tenneriff (an old old story)

The psilocybin mushrooms are in the fridge but he dare not take them because of the things that can be seen in the non-patterning of the beige tiles in the hotel bathroom.  The effect is like a smoke image produced by holding a candle under white paper or a pale surface, or perhaps like floating an oil based or semi-soluble paint in water over a white surface. Totally irregular, no two tiles are the same, but given a fairly lively imagination and a bit of concentration, many snapshots from other places were being shown on the bathroom wall tonight:

• The land of the flat faced bat-cat with tufted ears and a knife-sharp-tooted grin
• The sheikdom of the eyeless Arab
• The skies flown by the awe inspiring pterodactyl
• The planet ruled by the monkey with lightening coming from its eyes
• That location of which the blunt-toothed gargoyle speaks animatedly

He cannot tell, because he cannot go there, perhaps even with the assistance of psilocybin mushrooms, ( although the quantities of them that he has taken so far give him the feeling that he might be starting that journey), but none of the above seem as though they might be good places. Yet, although the faces of their denizens and rulers, as shown in the bathroom wall tiles, have fearsome aspects, they do not seem to be bad places either. Merely very, very different places with unknown rules based on huge tessellated and towered mental structures discerned dimly through the swirling patterns of the bathroom tiles and the complicit smirks of their understanders, for demons are always good and bad.

On Christmas morning one can wake up feeling free of demons, for a second or two at least, until you realise that you are on a package holiday in Tenerife. Trapped in vast leisure Industry mega-factory thousands of miles from mainland Europe. Stuck on a strip of sand and lava between the saw-toothed mountains and the sad Atlantic, hemmed in by motorways and patrolled by short trousered police on electric scooters and private security dressed up in Tyrolean costumes or as gnomes. A temporary escape can at least be made on a whale watching catamaran cruise.

Grinning tanned reps assemble enough Angloid lardbuts to load up their catamaran and then sail slowly south, plying the lardy ones with free booze the while, lest they get any thinner. Riding low in the water, the catamaran soon comes across the pod of pilot whales that usually sleep on the surface near here.

The whales whistle to one another to maintain their relative positions and formation, the catamaran cuts its engine and circles them. The lardies look on, drink, point their videos and cameras, drink, stand up, drink, drink point at the whales, drink, eat sandwiches and , drink. The captain of the catamaran tells the lardies a story about the pilot whales.

“This whales are short-finned pilot whales. They is sleepings now, please do not shout, we do not want to disturb thems. This whales is not eat plankton, this are toothéd whales, have tooths. This whales eat gigante squid. This squid is living very, very deep in the sea, 400 metres perhaps. At this deep the whales cannot see, but each whale have in his head this echo-location, he is like sonar, so he find the squid. The giant squid is very, very big and the short-finned pilot whales is only quite small, you can see…..”

We could see, the pod that we circled was about ten or twelve beasts big. These beings were black, six or seven feet long, one at least with its smaller whale calf following. Their dorsals cut the sea’s surface and it was possible, after a bit, to see that individual whales had different fins. One was curled over, almost into an ‘S’ shape, others were almost sharply triangular, most followed the damned bell curve between these two extremes, being rounded off triangles. Sometimes the whales coasted along all fins above the surface, and at others, perhaps when the boat got too close, they dipped under the sea top and rose up again a few yards further on. This motion was like the way dolphins swim, but without all the showy leaping, squeaking noise and begging to track suited guards for herring.

Now the captain of the catamaran psychoanalysed the whales: ““This whales is very clever, they do not sleep like us who is dives deep in sleep and is probing the Id underneath,  and all this collective unconscious and all this. Underneath whales is ocean, we fly over it like birdes is fly over us. To us ocean is one blue thing, is one mass of water, is saltwater, is wet water, is one blue wet thing. But ocean is not one thing, he is not homo, he is hetero watter….”

