I Couldn’t Possibly Know, Joe

Fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty. Here, you drink some too, you could use it, wash this down, this supplement, friend, get some iron in what you call blood, readers digest it with your pride and pasty, wipe your chin on your record sleeve, the dirtiest, friend, old friend, since records began. You hit the road, Tom Joad, and it hit you back, Jack, and we’re all the same to kingdom come and kingdom came and went, friend, where you were buried roadside and we’ll be buried or burned, come what may, that’ll come. Take any precaution with plentiful water against being overwhelmed by the world, and don’t be overwhelmed, friend, by the world, and don’t dribble your overdose on my pristine sedan chair if you’d be so kind; I mustn’t be miscarried, I must be delivered intact from a restless womb. We’re on the same side here, the same side of the moon, the same side of the canal. And while we’re giving orders here, tie your tie and fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty. If you recall, Paul, a week ago last any day now, you were drinking from a glass half empty and you drank the wrong half, Lord have mercy, and died. Well, I didn’t blame you, and I still don’t blame you, even after the resurrection that was a statement of intent post-dated, but still I’d sleep easier in a scenario wherein I’d sleep at all if I could understand why you went and did it all, all over again, painful as it must have been. Human frailty? I couldn’t possibly know. Write me a memorandum. Propose a toast; toast; anchovies on your toast, Tony? I can’t provide them, nor abide them, nor condone them, cousins as they are to the carp and cat, horse and bat; carping on, you call carp fish, but I call him Finn, and I couldn’t eat Finn, not when we’re sitting at the table, finishing starters, soup and salad, raising glasses, the first champagne, preparing for the New Year, the last flat sparkling wine of this old year; I couldn’t do that to him, not with his friends around him, not with the pervading air there already is of finality in all things present, all of us married and solemnly at that. I’ve an errand for you in the here and now, cow, I’d like you to run now with this satchel of mine, contents undisclosed, to some friends of mine, some dear sweet friends of mine, and colleagues moreover, identities undisclosed, I’d like you to deliver this and no I won’t give you this, and if you wish to take issue, Klaus, you can tell it to a hound dog, Pedro, you can flatten on the wheels of the National Express. Lick this ground that myths have walked on, lick the ordinary ground you’re going to walk on while walking, and pass the remote control, and before you put your boots on, and before you take your next breath, fetch the pail, pale, I’m thirsty, getting thirstier.

Frank and Fish

Old Frank the fisherman was always brimming over with his tales of aquatic heroism. There was the time he wrestled an octopus that had hold of some damsel or another. Then there was the time he clobbered a hammer-head shark. Usually I’d just nod and smile, but there was one evening I felt a touch mischievous.

“Frank,” I said, “What I want to know is, have you ever been involved in a battle of any sort with a Great White?”

Frank looked startled, “Oh, Heavens!” he said, fingers twitching nervously at his pint, “Sure, I’d have more sense than that!”

“I see,” said I, “Well, I suppose it’s a different mettle of fish.”

Old Frank was crestfallen.

The Boatman: Part Three of Three

With a full mind to throwing herself body and soul into the river that would be her grave, the young woman flew into a bitter despair and flung her pouch, tearing its strap, at the silt of the shore. It burst open, spilling all that was in it; coins were hurled into the reeds, others hit dry ground and rolled; gems and jewels, gold and silver lay scattered all around. Her poems fluttered in the slightest of breezes and her sketches of Spain grew blotched with the damp. Her attention was nowhere, but Jones looked keenly at this conflagration of beads and personal effects. His gaze was drawn immediately to near the very centre of the spread.

Had she been looking in this instant, she would not perhaps have understood its meaning, but the crisp, clear, solar gleam of the apple could not have escaped her notice. Indeed, when she did turn in the midst of her pain, she froze, despite herself, in a scarcely witting wonder. She had picked that apple, or an apple from the usual tree, and placed it with her bread and cheese as had become habitual; it was lunch. She made no sound nor moved for long enough to find her mind empty of thought when next she knew where she was.

“I believe you asked for passage?” said the boatman.

She said nothing.

“If your hunger can resist that particular portion of your meal,” and there was no need for him to gesture towards the apple, nor did he, “Then I shall allay your… worries, and take you aboard.”

She still said nothing, but turned to look at him, eyes wide and open.

