a confused young man with a gift for shuffling adjectives. Take it from someone whose silence was forced on them by the destruction of their life’s work, you will regret it if you don't fight hard for your voice.                Just as in my day a man like me had no right to his own story, was told by every single tale and parable, in fact, that I didn't exist, could never be the protagonist in my own adventure or morality tale, this used to be the case for women also. At least in conventional literature anyway. When Bronte dared to make Jane Eyre the hero of her own narrative this was a revolutionary act in the nineteenth century. Empathy is engendered through stepping into another’s stream of consciousness. Men of letters of the day were made to become Jane and they all went ahead and married Mr. Rochester with her! At this moment people very unlike myself are reading these words in countries all around the world and for a moment they too are Other.             Without this ability we are all quite self-involved creatures at the bottom of it. Walking around cocooned in our own storylines… Such is the nature of basic survival. What choice do we have? There is no one else we can rely on to fully body us forth on our behalf, to walk our path for us. Yet still I think we have some obligation to enlarge our sense of self. That is what true friendship is, surely? That moment when you realize that someone else’s narrative has collided with one’s own? When the collision is deep and hard enough you can no longer fully distinguish where their tale ends and yours begins. In this way, when my life has intersected with those of women their stories are mine also. Their liberation is my liberation, their oppression is my oppression. If we could extend our story wider, to include cities and mountains, rivers and trees, whose stories are also part of the myth of ourselves, then surely we would be closer to our native human condition?            Such a moment of atavistic surging happened to me when I went to the cafe to meet Alma. I’ve always known that not everyone you meet wearing human skin is truly what they appear. Mythic beings jostle everywhere with the illusion of mundanity. When I saw her she was sucking down a cigarette like it contained her true love or her salvation or both. She was standing outside a café on Criterion Street preoccupied with her phone. She was dressed in red and purple and upon her forehead was written Mystery.             Brazenly she looked me up and down. The way she exhaled her smoke reminded me of the manner in which Arthur’s ghost had done it in the cemetery. “You remind me of someone I used to know,” she said. No greetings or ‘are you Henry?’, just straight to the point. She had the kind of features and complexion that one might associate with the Mediterranean, or even perhaps Middle Eastern origin, but her accent marked her out as English.             My quizzical eyebrow twitched in response to her words but I don’t think my face showed much more expression than that. “Did you like this person I remind you of?” I asked, because it seemed good information to have.             Her smile was partly wistful but her warm dark eyes glimmered with something of experience and its bitter sweets. Although I couldn’t have pinned her to a numerical age I knew by that look in her eyes she was older than I had ever lived to.             “He and I had our moments.” I could hear a lot more gurgling under the surface of those words and I knew instinctually, the way they say the Tasmanian devil can smell death from mile away that it was a story I was part of. My heart accelerated as it always does during a powerful collision of persons. She butted out her cigarette and we went inside. When we approached the café table I pulled out her chair for her and she laughed. Realising I’d drawn attention to myself with the antiquated gesture I felt flustered and quickly sat down across from her trying to regain my composure. “So…” she said, still looking me over, scrutinizing my body language and my clothing. “You’re the boy who came back from the dead then?”






Click here to buy Wooing the Echo by Lee Morganfor greater understanding of the story as it develops. 