The  lardies, who the captain was apparently addressing, were by now either so pissed on free beer and wine that they couldn’t understand what he was saying, even if they had been able to understand it anyway, (when sober, which was infrequent), or  they were Dutch or Scandinavian, or as was the case with the two of them with the most developed mentation, they were arguing  over the only one last free bocadillo left between the two of them and who to sue about it, given the zero-sum  situation about bocadillos which appeared then to prevail on the catamaran i.e. that some other greedy lardperson had consumed two of them instead of his/her single bocadillo ration.

“….he is watter of different levels.” The captain continued. “ This levels I speak of is levels of temperature, of pressure, of consciousness, of being itself, which, (one assumes), entails different world views. But goes up, the other goes down, the whales and squids that is. In day, the ocean segment where squid is frolic descend, he go down and short finned pilot whale cannot dive so far, so he sleep here, but their breathing is voluntary, so they is trifurcate their brain: swim, sleep, breathe all at once. Clever whales.

At night the squid level rise and the clever whales dive, but unlike the psychoanalytically trained captain of catamaran, they is conscious when they go so deep. I can only reach the level of the squid when I sleep, sleep, and sleep. The squids are big, I know, I have seen the vast expanses of their tentacular reach, the enormity of their jet propelling ink-farts, the snip-snap-snapping of their cannibalistic beaks, and the rolling and focussing of their football-sized eyes. But whales is smarts, when they swim in id of squid, whale is ego, grab squid and climb, climb, climb. If you have dived, you know, even from small depth, too much pressure change too fast is bad, so squid explodes, bang and whales eat him.”

Lardies paid no attention.

“Please only take one bocadillo each. “ One of the Capitan’s assistants admonished, but it was too late.

“Now is time for swimming, we go to swimming, place.” the captain announced

The lardy-laden catamaran sailed away from the pod of pilot whales to an inlet where so semi-conscious lardies swam in the shallows, others slumped on deck, all drank. The boat now played music to accompany these proceedings, presumably as this would no longer distract the short-finned pilot whales from their quasi-sleep.

As the lardies swam, displaying the full extent of their tattoos, the music was sort of ambient, chill-out, Holgar Czukay style stuff. But then after the lardies were all back on the catamaran and as it glided along the coast on its way back to its harbour. Past the fish farms., the artificial jetties, the new luxury up-market style town apartment style complexes with double electric fencing, searchlights, watchtowers and very Tyrolean security staff,  and the shacks of the island’s small underclass, made of bamboos and bits of old tarpaulin. As the catamaran glided past all of this in the dry hot merciless sunlight of a near equatorial Christmas which was at least not in Britain, the sound track changed to some kind of sexually mildly suggestive reggae . This moved a mother of chavs to wave her breasts at people on shore, they probably could not see what she was doing, but this did not deter her from sending messages in mammary Morse or titular semaphore, all the while shouting; “Whooo! Whooo! Whooo!” and “Whoooo!”. Fortunately the embarrassing woman shut up soon because she was sick, mostly over the side of the boat, (although some of her vomit got on the deck), before the catamaran docked.

The catamaran docked and he climbed back up past the ‘friendly’ Irish pubs and Scottish pubs and German pubs and English pubs and ‘happy’ English restaurants and German restaurants and the reassuringly English, German and Spanish supermarkets and mini-markets, some of which sold proper crisps, baked beans and Smirnoff at only €5 per litre. Until he reached his room in the Tenereifoplaza hotel where there was the psychedelic bathroom wall displaying:

• The land of the flat faced bat-cat with tufted ears and a knife-sharp-tooted grin
• The sheikdom of the eyeless Arab
• The skies flown by the awe inspiring pterodactyl
• The planet ruled by the monkey with lightening coming from its eyes
• That location of which the blunt-toothed gargoyle speaks animatedly

He did not feel psychologically strong enough to cope with these alternative realms yet (psilocybin mushrooms or not), especially as their analogous relationship to the relative depths, diving capacities, and predatory behaviour of short-finned pilot whales and giant squid were only just beginning to sink in/up/down/into his own sun-frazzled anglo-brain.

