Zencore!: Scriptus Innominatus, page 1
part #7 of Nemonymous Series
Table of Contents
– Copyright –
Torsion
MMM—Delicious
Undergrowth
Fugly
The Nightmare Reader
The Secret Life of the Panda
Upset Stomach
The Awful Truth About The Circus
Red Velvet Dust
The Coughing Coffin
Terminus
Mary’s Gift, the Stars and Frank’s Pisser
Blue Raspberries
Berian Winslow & The Stream of Consciousness Storyteller
The Plunge
England and Nowhere
Word Doctor
– Late-labelling for Zencore! (2007) –
© 2007 Megazanthus Press and the individual authors.
All fiction is original to this Zencore anthology.
In due course, the authors’ names will be correctly assigned to each piece of short fiction. This will take place on-line and in the next projected anthology, together with similar credits for others involved in preparing this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, rebound or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author and publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
ISSN 1474-2020
Printed and Bound by Biddles, King’s Lynn, Norfolk
Cover design, layout, and typesetting by the bookbinder’s elves
www.nemonymous.com
A NOTE ABOUT THIS eBOOK: As per the preceding, bylines were originally published in the subsequent issue. The creator of this ebook has elected to include each "Credits" or "late-labelling" section at the end of its respective book. If the reader would prefer to remain in suspense as to the identities of each book’s authors, he or she can simply elect not to read that section until such as time as it is deemed appropriate to the reader.
Torsion
Imagine that your favorite place on Earth has been invaded—violated, as it were; you never asked much from life, except for a small place with a patch of green and gurgling of a brook spilling into an oval, calm pond fringed with cattails and sedges. A small place where you could sit in silence, occasionally casting an unbaited hook into the dark waters, the smells of heated mud and pungent greenery mixing in a still, humid air. You never asked for anything more, just to sit in peace, swat at midges, and cast the line into polluted, uninhabited waters.
Not completely uninhabited though. There are flukes and tadpole snails; you remember both as indicators of pollution and low environmental quality. There’s no fish, but that’s not what it’s all about.
So, imagine that you came to this spot, attractive precisely because it repulsed everyone else, and found the grass trampled, the cattails pulled and stomped upon, and the place where you used to sit, a neat little semicircle of compacted soil, littered with empty snail shells. As homely as the snails were, you feel bad about their drab little shattered shells, and feel indignant at the intrusion.
Now, imagine that the invader is still here. It takes you a second to notice, but there is a horrible old man crouching in the shallow water, his winter coat floating around him like an oil spill, his fingers raking through the mud. You automatically think of him as a ‘homeless person’ rather than a bum, but your anger squeezes your hands shut, clamps on your throat. Anger fades into a disbelieving disgust as he pulls out one muddy hand, silt dripping between clawed fingers, the lumps of the snails defenseless on his open palm. He holds up each snail in turn, cackling, whispering in a hot breathless voice, “Dextral, dextral, sinistral... oooh, let’s see if you’re just a little liar, a little faker...” With his simian fingers the man pries open the little door that hides the snail’s soft body, and pulls out the snail. It’s just a sad glob of gelatinous flesh, but the old man breaks into a wild fit of laughter. “Oooh, I knew, I knew! All truth, all the way... back home you go.”
You almost heave as he tosses the twitching body into his toothless maw, and gives a wide grin, and speaks to you directly. “Sweet as honey, the devil snail.”
“What are you doing?” you manage to say, half-surprised that you haven’t yet left.
“Looking for sweet devil snails, sinistral, delicious, wise and sweet. Honey and milk, but watch for the torsion—don’t rely on the shell, shells fake, snails lie.”
You are convinced that he is insane—has been since the moment you saw him—and yet the anger lingers, for the desecrated place that will never be the same. “Get lost,” you tell him, and brandish your fishing pole like a whip. “Get lost, or I’ll...”
The threat remains unfinished, but the old man stands up, gathering his coat into soggy folds around him, blinking quick old man’s tears away. “May you eat a dextral snail,” he says. “Goodly poison for the likes of you.” He sloshes to the shore, slipping on the dirt under his wet feet, and runs, hobbling, toward the desperate call of the freight train running on close but invisible tracks.
Now you feel bad, and start cleaning up the place—up righting the cattails, and tossing the snail shells into the dark water. They float for a moment, dip, and sink, filling up with water, heavy like Torsion dead snails’ bodies. The pond looks the same, but the memory of violation makes it useless to you.
When you go home, you read about snails. You learn about the rarity of sinistral shells, and the banality of the dextral, you learn of the difficulty with which dextral and sinistral snails mate with each other, and how they choose to stick to their own kind. You also learn that the bodies of snails are twisted like their shells, growing in the spiral pattern, but not necessarily in the same direction—some sinistral shells hide dextral bodies. There’s a chill as the old man’s words start to make sense.