I’ve heard it said that the first people of this land sometimes wore about themselves bone relics of their beloved dead. Some might think the idea of wearing human bones uncivilized, and I won’t dispute the charge with them. I’ve seen what people believe civilization looks like... I would that I could take no part in it again, and keep my heart’s native territory girt round by the beautiful barbarism of love. As I approached his grave the primary urge wasn't a million miles from grave robbing. While we walked you seemed uncomfortable with my obvious desire for this strange reunion of the bones. Dread was indeed mixed in with my wanting too, but I doubt it showed. “So… am I getting the right end of the stick from your writing that you and great great granddad Cecil never actually… you know, did it? I mean, made love, or whatever sex was called in the olden days?”             The question should have stung like lemon juice in a fresh cut, but for some reason I was taken by a sad, poignant smile. A soft old longing tugged at my belly, an antique ache as old as the hills. It belonged to something bigger than both of us. Its bone-deep bruise was too far below the surface for a sting. “Not in the conventional sense, no,” I replied quietly, my voice almost a whisper, as I watched the lonely path of a gull in the talcum-smelling-blue of the sky. I sensed when I looked back at you that you felt a cultural gulf between us you couldn’t cross, Carmen… As though I was strange to you because of the year of my birth. And indeed it is still strange to me, the openness with which you ask questions around this topic. But in reality it was something different that lay between us in that conversation. A seer of visions has no mortal age, belongs properly to no era, nor country, for we are but hollow bones with stops upon which the devil plays tunes to himself. Transients pass through, setting up tent cities in the arches between the ribs of people like me. If I seem unfamiliar in some way have no doubt I did so to my contemporaries also.             “How many other ways are there to do it?” You asked, looking down at the map to try to locate the Allport’s gravesite as if the paper itself might solve all love’s mysteries.             I smiled to myself the secretive type belonging to those who have arcane joys in their lives undreamed of by most. There are things that pass between two sorcerers that cannot be spoken. Additionally, when the more immediate method of gratification is suppressed, the energy of the erotic is never fully quelled, it rises like a silent revolution, seeps back up like a blood stain of a murder victim through a carpet. The energy of sex pervades every little curl of hair pressed into our poetry volumes we passed to each other. Out into sound, as I would play while he watched me from behind, the very back of my neck feeling his gaze like a burn. I am always confusing the emotions with the feeling senses and colours with smells, so perhaps it is my personal peculiarity that eye contact itself was eroticized, conversation conjugal... The colour saturation of every sex-stained thing like this is hyper intensified in my memory, the pitch of reality turned right up. Repression is inhumane, but like all sacrifice it holds a terrific power that crouches waiting in the shadows for when its moment has come at last, ready to burn the world to the ground.             “A few.” I didn’t mean to be smug or enigmatic in this answer, I just didn’t know how else to answer your question. The black shapes of text on page place a membrane of ink between my viscera and your gaze that makes a full explanation more bearable.             I knelt down on the edge of the tomb he shares with his family and lay down above him. How good it felt… there was less of sorrow in the gesture than sensuality. Love tumbled from me in a white water gush, love washing out of me for every tiny thing, every creeping thing that had consumed him in his tomb and whose tiny legs he’d walked with, every bird he’d flown as and the mice he’d skin-rode who had eaten those crawling things that ate him, every graveyard skulking cat who had eaten those rodents... The love that I had secreted inside his skin popped free from the holes between his now exposed bones and gushed in a terror of universal overflow that manifested as peace.              It was only when I let my edges go until I had blurred out into the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, and the grey of the stone and the heavy wet of the grief and the light green-to-gold of the new growth, that I realized I was feeling his presence. Ecstatic tears and a smile of irrepressible beatitude took ownership of me. The world outside went down the drain backwards (like they say it happens here at the bottom of the world where the seasons are reversed and all is doubly inverted by our island of madness and rainbows) and my inner sight came on with a sound like the old school camera flash.             When Bronte had Jane Eyre say ‘reader, I married him’ far more is said of her and her Mr. Rochester than any explicit description of their happiness and its consummation.  For this reason part of me wants to say ‘and I saw him’, and leave it at that, poetically understated and breathless. Yet the me who enjoined our dear Madeleine to tell her story until she became as transparent as beach glass knows better. Every word of this telling is punched and kicked out while I scrabble with my enemy upon the edge of the void. My enemy wishes to subdue me and stuff my nose and mouth with seaweed so I may not name names, but this time I will never stop fighting. You might say I'm staging a late come-back. They tell us all life comes from the ocean and it makes sense. The oceans are the tear ducts of Grandmother Earth. It’s in the same wet place within the human eye socket that holds the salty seed of future life joy. I don’t think I really understood that until I saw him again, after having survived the Riga Mortis of grief, -what Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed ‘the hour of lead’… Just how much joy is possible to a landscape of the heart carved out deep through grief like the land torn up by retreating glaciers.             Arthur was leaning against his mother and father’s headstone casually,
-despite his black three-piece suit, top hat and begloved elegance. He wore a great coat lightly and unselfconsciously, as though he’d known when he put it on how good it looked on him, but since forgotten. As always he owned the look of our period as if it was designed for him. Yet the way he smoked his cigarette had a cocky quality to it that I associated more with the wharf men. He blew his smoke in my direction while maintaining eye contact in a way that among the riff raff might have indicated sexual interest or threat. Under the surface of the perfect gentleman in Arthur there was an animal confidence that lurked, biding its time, feral and sniffing, dirty in all the places hearts were meant to be clean, clean in all the places Victorian hearts were usually dirty, still waiting for its moment to set the ridgeway and the Thames on fire. Still holding all four aces...             Before I could recover from the gut punch of the sight of him he pulled out his fob chain and consulted the pocket watch. “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.” The words were not delivered in the breathless, timorous tones of the rabbit in the story, or the way my father might have said them, but with the tone of the wolf that waits and salivates.            “Arthur,” I think I whispered his name, taking a step or two forward and hesitating. Even though no words clustered I noticed how powerful he’d become. I knew I was in the presence of a strong spirit, a conjurer of note, because all the air was sucked away from my lungs when he entered. The black hole hidden under his buttoned down waistcoat, a force that drew all eyes and wills in his direction, the air that fizzed with electricity around him, as if reality was ready to take a different form at his whim, each told me a story.             “Hello Hen.” He moved from leaning on his parents to standing before me without having taken a step. I didn’t startle at his speed, but I did grab him the way someone starving might accost victuals. For a few moments, where planetary-sized forces seemed to collide, it felt that I clasped flesh to flesh. He did not ask me why I had disappeared so long ago or where I went. He didn’t ask anything and yet a dozen or so questions howled between us. Instead, with fierce mutual pressure, it seemed we tried to stuff each other back in through the hole we’d left in each other’s hearts.             I wept in his arms and I believe I told him ‘I’m so sorry’ many times over and over again and that he kept saying ‘no’, forbidding me sternly to apologize. ‘You have nothing to apologize for’… I can account more certainly for everything he said next. Because these words were slow, distinct and clearly articulated like a speech that someone has long planned to give and finally got the chance to deliver. He gripped me hard while he spoke lest I get away before he finished.             “Don’t explain! Not yet... I just need you to hear me in this first.” He held me back with his arms to force me to make eye contact. “I loved you all my life, Henry. It was always you. Always. I never felt that way before, or again. I wanted to grow old with you, to cherish and protect and bestow all my worldly goods upon you, to have given you my last name, for God’s own sake… But that wasn’t allowed to us of course… That sort of thing… So I had to put that feeling somewhere. I’ve hidden something away for you. There’s an object that I’ve put my family’s magic into. You will know which one as soon as you recognize what fairytale we’re in. When you find it you will know. Even after all these years, sweetheart…” he whispered with a tenderness that gutted me open like a freshly landed fish. “I still know you better than I know anyone or anything.”             I tried to press my forehead to his but he redirected me. Instead he took off his hat and placed the side of his head against mine until our ears touched.             “Blood of my blood… You awakened me to the darkness within me, and then you left me alone in it…It's not going to be easy to find my way home...”            My heart broke apart for him. Drawing back I opened my waistcoat as if it were ribs and reached inside myself. In my hands I drew out diamonds, crystal bright shattered things. “There are some things we can give each other that are ever renewable, but not this… these are truly something of myself,” I explained as I pressed the light inside my bones into his hands. Arthur was ever one to return a gift for a gift. As though from his ear into mine the image of a shell within an ear came into my mind and then the image of a turning mill. I knew that I had received the clues to his riddle. But they were more than clues, they were distilled sadness. I could taste in them the complexity of years of quiet dedication.I bit my lip hard with the knowledge. I was truly human then, not a faerie changeling that my mother had always called me because of my lack of obvious outward emotion. I was human to the core, for I knew utter regret. There was red blood flowing from the places I’d picked out from myself the diamonds to give him. I would turn that blood into a ointment to salve the wounds I’d left in him, that I vowed to myself.  
He touched my face. Though his smile was sad and gentle his eyes had a lupine spike under their old warm twinkle. “After you left silence grew inside me like a cancer. What started out as unwillingness to share became inability. All of us tasked with suppressing out deepest truth require our outlets, yours was your opium and your music… mine the act of collection... Objects are silent like I became, you see? A thing encoded for me with intricate layers of meaning and memory… To another it is but a pocket watch or a cigarette case. To me the doorway to another time, another way of being, a flurry of sense memories…  If you follow me down the rabbit hole into the worlds within things, down here you can hear my silence roar.”

Dear Henry,
See? I’m practicing proper cursive script. Do you like it? It’s not as good as yours yet. But I’m good at picking up fussy, flourish things like this. Tiny stitches and loops on letters… Carmen’s always been the one who handles the blunt force things in our lives, and I put the finishing touches on. But I’m not so good at describing things in words.             You say it’s so important that we ‘say it all clear’ and tell our story loudly while we still can because you never know when it will all be snatched away from you. But I’m not really sure how to do that. I wish you could teach me how to write. I will try and describe what happened leading up to us finding our next lead, but I don’t promise it will be high art.             Carmen and I were in the kitchen getting ready for work and she was dressed in her nurse’s uniform. “He found this little prayer card of Saint Jude and he’s stuck it to an old jar with a tea light in it. I think he’s praying to it,” she told me as if it was pitiful.             I shrugged. “Well, he’s a nineteenth-century Catholic in trouble, what do you want from him?”            “Do you know who St Jude is?” she asked.             I shook my head.             “He’s the patron saint of lost causes...”            I pressed my lips together sadly and we both acknowledged the poignancy. “Do you think we should tell him about great-grandad Cecil’s collection yet?”            “Might be a good idea to do it soon, give him something to focus on, going through all that old stuff. You know, like busy work? That’s usually good for grief.”            “Don’t you think we should talk to someone else about him? He needs more than busy work. He needs a future of some kind… I mean, by no fault of our own, or his, we have an illegal immigrant from another time with no ID... What are we going to do with him long term? How is he going to contribute to society? He tells me that his own major saleable skill was being able to play music, but he can’t do that anymore. I asked him to write down his major remaining skills and he listed ‘sending the evil eye’ and ‘laudanum tolerance’…”             “Well he was only recently a teenager I suppose… I know he says that maturity levels are way down since then, but his skillset sounds on point… What are you thinking we should do? Like going to the authorities or something?” Carmen crossed her arms. “Because fuck that, I’m sorry, but I know people who can get him fake ID done up…”            “I think we need to find someone to help us. Not the authorities, but not necessarily criminals either… I mean, someone that knows about… well… the supernatural.” I was waiting for her to mock me because if she did I was going to remind her that you came back from the bloody dead so all the cards are on the table now.             “A priest? Are you thinking the Catholic angle?”            I shook my head. “No I’m thinking of something a little more outside the box than that.”            That’s what led me out there looking for witches, occultists, mediums, spiritualists, whatever turns up when you go looking for the psychic riff raff of the city. I will say right from the start that whatever Carmen says it was more than coincidence that an Allport descendent happened to be standing in the rivulet tunnel taking photographs after her hospital shift when you came along. And just as that was no coincidence neither was it that I then went to that particular card reader… I think I know what we have to do next now, Henry. I’ve found people who are specialists in the uncanny. That’s what I do, I think. Carmen saves people, I discover people. Her super hero name has to be Saving Carmen and I’m Discovering Madeline. See what I did there? You will approve of the double meanings I’m sure, if not the mangled grammar!