So he chilled out with some artisan style Gomerian potato crisps and a nasty 72% double-brewed malt beer called “Specialer Vole-Twaart” (or something), whilst looking at live TV shots of a tsunami drowning Sri Lankans on Sky News. 

It was horrible, you saw the brown surge of water, you saw two men standing on the side of the partially capsized bus, the vast tide swirling round their feet and after a bit you realised what could be happening inside the bus. God rest their souls, they go to heaven or a better life. But why should God rest them? Wasn’t it He/she/It/None of the above who had an itch in the nose and went: “arrr, errr… errrr. Errrr

TSUNAMI!

Never mind, what can you do?

Immediately the answer is eat the buffet hotel meal that he has already paid for. Drink too much red wine and have a piece of diced carrot from the Russian salad lodge firmly in his moustache to the disgust of his fellow singles holiday clients. Then go and see the floor show in the Tenereifoplaza ‘Bougainvillea’ performance area. It is the great DERMO and his glamorous assistant Katrin Gigantbox. He is a sort of shiny black plastic trousered bad latin knife throwing act who saves himself by Tommy Coopering but has to speak 25 euro linguas so ‘communicates’ mostly by fast claps and stamps and shouting “OY” or “HAY” (or something like that). His major talent is balancing bits of furniture on his chin whilst accompanied by a fat Polish artiste. He balances:

• Plastic chair
• Stack of (approx) 20 glasses
• Plastic table
• Wooden armchair with stuffing
• Wooden coffee table
• Plastic lounger from next to hotel swimming pool
• Sofa (3 seater) (Polish tart removes cushions)
• Medium sizes aluminium ladder

Then brings on puma cub on lead, end of act.

Now it is night, the level of concscoiusness is sinking towards the Id as the level of water in which the giant squid swims rises. The kingdoms concealed beneath the bathroom tiles emerge from their dimensions to connect a human brain and call it into their thrall.

Soon there will be an empty Hotel room.

.

MORT’S AVENUE RELIGION

Mort Legger had come to regard the London suburban Avenue that he lived in religiously. It was as finally tree-lined gentle ascent to a small plateau. Since Mort lived at the bottom, his eyes, were, willy-nilly, turned up wards. So perhaps his gaze, over the years that he had lived here, had, by dint of seeming pious, become so.

Mort Legger’s Avenue was not at true avenue, nor was it, anywhere other than in Mort’s imaginings, in any sense religious or possessed of any sacred significance. It had trees growing along both sides of it, through the pavements in front of the mainly semi-detached houses that made it up; but the trees were not evenly spaced now, although they could once have been, perhaps when the street was originally planned and planted. As the majority of the trees were London planes, which could easily grow fifty feet in height before a baby human had had time to become an adult, it seemed likely that many more had stood together, before the shell bursts and snipers had thinned them out.

Sometimes new replacement trees were planted, sometimes gaps were left. Most recently, the Council had implanted many slim young trees of species unknown to Mort. These novices were not always up to the job. Early one afternoon Mort had stepped outside his front door. This event was usually responded to the announcement “CAW” from one or other of the crows perched on neighbouring roofs. On this particular occasion as a strong gust from an unseasonable late May gale blew down the Avenue, Mort heard a “CRACK” followed immediately by the ripping, tearing sounds of severance.

Mort recognised these sounds because the last time that he had heard them, he had lifted the rip-saw in his hand from, a partially cut Medlar tree bough. Crude saw’n’axe surgery by Mort made the main tree unable to sustain the weight of the branch which crashed down from it into a lawn in a cloud of dust, twigs, leaves and dislodged insects.

In the May gale Mort saw the storm, rip a young council-planted tree which had had a trunk thicker than one of Mort’s legs, into two parts. A shattered stump still rooted in the ground, and the fully-leaved, blooming wide crown of the tree which crashed to the pavement and into the roadway in another unremembered and happening confusion of dust, twigs, leaves and dislodged insects. And knocking over grey plastic council wheelie bins, like a fictionally slow motion gangster, being shot with fake bullets up the end of an alley in a bad movie.