The next time you go back, you watch the snails as they crawl up the cattails’ stems. It is difficult not to think about how twisted they are underneath. It is difficult not to wonder what they taste like.
You pick one up, just to take a closer look, and your fingers grab at the tiny door, the size of your pinky nail, and tear it away; your nails dig at the edges of the shell, chipping away small translucent chunks. The twisting flesh is exposed, repeating every clockwise turn of its shell. Gingerly, you stick out your tongue, touching it to the glistening surface of the snail. It tastes of swamp and mud. A smallest bite lights a fire in your mouth and you spit, furiously, and rub your tongue with your free hand. Goodly poison.
It takes you several hours to find a sinistral snail, but your expectations are not high as you destroy the shell and try another bite. It melts on your tongue, fizzle and sweetness, and sends small jolts of ecstasy sparkling through your mind. You want more, and wade into the pool, fishing rod abandoned for good, and search for the counterclockwise coiling snails.
It’s not just the taste, it is also the sensation that they give you, as their life’s cold blood squirts onto your molars; it is the knowledge that grows within you, shapeless and unstoppable like cancer. Another sinistral snail, but this one doesn’t quite taste right. You turn it on your tongue, tracing the coils, and realize that this is a liar snail—hiding its righteous body in the sinister shell (they don’t call them that without a good reason, you know). But it’s sweet, and you swallow, and all the accumulated understanding reaches the breaking point and rushes through, scattering the remains of what you once knew like so much debris of a burst dam.
You feel your mind rise and twist upon itself, taking your spine and your guts with it. Your body heaves high up above your head, churning, crossing the nerves, unravelling the guts and turning them onto themselves. You recognize the process—it is called torsion, and every proper snail must go through it, to become itself. The soft mass shudders and expels bones, solidifying them as a thin covering of the outside, spacious enough to withdraw into in case of danger. Your teeth fuse into a radula, a perfect thing to grate the stems of rushes, and you hurry to the water. There’s danger afoot—you hear the whistling of the train and the lopsided gait of an old man with thin fingers.
MMM—Delicious
Harrison-Hargrave was no different to any other advertising agency, except that it was bigger. I did not know that at the time because it was my first job. I did not know that there was a snooker table in the main reception area because there was a snooker table in the main reception area of all big advertising agencies, together with low tables topped with smoked glass loaded with glossy magazines, and deep, leather-bound sofas. I did not know that there would be long meetings, called “creative sessions” in which nothing was decided except that “some interesting ideas” had been “kicked around”. I did not know that it was, despite some appearances to the contrary, an intensely male environment, hence that intensely male phrase “kicked around”. I did not know that for the first year of my life there I would be known as “Lucy-make-the-tea” since that, in the opinion of the men, was all I did.
This is not going to be a rant. Actually, I enjoyed it because I never allowed myself to be intimidated, and because I knew I was going to be good at this job. I was. I am. After all, I was the first person to spot Tony White. There are other claimants, I am sure, but no-one else really understood or knew as much as I did about Tony. It is n
In September ‘85 we, at Harrison-Hargrave, held a casting session for a TV commercial. The product was a new “healthy” breakfast cereal called Weetsheefs. The concept, as we say, was as follows. A man is sitting at a table in a kitchen. It is morning and he has a bowl of breakfast cereal before him. He puts a spoonful of Weetsheefs—little lumps of puffed wheat shaped like tiny sheaves—in his mouth and is immediately transported, together with his table and bowl of cereal, to a sunlit English wheat field where birds sing. He looks around, smiles and says: “Mmm delicious!” A voice-over says: “Eat Weetsheefs. They’re Mmm-delicious!” That’s it. Yes, I know, it is strikingly unoriginal, though I can’t tell you how long the chaps took to hammer out that little scenario. It was not the kind of commercial that wins awards, but award-winning commercials are not always those which sell product.
Being the lowest of the low at Harrison-Hargrave, my job description varied from day to day. On this occasion I was appointed to be the P.A. (personal assistant) for the casting session. That is to say, I had a clipboard on which were the names of all the actors to be interviewed. As each one came in I would ask them to fill in a form (measurements, hair colour, that sort of thing), take a Polaroid of them and give them a copy of the script to study. Then I would usher them in one by one to a little studio where sat or slouched a posse of important people: the director of the commercial, several Harrison-Hargrave executives and “creative consultants”, and a representative from Realfoods Ltd, the company that made Weetsheefs. The actor would sit down on a chair facing these people under a glare of lights. He would be videotaped answering questions about his name and agent; then he would be asked to perform the line from the script—“Mmm delicious!”—while he mimed the eating of the product.
My then boyfriend Doug, an actor, told me that the atmosphere at commercial casting sessions is quite different from any other type of audition. If you are waiting your turn to be seen for a stage show, or for a film or television part, there is always tension between actors under the bonhomie. Your talent is competing against theirs. When it’s a commercial everyone knows the whole affair is a lottery and that you will be chosen not for your peculiar gifts as an actor but because your face happens to fit. You know that ninety nine times out of a hundred you will miss; then comes that one time when, for some unknown reason, someone thinks you are just the type to recommend bath salts or insurance to the public. As a result actors at commercial castings are always very genial with each other, greet casual acquaintances like old friends and, quite sincerely, wish them the very best of luck.