Dearest Madeline,
I am a poet, not a schoolteacher, I’m not here to correct your grammar or hatchet out the joy from language as pedants do. Twist it to any shape that pleases you, yet touch it still, work it in your fingers, soften it to other shapes you haven’t tried before. You don’t have to be good at it, but write it anyway. Our mind is partially bound with words, it pays to make them supple. My kind are the outlaws of language, we capture and torture English until it gives up its hidden secrets to us. We put grammar on the rack and to the thumbscrew, stretching and rending them, while we ask again and again for them to confess to us where the devil sucked upon their witch-teats.             It vexes me when people say they are afraid to write. The whole of society seems to exist to clamp down on the main artery of creativity, anyone who creates does so in the teeth of all, risking mockery and infamy. Anybody with any sense is afraid to write, especially if it means bearing their jugular vein to the unkind masses. If you say you want to write but you won’t because you fear you will be derided, know that you will indeed be derided, by at least someone, somewhere, out there. But do you intend to let that bitter mediocrity own you? Or do you love language enough to do it anyway?           You are right about Saving Carmen and Discovering Madeline, I like what you did there. ‘Maddie’ is quite lovely and I appreciate all she’s done for me, more than I can express, yet I am very much looking forward to discovering Madeline.            It might interest you, (just as an aside and because I’d rather talk about just about anything than the matter at hand) to know I have a girl living inside of me, who has a different name to myself, just as you do. At least, she has the embryo of a name. She is something made of light. She lives inside the jaws of the wolf in my belly. I am the man, who swallowed the wolf, who devoured the girl… It isn’t around just anyone that she comes out, you have to hold open the jaws of the wolf like the lady with her hands in the mouth of the lion in Strength from the tarot deck.             My interior girl of light came out around you Madeleine when you let me brush your hair. I’ve always enjoyed it when ladies allow me little privileges, which would not be extended to normal men. That’s not how I’m meant to refer to myself anymore, is it? There are all these beastly new categorizations for attraction I need to work out. I never thought about it like that, this gay, straight or bisexual business, all I know for sure is that you aren’t the first lady to allow me the relaxed intimacy of a girl friend.  That which is man in me indeed takes much less interest in the sexual features of women’s bodies, but the beast inside, and the girl… They have their own agendas. Usually it was only in Arthur’s presence that I could allow partial freedom to those other parts. To the sharp bird of prey beak that lives in my mind, ready to rend the visceral of an idea and to the hungry, feral she-wolf in my gut, and the girl hiding inside the beast skin, also. But despite struggling to fit my understanding to the three-pronged division of sexuality your era presents me with, I’m coming to feel safer here… Which really wouldn’t be terribly hard under the circumstances of the now absent death penalty that hung over our every move.With the subsiding of fear I find myself able to think with lucidity again. When your mind is doused with the chemical wash of fighting or fleeing you are never really thinking rationally. It is only now that I can realistically assess the level of danger I was putting him in. It is only now that I discover what Arthur left behind him here in Hobart, like a resounding echo of his life ringing out still, that I can feel the true magnitude of my mistake. Fear swallowed me utterly, just as despair threatens me at times now. It was his job to protect me, and yet I could not bear the risk he would have taken for me. Now I can relax I see that I had no right to take that decision from his hands, it was his life to risk, his death to choose. What is love though, but that kicking out from the very centre of yourself against the death that has chosen your beloved? It was Arthur’s job to hold the cloak around me, to conceal me, to partially reveal me, but to neither report what he had seen nor record it. The work we did was secret, and he knew better than most how to Keep Silent. Such is the sacrifice akin to death, which is asked of the men who ward the edges of our House’s precinct.             For this reason I doubt I will find anything about myself in his papers…Arthur would have destroyed any evidence from before my death, not because he was ashamed about he and I, in truth there was nothing, at the physical level, that we were guilty of. He would have done it still because it was his job to be an invisible man, a man made of many faces and no face, composed of nothing but shadows and ocean mist.             Sometimes I see echoes of his particular talents in yourself and your sister. Forgive me if my words come off sounding paternalistic, which might seem strange when you are physically older than I. If it sounds so it is because I am a contemporary of your forebear, and out of my love for your forefather I feel a strange stewardship or guardian role over you two. You are the product of my love, even if you could never have been the product of our love. At the physical level it has been you two who have shielded me from this new world, and I who can protect you from the other more arcane terrors that lurk below our feet and inside the walls of this city. I feel that in some way the luck force of his family line is therefore still with me, heralded by your arrival, still draped around me like his loving sponsorship. His spiritual patronage endures over the whole city having its roots in his collection.
As to how to tell it all clear… we must tell and tell until our very skin becomes see-through that is what it means to get clear with yourself. If we are to empty out all the falsehood that’s been shoved down our throats we must go to the extreme ends with confession. I took my clothes off in the night and opened the window, standing naked beneath the moon and told the sky I was who I was, unchanged, unashamed. Before mankind I will put my clothes back on, I will put my human skin back on, and walk around taken for normal, but I have given back their voices. My voice is alone now in a stark sort of purity.One simply screams in some form and tries to do it tunefully, that is all art is, that is all writing is, an eruption of what is unbearable otherwise, made beautiful so as to be tolerable to others…. One finds one’s self in a place, and one writes from there. One sits very still and listens to the story demons creeping up, barely breathing with anticipation. I felt them skulking around up from the rivulet about when the rain began to ease off. When I feel that breeze stir in a certain way I grab a pen and brace myself.             I over heard you and Maddie from the kitchen talking about how the dam had dropped in Les Revenants just before the zombies came back. I may have rolled my eyes at you, but I was intrigued. You noted that the dam was back in fine form again now in Hobart, after all this rain that ‘Henry has brought with him’. Movies, songs, and the electronic world that interacts with your stream of consciousness so regularly are looked to as oracles of sorts, just as the sky and bush were looked to for omens once. You don’t notice that you do it, or count it as a belief system, but you believe these electronic stories and story fragments you are immersed in have some bearing on your reality. You believe these stories interact with each other and with reality in some way, just as my mother believed the folk stories she grew up with enough to claim I was a changeling.             When I heard you two talking it led me to consider what a man of Arthur’s talents would have done with such things at his disposal. Right when I was thinking it, the electricity went down and we were plunged into the reassertion of primordial night.             “Arthur?” I murmured into the now dark air of your flat. Perhaps it is the same species of mytho-logic you used to link your viewing of a French television series to a drop in Hobart’s dam water, and onward to my own synchronistic appearance? It is story logic to be sure, but what isn’t, when you break it all down? I knew what it meant in my marrow. It meant Arthur killed the lights, like our century split the night, and it means he can still hear me.