At the time Mort contemplated going to his garage and getting out his timber saw to scavenge bits of tree for potential sculpture, but he didn’t because his sculpture vulture belly was already overfull. By three hours later when he limped back up the road dragging an overloaded shopping trolley from the supermarket, the Council had purged all evidence that the tree’s fall had been due to storm damage. Only a cleanly cut off tree stump was still there. Mort mused that many taboos seemed to have vanished from British social mores in his lifetime, but death, money and even some aspects of sex remained out of bounds for polite middleclass conversation.; perhaps now with the impending impact of global climate change, the fact that humans might be exposed to danger from weather, and could not be protected from it by their own pompous political, devices might be a fact that Council lorries and chainsaws could attempt to sprees.

So that is how gaps and irregularities in the Avenue began and perhaps persisted as trees were or not replaced.

Mort assumed that the London plane, an Iberian immigrant, which was now the majority large species in the Avenue, had always been in the majority. Unlike some nearby roads which maybe ran along old field boundaries, so that an occasional oak, which might be two hundred years old or older, survived in a pavement or front garden. The only tree’s in Mort’s avenue that might have predated the planes, were two tall willows. Until ten or fifteen years ago there had been three of them.

Willows had a notorious hearsay reputation for thirst and Mort supposed that one of the three had inserted a guzzling tap root into a main drain or an underground stream or something, and that it had thus threatened the structural stability of the house it grew nearest to, or the integrity of the road itself.

It took the Council three years to get rid of that willow tree; the whole operation had many inexact parallels with some twenty first century neo-imperialist wars. A massive shock and awe offensive was mounted with seemingly invincible and unresisted force. Tree surgeons had hung down from ropes and in one afternoon filled with the racket and smell of their chainsaws, removed the branches of the willow and sliced its thirty foot trunk into sections. The tree became logs and sawdust; it was put into trailers and lorries and taken away.

A year later and it was clear that the stump that was left behind had been neither sufficiently shocked nor awestruck, but that the impact of the first attack on it had actually made it re-group, re-organise and counterattack. The initial Council offensive had had the paradoxical consequence of shortening an over-extended enemies' lines of supply and a pressing motive to resist existential threat. Or to put it less portentously, and militarily, any gardener knows that a good way to simulate growth is to cut a plant back hard.  Within twelve months, the willow had sprouted new branches, the trunklets of a thicket of new trees. Some by midsummer, were about eight feet high and in full leaf which almost blocked the pavement.

The Council sent the tree surgeons back in. They now cut the willow down to the ground, leaving behind a circular disc of wood in the pavement. Yet this still lived and regrew again in the following year, this time not getting to eight foot, but making a willow bush about a yard in height.

The Council’s final solution was to dig up as much of the underground roots and stump as it could and then, pour cement, and probably poison, into the hole, which was then capped with tarmac. This kind of thing might have worked for Imperial Rome at the end of the Punic wars when it eradicated Carthage, but it still didn’t quite pan out on Mort’s avenue, next spring a few small willow shoots came up around the edges of the tarmac plug, but didn’t make it much beyond that, or weren’t allowed to. Perhaps the expense and extent of the Willow Wars made The Council decide to leave the two remaining willow trees in the avenue alone.

The two Willows were as tall as the planes, but that did not mean they were of the same age, they could have been older as the planes were regularly pollarded and they were not, but the planes were not pollarded in any particular order. Newly pollarded planes are a first glance, an ugly sight. This drastic cutting back of protruding branches can make the tree look like some mutilated wooden hand or paw that has had fingers or claws amputated. Seen against a setting winter sun, they could seem, to Mort, to be reaching out in some sort of prayer of the wounded like some of the shell-shattered trees painted by war artists in 1914-18.