Such was the atmosphere at the Weetsheefs casting. There were a lot of jokes about how that one line “Mmm delicious!” could be interpreted. “What’s my motivation?”
“About three or four grand, I should imagine!” And so on. But there was one person at the casting session who did not take part in the fun. He sat alone, staring intently at the script and occasionally mouthing those two words: “Mmm delicious!” Either no-one knew him, or he was being deliberately shunned. This was Tony White.
I asked if I could take a Polaroid of him which I did. He stood up against a white patch of wall and stared directly into the camera, like a criminal posing for a mug shot. I have the Polaroid in front of me now, or I could not describe him to you. In spite of everything, I carry around no mental image of his face. Other things about him I do remember, but the face escapes me. I can see that his head is a very regular oval shape. He must be in his early to mid thirties. His gingery fair hair is cropped and he is balding. The features are evenly spaced, rather small, the lips thin. There is an odd sort of smile on them. His blue eyes are looking straight at me, but I don’t know what he is seeing.
I think we saw about thirty or forty people at that casting. As a reward for my hard work that day I was allowed to sit in and form part of the “jury” while we played back the videos of all those grown-up men pretending to eat breakfast cereal and saying: “Mmm delicious!”
After watching the first dozen or so the futility of it all began to depress me. The inanity of their words and actions started to take on a cosmic dimension. I looked at the others and they appeared equally gloomy. The actors were either trying too hard, or trying too hard not to appear to be trying too hard, or their faces didn’t fit, or there was something odd about their personality. Few if any seemed just natural. When it was over the director was all for holding another casting session, but that could take a week to set up and the representative from Realfoods Ltd did not want to waste any more time or money. The product was being launched in a month’s time.
We looked through them all again which made most of us even more gloomy. Eventually Selwyn one of our creative team at Harrison-Hargrave turned to me. I think he was hoping to relieve the tension by making fun of me. He was like that; he was the company character, a bit of a card, a gas, always one for a laugh: so they told me.
“Well, Lucy babes, do you want to give us the benefit of your wisdom? Is there anyone there who tickles your fancy?”
That was when I mentioned Tony White.
“Tony White. Can’t say I remember him at all which is ominous,” said Selwyn. “Nevertheless, spool back the tape and we’ll have a look at this lady’s favourite, shall we?”
We watched the video of Tony White.
“Well, Lucy pussy,” said Selwyn, “we have now seen your boyfriend yet again and I really don’t know what you see in him. It’s okay, I suppose, but he seems to be totally bland and forgettable. Perhaps you could explain to us mere males why your withers have been wrung by this amiable nonentity.”
As you can imagine, I was in a rage by this time which is why I expressed myself with far more conviction than I felt. “But don’t you see,” I said, “it is precisely because he is so bland that he is perfect for it. He is nobody and everybody. He’s a blank screen on which anyone can project themselves. Nobody is going to object to his personality because he has none. Weetsheefs is the breakfast cereal for Everyman. You have just seen liveryman.”
People were impressed. I was impressed myself. “I’ll buy it,” said the Realfoods man, and that settled the issue.
From that moment on I was no longer “Lucy-make-the-tea” but “Lucy-darling” or “Lucy-babe” which, I suppose, was an improvement. As a reward, or perhaps punishment, for my enterprise Selwyn, gave me the task of hiring Tony White. This naturally involved ringing up and negotiating with Tony White’s agent, Dinah Shuckwell.
Dinah Shuckwell was the most hated agent in London—hated, that is, by our profession—but we all had to deal with her from time to time because she had a high quality stable of clients. They were actors and actresses mostly, but there were some variety people and “personalities”, and they swore by her, as she, profanely, did by them. She had an uncanny knack of squeezing the maximum possible amount of money out of a production company. Some believed she had spies everywhere; certainly she knew almost to the last penny what her clients were worth to us. She did not mind being rude and aggressive; sometimes she seemed to go out of her way to cause offence. With loathing comes fear, and fear is a very useful negotiating tool.
Dinah operated from a huge, dark flat off the Brompton Road that smelt of gin, cats and Gitanes cigarettes. I know because I had occasion to visit her there once, but I’ll come to that later. She was in her late fifties and wore her dyed black hair in a bob over a face that might once have been described as “piquant”, but was now gaunt and mean. Her hands were ring-encrusted claws. She had retained her figure presumably because she drank and smoked but rarely ate, and always wore perfectly cut French designer clothes. The effect of this chic, however, was mitigated by the horror of her face, and the strange fact that she never wore stockings; nor any knickers, it was rumoured. (Who found that out, and how? I’d rather not think about it.)