Stimulus Question: Henry, could you please describe Cecil Allport, whom you called Arthur, and your relationship with him? I’m particularly interested to hear more about the reason you believe he would be capable of turning off our electricity? This might help give you something to do while I’m at work other than turning all of our jars into saint candles and hiding magical pee samples. –love, Carmen.
There are some things in life so far outside the ordinary we can only express them in mythic terms. For this reason I will as yet give you no: ‘we met at the age of ten at my father’s house’ or ‘as we grew I would read poetry to him as we lay on our backs in the long, late-summer grass.’ Even those facts seem too pedestrian, and to do it justice in another form would require a novel-length endeavor.             Let me tell you, instead of describing our relationship, about the story of a child named Sorrow, whom my Welsh Grandmother spoke of in hushed tones. Pryderi, son of Rhiannon, stolen away on the night of his birth reappeared in the home of a horse breeder whose mare had been in foal, but the foal had been snatched away. Pryderi had reappeared, replacing the vanished colt foal, which had been taken from the stable by a monstrous hand of a creature of a troll being of the Otherwise. The loss of Pryderi caused Rhiannon much sorrow and care as she was punished for his murder, and for this the child was named for sadness.            Pryderi and his equine double, are part of an ongoing story about divine twins of light and darkness. One who sees the sun through the sky and the other on its perilous nightside journey through the Underworld, one passing it to the other… Snow White and Rose Red, a feminine version of this ageless story with no beginning and no end, that is always going around and around like the sun seems to walk across the heavens and down into the salty arms of the sea. I knew a man once who claimed to have danced with the Vodou Queen of New Orleans, he used to say Arthur and I were the Marassa… Because even as far afield as Africa the story was still going around and around about twin beings that herald the beginning of things.            Just as I was taken, and the unlucky Pryderi, Mabon ap Modron was also stolen from his mother’s side by otherworldly beings. Mabon grows to young manhood languishing in a strange land, little different to Sleeping Beauty in his isolation and the feats that must be passed to obtain him, except that he, like the caged bird, and myself, sings in his captivity. ‘What is to be got of me will be got through fighting’ –Mabon warns the intrepid heroes who would attempt the task. Oh I know all the words to the paean of Mabon… I know that old refrain like the Irishman in me knows the bittersweet tune of heartsick, and the scent of dawn after whiskey and tears. It is King Arthur and his war band who rescued Mabon, by entering the deathly domain of water on the back of the Salmon of Wisdom. I think that was one of the reasons I thought of calling Cecil ‘Arthur’, in the beginning. Though it was not the reason at the forefront of my mind I see now the form of the salmon of wisdom rising beneath me, monsterous, titanic, lifting me from the water that threatens to engulf me, with a strength greater than any human hands. I realize suddenly that it was not Arthur, or my angel who lifted me from the ocean and brought me here, but the specter of some rising immortality, its nature only partially knowable. It was who I am still becoming that lifted me.That idea of Arthur, the raven-turning once and future graal king, lurked deeper in, within the wet, subterranean chambers of the heart where Mabon sings his lament inside me, waiting for his fated appointment with the sacral king. In a way that name, his secret name, is still only the echo of an idea gestating in the dark. But once unleashed into many minds, ideas can be powerful. When I fell into trance his were the hands that steadied me and the hands that held the fob watch that mesmerized me, also. When he and I touched hands in the séance, sparks could be felt as though were designed by nature to create a battery. When I went out into the world his arm was there through mine, mutely telling the world I was his friend, and therefore not to be bothered by anyone, or else… His voice the one that spoke for me when I was uncertain... When I trembled under the weight of my calling and my gift, his was the coat around my shoulders and the excuses for why we had to leave early. When The Ignorant came to persecute me it was his fists that drew my enemy’s blood and his quick tongue that left them stammering for a stillborn comeback. It was me who showed him how to break the fourth wall on reality, so that he saw for the first time how what we call life is but a stage play, and who the audience is and the people who leverage our puppet strings. It was me that pressed close the heat of the cunning fire in my own brow over his until his forebrain grew incandescent with the glow of our connection. I taught him how to see and hear what is called dead, but has merely moved its location to the interior spaces of life. It was I, since we were little more than boys, who held him when he was sorrowful, cooked for him when he hungered, tended him where he hurt, read to him and broadened and deepened his apprehension of the beautiful, and again and again decided to place our friendship above all petty irritations in life. Thus something of the divine nature touched upon us, lightly, perfectly, shyly... And it was good. That is all I know how to say of it for now. As to how he could have turned out our electricity, well… Your great great grandfather was a two-faced man, a crossroad’s walker, a taker and wearer of the faces of others and the skins of beasts, the kind of man a grave can’t hold down for long. He had a wolf inside him like I do, but there was a fecund and fearsome darkness that lodges close to his heart, a breathless outer space, close to the Void sensation.I feel his influence here still and I know his collection of curiosities, which his son Henry bequeathed (as he wished it) to the people of Hobart, will prove this to be true when I can bear to go look at them. My avenging angel who watches over me told me once that I would need to come to terms with the sex in me to progress with my Art, because it is not enough to say that sexuality is part of magic. Magic, instead, is a sexuality, something which exists within the erotic nature of a person. If magic is up inside you it’s as unstoppable as if you are a boy who likes other boys, and it is felt and wanted with the same kind of intensity. I believe and know he is right. Yet for me I feel that if magic is an aspect of human sexuality then sexuality, for me at least, is a type of art. Some people have a gift for it, like music or dance. There is no discontinuity between my music and how it felt to love Arthur. There is no real line between the compulsion toward poetry and the intricate and mindful expression of love, which I desired to compose upon his flesh with mine. Make no mistake about it, to me that was what our relationship was, if you want to know, art… A thing of deep enduring beauty and a joy forever, a still unravished bride of quietness, a foster child of Silence and slow Time. Like the figures in Keats’ Grecian urn, we are suspending in mid-motion always, a lost refrain, or cause, a few unplayed notes lingering in the air, a reaching out hand ungrasped, a caress never quite landing.