In spring each pollarded knuckle sprouted numerous thin withies that shot up green and skyward, two or three feet, before beginning to bud into leaf. Mort projected religious significance onto this. Silhouetted before a grey and china blue sky as a gale blew across, the slender new twigs seemed like a web of prayer being grown into the sky to catch the start of summer, or even a first swift migrating back from Africa, and trap it and keep it on earth in Britain, instead of letting it blow over and away again.

There was almost no end to the superstitions that dribbled through Mort’s dreamy brain as he looked at the plane trees. He wondered as he hobbled up the Avenue, on his twice weekly walk for treatment by his local Doctor if he was like some ancient British pilgrim limping along one of the avenues leading to the central healing place at Stonehenge or Avebury. The summer leaf cover got denser as he got further, so one could, were one as daft as Mort, feel a sense of being drawn further and further into a web, or something. The trees spreading overhead became a sheltering presence, not enough it was true, to prevent Mort get soaked if a cloudburst came, but enough to provide a little shelter during such a wet and relatively rare event.

The trees were more closely planted as Mort worked his laborious way up the hill so Mort sometimes thought that he entered a quasi magical, mystical glade. This feeling was enhanced by two particular features of this small area. One of these was the tallest man in the world who was about eight foot in height, and dark skinned. He was a Somali, who tended to wear white flowing robes. His figure could loom up before Mort with his head and shoulder disconcertingly appearing in a zone where Mort expected to see flying garden birds or the tops of passing vans.

The other strange feature was a dog that answered Irish commands. If this hound came up to sniff Mort, one of its owners, (one of whom was a galloping man), would call the tame beast to heel with a terse Erse injunction.

Mort enhanced the feeling of sacredness that came over him as he walked up the Avenue by inventing silly little private practices that he preformed when he rested, leaning against a plane trunk. Here he often found a piece of bark about to totally flake off the tree. Sometimes the hint of a touch would detach this bit of treeskin. Other bits might require a firmer whack or tap to send them down to the pavement; and then there were those flakes that almost did not “know” that the were flakes for themselves as well as flakes in themselves and need to be prised of the tree trunk by one of Mort’s fingernails in order to join the rest of the tree dandruff. At each tree, Mort felt that he had to detach at least three flakes of bark, to merely knock or pick off one or two was to him, unlucky; and if, having picked off three pieces, he accidentally dislodged a fourth fragment, Mort would not then leave, he continued removing bits until the total was nine, or sometimes even twelve or fifteen. Mort tried to ensure that the number of fragments that he picked off any one plane tree at any one time was a number divisible by three. Occasionally, as this numerically disciplined mini ritual took place, Mort might be rewarded by a tiny vision, in the form of living, curved, bright red letter “w” made by the body of a millipede which started to crawl towards more under-bark darkness after Mort had ripped the ceiling off its universe.

This omen was now all Mort could think of; he did not now know where he was or what he was doing. He woke in deep night to see before him four or five nurses struggling to control what looked like an H.R.Giger Alien, but was actually a very old, very tall, stark naked man on a hospital bed that he seemed to be trying to get out of. He looked like The Alien, because he had had oxygen mask over the lower part of his face and this mask had a long, concertinaed hose hanging down from it. The hose was writhing about like a serpent as the man moved. All the man’s flesh had shrunk and it seemed to have pulled his hand s and limbs into insectoid shapes of bone and sinew. He was festooned in part with wires and tubes and that had been pulled out and bandages unravelled in his struggles. He thrashed about, at times seemingly randomly, at others seeming to attempt to take off his mask or hit at the nurses who were attempting to restrain him, and keep him in the hospital bed with his mask on.

It was futile battle, futile in the sense that the nurses would “win", because of their numbers, strength and unity and clarity of purpose; and also perhaps because sedatives were taking effect on the man. Nothing that was said mattered, but things kept being said. The nurses said things like "Now, now, you’ve got to keep the mask on Mr James.” Mr James’ replies were initially loud, frequent and totally inarticulate.

Watching from his hospital bed in an opposite corner of the ward, Mort hoped that if he could go to sleep and dream hard enough he could go back to his Avenue. Dying was easier for him think about there than to witness here.