Maybe.

That was when all the clocks stopped again. 
The rivulet was in full gush as it rained and rained. The dead have membranous feet you see, leaving behind the translucent mucous trails like snails, silvery footsteps that last only up until the nascent dawn. It’s easier for them to move around along wet tracks. Martha taught me that, many years ago and it made sense of what I’d always observed around the rivulet and the sea mist.             When you saw I had really stopped all the clocks in your house like I told you I used to, (both the clockwork and digital therefore ruling out an electrical surge) you started to really believe in me. -Not to contradict your earlier assertion about timing. Merely to say that our experience of belief has layers, like being slowly stripped by a lover. It’s one thing to accept the proposition that I have come back from the dead, in absence of another explanation. Quite another for a woman of a time that has grown so very modern to believe the whole story I bring up out of the Bridgewater Jerry with me…
Belief has its own apocalypse wrapped up in it. Once people know something is possible it doesn’t take long before it must happen. The mustnessgathers pace behind all possibilities like the early stages of an avalanche. Once you start to believe you can… It’s as if people cannot bear to sit with the tension of the uncreated, of the not-yet-come-to-being… To be honest I don’t blame them, my whole body for so long has been made up of not-yet and maybe-never, and who (given the chance) wouldn’t release one’s true soul song in a spasm of apocalypse? This urge in us, it comes from a place so deep morality has never been there.I went outside in the rain after the ticking stopped for good, and walked through the deserted streets. With my fingers I reached out to touch old buildings that I recognized with my eyes closed, dragging my pink tips along the wet rock, reading the wear and tear of a century and a half of wind and rain in the surface like a brail message from the elements. The wind seemed to play music on my exposed ribs as I walked, even though I was fully clothed for the weather. Where once I was the musician I had become the instrument. This city is the artist, out of whose dark imaginings and underbelly I’ve come forth, slouching my way up out of the sludge of forgotten things. I longed savagely to play music. I think the wanting was what always made the clocks stop. But even as I delicately palpitated my fingertips against the stones I could already feel it was gone. The delicious tremor of music that used to thread through my muscles and tendons, starting somewhere in my hips and rising, had been sucked away by the retreating wave as I left the water. The sea will have her sacrifices, after all. I smiled softly, sadly, because I knew in that moment, passing through the curtain of rain, what it meant and why it was worth it. Later, as you know, when I first sat in front of a piano and tried to play and felt the stump of my cut out tongue flap uselessly against my mouth’s roof I reacted somewhat less gracefully… Nonetheless I’ve learned that its not about where you reach at your lowest that defines your courage, but it’s what decisions you make about how you will go forward from there. The purity of the decision I would make for him again and again, will outlive and outlast the memory of that graceless tantrum, where I kicked my feet about, flailing at the great binding of the Old Woman Fate. When you’ve had someone you love grow old while you were away, you slow your step even in the rain. I didn’t care if I couldn’t play anymore, only that  I would find him and with whatever art was left to me I would at last find expression, in some way that would reflect the fineness and intricacy of the feeling itself. Nothing else of who I was or what I could do mattered to me by comparison to that one dread wanting… The one I had broken my body against, inside the gullet of the rivulet in flood. I watched for his slower moving shade to keep pace. I lined our steps up so that they came into rhythm. I had wanted to grow old with him, after all, and so sometimes now, I do... The moisture in the air makes my old man joints ache and I am forced to shuffle. My feet are made of whatever the hands of frogs are made from. This is why no one can hear the dead when we’re walking beside or behind you. We move when you move and stop when you stop. Our patience is infinite. There are no ticking clocks where we come from, that’s why when the part of me that is Other arrives there are no ticking clocks around me either… Nobody can watch you sleep quite like us. My mother died in our rocking chair and whenever she would watch me sleep afterwards she would always rock back and forth just the same, as though caught in some eternal loop. If one could be as the dead whilst still alive the power one would have! There are some crooked paths I’ve walked, and know of, where feral visionaries meet you with meadowsweet in their hair and wormwood on their breath, they will tell you that such a thing is termed ‘initiation’ among the hedge-wise.  If I’m still here does this mean I’ve achieved initiation?All I know is that my mind tries to fill the blanks in, to catch up with the life lived while I was away. My love has become a dead man while I was gone and now the wind and the rain that sleet my face become eroticized, even with their moss-bleak taste. The feelings that once belonged exclusively to the shiver of his hand grazing my skin, diffuses, in the forever-absence of that touch, into the old stone, into the thick soul of our city… Don’t think I mean an easy letting of the edges, where grief just pop goes and weasels away... No…. This is a grim, cold joy-sorrow in the pit of the gut, a cutting elation. Our city caresses me with his many hands made of wind currents, rain running down the back of my shirt, jagged bird flight, and the way stone holds the sorrow salt and the tremors of shroud-muffled voices. I wanted to go with him where he’d gone. I suppose I only didn’t because you cared for me... Rather than sending me to the insane asylum as would have likely been my fate if I turned up in my time from yours, you have sheltered me, tended my wounds, cooked me strange and fascinating new foods... You showed me how music could be immediately conjured which seemed to suit any mood or taste, even my eccentric ones. Soon I found songs on your machine that gave voice to the music I could no longer make with my hands but had spilling out of my heart. Maddie worked for hours on repairing as much of my clothing as could be salvaged and you brought me home replacements in the modern style for what could not be fixed. With great gusto you dressed me up in this hybrid costume, much like my own mind, straddling two eras.             Instead of killing myself again I walked to his old house, because you cared. As I stood outside his home on Upper Davey Street that night in the rain staring up at the windows, I was on the outside looking in again. Never to be invited inside, a stray of sorts, part of time’s beach rubble and jetsam, floating in and out of the picture with too much agility for history to get a lock on me. The type of uncatalogued item he never could quite collect... The name that gets omitted, the part of the journal torn out, the letters confiscated... A watermark here, a scrawled name there but nothing that would stand up in court...The wind that caught my clothes, blowing through the bone tunnels of me, spiked a longing so savage I heard a wolf’s howl echoing out over a frozen tundra inside me. So stark was the desolation of this feeling-sound that I shuddered as no returning cry answered. I had thought longing to be a hot, pulsing, palpitation of sound something thick and percussive that made me sometimes wish to hit the body of my cello with my open palm and hit out a beat. But instead perfect-want is a thing of stark, cold purity. Colder than the low-soft-ache of the cello, like a violin made of ice, lupine sharp and nuclear bright.           


You found me about dawn. I should have found it strange you knew to come to Fernleigh... It suggested a bit of knowledge about the Allports, but at the time I thought nothing of it and of it nothing... I was sitting in the gutter trying to hold so as not to fall off the surface of the world.             “Hey, look at me. That’s better… You’re doing so well, you get that?” Forcefully you made me hold your gaze as though with pure force of will and persuasion you could convince me I was all right. “What you’re processing at the moment… It’s huge. How many people have ever had to process something like this?”            These words, said to fill the silence, in themselves seemed to mean very little. But what was more important was the certainty in your warm brown eyes. You seemed to believe I deserved to live, not everyone had always shared your opinion, and so I trusted you.            “Indeed,” I replied.            “Who are they to you?” you asked, looking up at the house.            “You know of them? The Allports? You had heard of their family before I mentioned the name?”            You smiled oddly at me, kind of ruefully. “I hope you’re not going to hate me when you find this out…. But when you mentioned Elizabeth Allport, Maddie and I went back through our family tree to check we were right… She was the grandmother of my great, grandmother Eileen Allport.” You came out with this all in one breath. “You don’t hate me now do you? Am I, like, descended from your arch nemesis or something?”            “Who was your great, great grandparent?” My voice a husk of sound. “Which of the Allport children was Eileen’s parent?”             “Cecil Allport.” I swallowed down hard and closed my eyes. “Who was Elizabeth to you?”“The mother of my dearest friend,” I replied quietly. Those words stuck thickly in my throat like I’d swallowed glue. “She did not wish me well, in a way, you could say... there was an action of hers that caused me much misfortune.”Understatement sticks me together with sticking-plasters, always a sign you’ve hovering over a deep bruise.             “She’s the one you were setting out the witch bottles against? To avert her evil eye? Was my ancestor a witch or something? But… So… does that mean her son Cecil was your… friend?”            I jumped at the mention of his name as I always do, even though it was the one his family called him, not the one I did, or even the one on his birth certificate. My friend was, you might say, a man of many faces. “Yes.” The fact you knew of him left of me nothing but an ache that harrowed up my lungs with its sucking power. I wanted to ask all the questions immediately, about what he did with the rest of his life, but the grief was still too near for words. Those moments outside his home were of the leaden hour. For focusing on the next breath that must be taken without him, and then the one after that. Grief is an endurance run and I am more of a sprinter... People depict the Victorian Age approach to mourning as hyperbolic and melodramatic but there is a discipline expressed in it that was part of our love language. To lose well and deep is part of loving what is mortal, part of holding it with no guarantees, knowing your life depends on it, and having it ripped away, or suddenly granted back, with no real understanding possible of why.             “Are you just finding out that the love of your life married someone else, hun?”The unexpected understanding I read in your words degloved me. Normally I’d not have confirmed it but I nodded. What was to be lost now?“He named his son Henry, if that helps?”             “Lovely,” I murmured, because there weren’t really any words, but custom demanded I make a response. I was thinking through the pain of knowing there was a woman who did for him and gave him all that I never could. I was pushing through it to how this shrieking pain meant your skin and hair cells carried part of him alive into the future, so therefore it was worth it.... I found myself gazing into your face like it was a skrying ball, trying to see something of him still echoing up to the surface of manifestation and joining me in the world of the living.              “Your eyes are somewhat like his.”“There’s something I want to show you,” you said getting to your feet and offering me your hand as if you were the gentleman.





When we arrived at Parliament lawn you showed me the textual public monuments worked into the pavement there. The first of them said: ‘In the wake of your courage I swim’ the other: ‘Sorry for not holding you in my arms.’ Upon reading I closed my eyes for a moment and they misted with tears. I didn't yet know it's meaning to its creator, but I knew what it meant to me.  “What do they mean?” You came and put your hand on my arm. “They mean the city is saying sorry to you, Henry.”It took me some time to understand what you meant, and after that what it meant, even once you explained about the Stonewall riots and the civil rights movement. I was coming to understand that I wasn’t a deviant deserving of death in your eyes, but a fellow human carrying the albatross of a story around my neck.
Because you were his flesh and blood it was important to me that you knew. “He was a good man,” I said in the tight-lipped way that people use to gloss over the raw choking power keg of life when its gets stuck in the throat of their narrative. “A kind and decent man,” I continued, gaining courage in my convictions as I used that word I was told was off limits to me. “With a beautiful soul. If anyone spoke ill of him… well… evil be to he who thinks evil of it.”

Read the next Episode!

Dear Miss Carmen,
Stimulus Question: How did it feel when you realized I was real? Not provisionally real, but really-real? Describe your thought process in the moment so I may study modern mores as exhibited by a 2010’s female, for the edification of a Victorian Age audience.
Kind Regards
Audience
'Up From The Ocean' by Elizabeth Barsham
Carmen: "You’re hilarious! So you’re going to be writing me stimulus questions now and leaving them about my flat? I’m guessing this is your way of saying you feel like you’re being studied? Well I’m sorry, but really… I spent the first couple of minutes after I found this note stashed under my coffee plunger staring at your beautiful handwriting lost in a bottomless well of grief. Not sure why it never struck me before now, (probably because it’s been so long since I sat down and wrote something out at any length with a pen and paper) but nobody has handwriting like yours any more… I guess you and your melancholy bullshit is rubbing off on me because I’m starting to see some epic tragedy encoded in all the pretty loops and flourishes of your old fashioned hand… My great grandmother Eileen used to write like you. I mainly write texts with my thumbs and I hate myself. -Put that down in your notes and mores. By the way, we’re called 'Millenials', or maybe 'Gen Y' in my case and Millenial in Maddie’s… Nobody says ‘2010’s female’. LOL (that means laughing out loud, just so you know. Yep that’s right, you’ve missed some heavy shit.)            I suppose it was after we’d shown you how to adjust the water temperature on the shower that it hit me, the whole this is ‘really real’ part. You understood the light switch and the basin but all the things that confused you were the right things. I paid attention. Of course I thought you were mad still but I noticed because sane people always hang onto this strange idea you can talk people out of their delusions. Like, if I was to point out that you should know about running water if you were alive in 1874 and I caught you out, the cognitive dissonance would just suddenly destroy the delusion. Right?? Wrong! But futility is a favourite human sport for all eras. I always thought that with our mother too, could never seem to stop thinking like I just needed to out-argue her crazy and it would all patch up with Band-Aids, sew some buttons on where eyes used to be and right as rain! It never worked, but the habits acquired in childhood are hard to break.             There was never anything to catch you out on though. You were smarter than me, and at first that’s all it seemed to mean. There are clever crazies, I learned that working in mental health for nearly a decade… Which, trust me, is basically the equivalent to a lifetime in any other profession. But their clever doesn’t get them out of the psych ward. Crazy is crazy, no matter what. At least that’s what I thought until you were in the shower and Maddie went through your clothes. She showed me the stitches and the lining as if something special about them should be immediately apparent. “Look at the label with the tailor’s logo on it. It’s water damaged now but it’s genuine to the time period and in remarkable condition.”            I shrugged. “So what? Someone can still be crazy and like antique clothes. Probably some steampunk bullshit.”             But Maddie was persistent. “Look at these empty viols! You can still see they’re for Laudanum even though the ink’s running on the label.”             I frowned and took it from her. She’s the fashion designer but I’m the local history enthusiast and I was keen to find something wrong with the picture. Just as with the technological objects I could find no evidence you were faking.             I shrugged again but this time it was less certain. “So… What do you think’s going on? We’ve wandered onto the set of Les Revenants and people are coming back from the dead? Or what do you reckon? More of a In the Flesh vibe with this one? Full zombie?”             I was waiting for her to say: ‘never go full zombie!!’ I’d set it up for her but she didn’t take it. Maddie opened her mouth to reply but didn’t say anything. Her seriousness was contagious. I glanced in the direction of my closed bathroom door and the hairs went up on the back of my arms. “I don’t know what I think. But what if it’s like that moment in Magnolia where the frogs all rain down from the sky and the little kid is like, this is something that happens?”            My sister’s a smart lady but it seems to be written into whatever coding siblings come with that it’s my job to scorn her when she gets sentimental. Maybe it’s because I’m pretty sure she fancies herself as Fanny Brawne and is still looking for her John Keats to arrive. I, on the other hand, work in the hospital juggling bedpans and when I get off my shift and its too late to go to bed I like taking photographs of Hobart by night. The town’s history interests me, but that’s about as weird as I get, so why would this kind of thing happen to me?             “So, is that what you’re going to do if it’s real? A quick fashion recap of the past one hundred and fifty years in dresses, a tour of kitchen appliances, a brief diversion through a couple of world wars, then its movie marathon time?” I teased her. The shower had turned off and I was joking to cover my growing unease. I got to my feet all of a sudden. “Fuck, what am I thinking? I’ve just left a mental health patient alone in the bathroom with a metric shit heap of pharmaceuticals and about ten other things you could self harm with!”            I was about to go knock and check up on you when you abruptly opened the door and I jumped visibly, totally giving away how spooked I was.             “Don’t worry,” you replied dryly. “I got that out of my system already.” Your face was expressionless and your voice was almost toneless but I could just detect a cool, grim humour. Part of me was embarrassed that you’d overheard me describing you as a self harm risk, which I don’t think I would have been if I was still thinking of you as crazy... Maddie got up from where she was sitting on the floor and wrapped her robe tighter before decisively tying it around her, a clear sign she felt on formal terms with someone. You were standing there in my plain white dressing gown I’d given you to change into, so I made a show of taking your clothes off Maddie and hanging them up to dry in front of the heater.             “Sorry for touching your things,” Maddie muttered. “I was just…”            “Checking to see if I’m lying,” you finished for her. I noticed that your gaze was very steady and you weren’t giving off any visible signs of psychosis. You crossed your arms in a way that seemed a bit self-protective but you gave off a sense of determined functionality. “I don’t at all blame you.”            It was only then that I noticed the contrast of red blood on my tiles beside your white robe. “Fuck!” I yelled. “You’re bleeding!” Within moments I was gloving up and rummaging through my medical kit. By the time I reached the door to the bathroom you hadn’t moved except to gaze down at your own feet like you were still working out what was down there.             “Oh. That’s just some cuts on my feet from the oyster shells,” you muttered. “My apologies.”             I frowned at your apology for bleeding on my floor. You didn’t get that often in the psych ward… But Maddie was quicker than me. “What oyster shells?”“There are many upon the stones at the edge of the bay, as I walked to shore. I didn’t feel it until later.” I don’t remember how Maddie reacted because I was in full nurse mode by then. You didn’t get any say in being treated by me either. While I cleaned and dressed the wounds on your feet with ointment and bandaging my hair brushed the wet, bloody tiles. I should have restrained it in a hairnet like at work but I hadn’t thought and even though it was only my hair soaking in your blood I felt a shudder of infection paranoia, as if you could be carrying some exotic strain of disease. Your fingernails were torn and your hands were injured too. There was an eerie feeling in touching you, even through the membrane of latex. You weren't really colder than a normal living person but there was a weird stigmataery feeling about dressing those little bandages on your hands and feet. “Can I open this?” You complied but very reluctantly to let me open your robe. When I glanced up at your face it revealed actual shyness. As someone who sees people of all ages and sexes naked on a daily basis I can say true modesty is pretty rare in grown ups. So maybe it was that or something mysterious I can’t quite explain that I felt through the gloves while I examined you. Despite your mild lacerations there was no sign of necrotic bruising or anything that would suggest you’d recently been dead. My instruments said your temperature and blood pressure were both within normal range, if low-to-normal.It wasn’t those things… Instead there was this other weird feeling your body gave off… It will sound weird but it’s as though the past is something you can smell on people. Not because of sanitary conditions of course, but is it perhaps that I had never been around the skin of a person who ate the food and breathed the air of another era? There was something that passed between us as animals, some sniffing sort of instinct that told me you were really real. Long before you started to produce the proof. Are you happy with that? On behalf of my tribe Generation Y of Hobart Town, I would like it known that The Victorian Age can be a wee bit of a Princess sometimes… Just saying… New Stimulus Question! Why do we have little urine samples full of pins and needles hidden around the house now? I’ve heard all about you people and the happy snaps with your dead kids but what’s with the jar pee??
I was sitting by the window of the room you assigned me, listening to my death river gushing below, when I first started bringing up the witch-ball. You won’t even know what it is I suppose, so oblivious is your over-lit century to the darkness and her brood… You fancy you’ve vanquished the night far further than the old town boundary around Forest Road, but it’s a confidence that will only last as long as your access to electricity.             A witch ball is a concentration of malignancy sent against you by another person empowered with The Eye. If you were of Irish stock as I am you’d probably know already about how important it is to make the spirit traps that encircle the ill wishing in thorns and broken glass and tempt them away from their target into fragmentation. With your home so close to the rivulet, where the dead are want to slake their thirst it is unwise to have no protection beyond a few electrical light bulbs and heating devices. I’ve made some traps out of my old laudanum bottles and hidden them around your house. You’ll be safe now, you can thank me later each day you don’t cough up tangled masses of hair and pins.             Sadly I was not so lucky as to avoid becoming mother to the abortions of my whole life's history in an unfortunately oral manner. The first ball was made of the hair of Elizabeth Allport, the woman who had Overlooked me with The Eye shortly before I arrived here. I can already anticipate you hearing this and taking it as further sign I suffer from some form of paranoid delusion. But her suppression of my voice was real and literal. They keep us quiet for a reason, people like her, you realize? The weavers of dreams threaten their very construct of reality, the comfortable status quo. They’re afraid of the apocalypse of daffodils we carry in our heart-cages, they’re afraid of the dandelions or our minds tearing up their fetish with concrete. They’re just afraid. It was this way in my time and I’m skeptical that the matter has altered. People without The Second Sight would have just seen her as a mother protecting her son, trying to prevent a non-advantageous situation for him. But I knew they were her sewing pins and her hair tangled around and around until they stuck in my throat like river-weed and dragged me into the great quiet. Wrapped up in coagulative malice and rolled tight into balls of spite, the witch ball has to be worked and worked between the fingers like an ulcer is favoured by the tongue, it finds no accidental victims. The second one… That was his hair… But not because he harmed me. I knew it meant something different, as I pulled the long, dark strands of it out of my throat by the fistful and gagged on all the sharp edges of his broken heart. She'd turned my love against me. I think I coughed out a whole music box while the death river rushed and rushed below me… I think I coughed out yesterday, and tomorrow, and all the times were happening at once again for a cacophony. I understood the anomaly that brought me here in that moment of overlap, standing at the crossroads of time… I understood completely how it is all, always, only ever happening Now. If you could break through the illusion that it’s otherwise then somewhere on the other side of the theatrical fourth wall… Somewhere over there, over West, further, further on, where the veil goes down and never comes back up again and the worlds melt in on each other, if I was standing there I could explain. 
But all I know is I came from there.  And now I can’t get back. So now you have witch bottles. 


Read On To Episode Four!

Stimulus Question: So tell me about what happened leading up to when I found you in the rivulet tunnel?

Photography by Rebecca FlynnYou really want a story about what I did next? Walked down to the corner of Argyle and Collins Street where the rivulet tunnel opens and climbed down inside to hide from people, is what I did. But I contend that part was quite unremarkable. Luckily it was only an hour or two from dawn on a weeknight and the city was quiet. So I was able to duck and weave. I walked at first down an avenue of cypresses that seemed to commemorate some great and terrible war I’d not yet heard about, but did not approach the monument in fear of seeing the date. I came to a place where I could watch the wide, empty eyes of the horseless, carriages. Instead of headless horseman the night streets of Hobart now bore headless carriages.             Also in my favour was the my feverish imagination has always been balanced by a streak of cooler reason. Observing everything from the trees, I steeled myself into a state of calm. I reasoned that these vehicles were run by some type of engine in the front, one more advanced than steam, but nonetheless non-magical. When the noisy things stopped for the red lights (moving away again at the green signal) I was able to see people inside them operating the controls, just as with a normal carriage, but with engines. Inside something was combusting other than coal. I discerned the safe way to cross the road and went about doing it.What was far louder in me at the time than the cars or my heartbeat was the queasy autogenesis of fear. The dread that I had indeed been away longer than twenty or even thirty years... My earlier surge of faith where I’d told Arthur aloud I was coming for him was greatly rattled by this doubt that edged and thorn-needled its way into the back of my brain. Witch-pin like it gave off subtle venom, that doubt-demon. I knew all I had left going for me was the power of my determination, the pin-cushion poppet of my body endured these regular bone-deep injections, whilst on the outside I effortlessly negotiated the changed world around me. Below the surface I was still drowning, on the surface I am… well, good at things, I suppose. You will think me arrogant for saying so, but it’s true. It’s also not a choice for me whether to believe this of myself, because for me the other alternative to self-value is always death.             As I write this I fall again into the semi-stupor in which I wandered those nighttime streets… A functional stupor, of course, because one’s worth to this world must always be re-demonstrated, for humans forget past services very rapidly when made comfortable and complacent. Last time I stopped being functional something terrible had happened to me that I didn't fully understand as yet. So I was avoiding other humans like the concrete-spreading plague animal it seemed they had become. Or should that be that wehave become? After what I had done I felt more human than ever somehow, up against the stark background of this miracle that tasted clean-bitter like the pith of the blood orange... I was ever so much more human than this world, ever so much more fragile than the current Spirit of the Age, I guessed from the start. Time it appears, the lineality (to coin a word) of experience is also quite deceptively delicate. It folds in like treacle and the distinction between its layers is quickly lost. This is what is important about my story. I hope you didn’t expect I was going to leave all the analysis up to you, did you? I didn’t come here to let you study me, together we will study what has occurred and together draw the conclusions.             A brief observation of the system for regulation of traffic and spying on another late night pedestrian allowed me to cross the highway without incident. Running where possible and walking when I fatigued I generated sufficient body heat to partially warm and partially dry my clothing. So there could be no doubt I was quick with life.            Next I discerned where best to jump the very serious looking fence that seems to bar our descent down into the darkness. There is no sign to say it’s explicitly not allowed for citizens to crawl down into the Hobart Rivulet Tunnel but there’s a fence. As if the dark bowels of our city, seething with memory, are not quite forbidden by the rule of modernity, just strongly discouraged. A mild prohibition was never enough to prevent me finding my way into the guts of Hobart. It was where I belonged after all, was I not something that ought to have been digested by her long ago? Was I so uniquely unpalatable that of all Hobart’s dead only I had been coughed up, phlegm-covered and wriggling like a raw nerve?             The walls of the rivulet tunnel hissed and wriggled with voices. You could smell the history down there as strongly as you’d have smelt rot around the water in my time. History is buried into the foundations of Hobart, the skeletons of cottages of convict-hewn stone rise like stone ghosts to the sight of the late-night wayfarer. Deeper into the arteries of the city the air smelt like the effluence of well advanced capitalism. Just from the way they vented into the Undertown my nose wrinkled and I knew I wasn’t going to like what the living had been up to above.             Photography by Rebecca FlynnThe rest you know. How you say I froze, like a ‘deer in headlights’, when you flooded me in torchlight. You were standing there with your modern camera, a girl who was to my perception dressed in boy’s clothes, right beside the place with the baby’s heads. You pointed at the numerous plaster castes of boneyard-white doll faces that looked out eyelessly from the walls of the tunnel. You didn’t seem worried by them or by me.             “My theory is that this is here to commemorate the high infant morality in Hobart during the nineteenth century. Did you know they used to call part of South Hobart ‘shadow of death valley’ back in the day?” You addressed me.            “Yes,” I whispered, still caught staring into the bright light you wielded in your hand and forgetting to lie.              You turned the direction of the light on the baby head art next, so I was able to think more clearly.             “Well aren’t you the current reigning Smartypants of Smartypants Town?”             I wondered if I should agree it was likely, but I sensed you were perhaps facetious. "Well answer me this one then if you're so smart." You said this shining light on a gold painted plaque of a demon. "Whose this ugly, fella?"              "He looks like Typhon the many-headed monster of Greek myth, or perhaps his spawn Gorgon." I said it very quietly, as someone well aware that I wouldn't always be rewarded for knowing things. You nodded as if you were genuinely pleased to know. But all the intelligence in the world wasn’t going to help me out of the fix I was in, and I knew it. There was a question that would come to mean everything and it was going to hurt less to answer it now than when I would later find myself standing outside Lebrena and seeing the physical evidence.            “When you say… the nineteenth century… what… which year would that… make it today? Please?” Even cold and injured as I was it pained me not to use my manners in a proper introduction, to say my name and ask yours, as two humans ought. But the imperative around my question had become stronger even than my good upbringing.
            I watched the motion in your eyes from incomprehension to growing fear, and who could blame you really? When some lunatic in a tunnel looking like something the ocean regurgitated asks you what year it is, it’s reasonable to feel unsettled. But you didn’t run, thanks be to Our Lady…. You stayed and told me how many years it has been. I don’t want to write about that… About what I felt. About realizing… No. I’ve got nothing more for now. Give me a different stimulus question.

Read on to Episode 3!

Stimulus Question: So tell me about what happened leading up to when I found you in the rivulet tunnel?

You really want a story about what I did next? Walked down to the corner of Argyle and Collins Street where the rivulet tunnel opens and climbed down inside to hide from people, is what I did. But I contend that part was quite unremarkable. Luckily it was only an hour or two from dawn on a weeknight and the city was quiet. So I was able to duck and weave. I walked at first down an avenue of cypresses that seemed to commemorate some great and terrible war I’d not yet heard about, but did not approach the monument in fear of seeing the date. I came to a place where I could watch the wide, empty eyes of the horseless, carriages. Instead of headless horseman the night streets of Hobart now bore headless carriages.             Also in my favour was the my feverish imagination has always been balanced by a streak of cooler reason. Observing everything from the trees, I steeled myself into a state of calm. I reasoned that these vehicles were run by some type of engine in the front, one more advanced than steam, but nonetheless non-magical. When the noisy things stopped for the red lights (moving away again at the green signal) I was able to see people inside them operating the controls, just as with a normal carriage, but with engines. Inside something was combusting other than coal. I discerned the safe way to cross the road and went about doing it.What was far louder in me at the time than the cars or my heartbeat was the queasy autogenesis of fear. The dread that I had indeed been away longer than twenty or even thirty years... My earlier surge of faith where I’d told Arthur aloud I was coming for him was greatly rattled by this doubt that edged and thorn-needled its way into the back of my brain. Witch-pin like it gave off subtle venom, that doubt-demon. I knew all I had left going for me was the power of my determination, the pin-cushion poppet of my body endured these regular bone-deep injections, whilst on the outside I effortlessly negotiated the changed world around me. Below the surface I was still drowning, on the surface I am… well, good at things, I suppose. You will think me arrogant for saying so, but it’s true. It’s also not a choice for me whether to believe this of myself, because for me the other alternative to self-value is always death.             As I write this I fall again into the semi-stupor in which I wandered those nighttime streets… A functional stupor, of course, because one’s worth to this world must always be re-demonstrated, for humans forget past services very rapidly when made comfortable and complacent. Last time I stopped being functional something terrible had happened to me that I didn't fully understand as yet. So I was avoiding other humans like the concrete-spreading plague animal it seemed they had become. Or should that be that wehave become? After what I had done I felt more human than ever somehow, up against the stark background of this miracle that tasted clean-bitter like the pith of the blood orange... I was ever so much more human than this world, ever so much more fragile than the current Spirit of the Age, I guessed from the start. Time it appears, the lineality (to coin a word) of experience is also quite deceptively delicate. It folds in like treacle and the distinction between its layers is quickly lost. This is what is important about my story. I hope you didn’t expect I was going to leave all the analysis up to you, did you? I didn’t come here to let you study me, together we will study what has occurred and together draw the conclusions.             A brief observation of the system for regulation of traffic and spying on another late night pedestrian allowed me to cross the highway without incident. Running where possible and walking when I fatigued I generated sufficient body heat to partially warm and partially dry my clothing. So there could be no doubt I was quick with life.            Next I discerned where best to jump the very serious looking fence that seems to bar our descent down into the darkness. There is no sign to say it’s explicitly not allowed for citizens to crawl down into the Hobart Rivulet Tunnel but there’s a fence. As if the dark bowels of our city, seething with memory, are not quite forbidden by the rule of modernity, just strongly discouraged. A mild prohibition was never enough to prevent me finding my way into the guts of Hobart. It was where I belonged after all, was I not something that ought to have been digested by her long ago? Was I so uniquely unpalatable that of all Hobart’s dead only I had been coughed up, phlegm-covered and wriggling like a raw nerve?             The walls of the rivulet tunnel hissed and wriggled with voices. You could smell the history down there as strongly as you’d have smelt rot around the water in my time. History is buried into the foundations of Hobart, the skeletons of cottages of convict-hewn stone rise like stone ghosts to the sight of the late-night wayfarer. Deeper into the arteries of the city the air smelt like the effluence of well advanced capitalism. Just from the way they vented into the Undertown my nose wrinkled and I knew I wasn’t going to like what the living had been up to above.             Photography by Rebecca FlynnThe rest you know. How you say I froze, like a ‘deer in headlights’, when you flooded me in torchlight. You were standing there with your modern camera, a girl who was to my perception dressed in boy’s clothes, right beside the place with the baby’s heads. You pointed at the numerous plaster castes of boneyard-white doll faces that looked out eyelessly from the walls of the tunnel. You didn’t seem worried by them or by me.             “My theory is that this is here to commemorate the high infant morality in Hobart during the nineteenth century. Did you know they used to call part of South Hobart ‘shadow of death valley’ back in the day?” You addressed me.            “Yes,” I whispered, still caught staring into the bright light you wielded in your hand and forgetting to lie.              You turned the direction of the light on the baby head art next, so I was able to think more clearly.             “Well aren’t you the current reigning Mr. Smartypants or Smartypants Town?”             I wondered if I should agree it was likely, but I sensed you were perhaps facetious. "Well answer me this one then if you're so smart." You said this shining light on a gold painted plaque of a demon. "Whose this ugly, fella?"              "He looks like Typhon the many-headed monster of Greek myth, or perhaps his spawn Gorgon." I said it very quietly, as someone well aware that I wouldn't always be rewarded for knowing things. You nodded as if you were genuinely pleased to know. But all the intelligence in the world wasn’t going to help me out of the fix I was in, and I knew it. There was a question that would come to mean everything and it was going to hurt less to answer it now than when I would later find myself standing outside Lebrena and seeing the physical evidence.            “When you say… the nineteenth century… what… which year would that… make it today? Please?” Even cold and injured as I was it pained me not to use my manners in a proper introduction, to say my name and ask yours, as two humans ought. But the imperative around my question had become stronger even than my good upbringing.
            I watched the motion in your eyes from incomprehension to growing fear, and who could blame you really? When some lunatic in a tunnel looking like something the ocean regurgitated asks you what year it is, it’s reasonable to feel unsettled. But you didn’t run, thanks be to Our Lady…. You stayed and told me how many years it has been. I don’t want to write about that… About what I felt. About realizing… No. I’ve got nothing more for now. Give me a different stimulus question.