“It won’t be a direct trip,” he warned, “As that payment would be too great for a simple river-crossing. But the return journey will be assured, should you wish for it. And yes, you can reach the other side, though I can’t guarantee a precise timeframe; there’ll be plentiful wine where we’ll be going, and so you shall certainly have the means to pay. It’s a feast, see?” he intoned what was almost a request.

She assented wordlessly, moving towards the boat. She grasped the apple, the light of which made even the copper coins shine in constellations. Everything else she left, without a thought to picking it up.

“And please,” said the boatman, “Call me Jones.”

The Boatman: Part Two of Three

This particular circumstance repeated itself on a number of occasions. The young woman tried carrying several flagons at a time, she tried transporting them in a basket, even once in a wheelbarrow, but always, in one way or another, the wine contrived to spill itself on the ground before she reached the boatman. Usually it was a simple case of the skin splitting (though there is nothing simple in the splitting of four or five seemingly well-made flagons in the course of one journey), but more than once the reason for the spillage was more surprising. For instance, one day a swan flew at her and she dropped her basket, another day she was knocked off her feet by a pack of handsome hounds as a bugle called someway behind, and the day she brought the wheelbarrow it was struck by lightning and escaped her grip, trundling into a fearsome ravine. She felt very unlucky, and exceedingly hard done by.

One constant, and it didn’t escape the young woman’s attention, was that the wine was always spilt nearer to her destination than to her point of departure. She assumed after a while that this was some mean, tantalising trick of fate, as sometimes she could hear the lapping of the river at the shore when the wine was spilt, so close was she to success. She never once made it to the edge of the woods, though, with a drop of wine left in her possession. She always, however, completed her journey and, with less optimism every time, tried to bargain with Jones. She offered many things; yet more money, more jewels, bread and meat, fur and feathers, even herself eventually, but the answer was always the same.

It was on the day that he spurned this last offer that she reached the very end of her tether and, weeping copiously, told Jones the following;

“You know my face well enough by now, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked you for passage. I’ll tell you now what I shouldn’t wonder you have long since guessed, and that is that my true love is on yonder bank, and that I mean to be reunited with him. Since he cannot know he would find me here, I daresay he’s given up hope, but a promise is a promise, and if you refuse to ferry me today, I shall swim, although that the water is wide and I shall certainly drown. I shall leave you my pouch with all of its riches, for better it remain with you, dear boatman, than that it drown with me. For while I lie clay-cold and eaten by fishes, it may yet bring me solace to think that perhaps you have made your way to town to buy wine with that money for the dry mouth that so afflicts you.”

Jones said nothing at first, but gave a wry chuckle. He looked for a moment or so at this young woman, miserably awaiting his response.

“My dear,” he said presently, “I hope you have a good lunch with you, as I would hate to think of you undertaking so arduous a task on an empty stomach.”

Track 2: Have I Been Rescued? (The Ballad of the Broke-Down Blue)

(Introduction: Strictly Bass and Mouth Organ
Then a gradual wave of Gospel- getting louder and louder, like a Mouthie. Then).

Oh Gospel, could you hear me
when the water lapped my waist?
Heard nothin’ to alarm me
Put that devil in his place
Now just a dice roll from delusion
I blinked every second frame
I counted angles in the alleys
Every one was just the same.
Now my baby’s out of earshot
And she better be as blue
The pavement full of fractures
For my wails to drip into

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep?
How could you let my fingers tremble?
Yeah, Let me bawl about that girl.

Say Gospel, could ya hear me
As the water touched my chest?
Don’t set fire to the bar-side, they said
But it was just a test.
I just don’t have the guts for heaven
and hell don’t have the guts for me.
You wear your sins like jewellery
And Now Honey, you’re guilt free

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep.
How could you let my stomach empty?
Well let me bawl about my girl.

But tell me…
Gospel could you hear me
As the water reached my neck?
I was overcast with moonshine
I just hadn’t thought to check.
All my jokes before the bar side
fell flat out on their designs
So I plot a graph from Britain
To the Jwaneng Diamond Mines.

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep.
How could you let my gizzards tangle?
Well let me bawl about my girl.

For Godssake Gospel won’t you hear me
Now the water’s overhead?
I’m screaming can’t you hear me!?
It’s hopeless now to tread.

Chorus:
You let me bawl about my baby
When I shoulda been asleep!
How couldya let my lungs fill
Lord I coulda been asleep!
All of this is your fault
So let me
Bawl
About
The
Girl.

The Boatman: Part One of Three

Where Lethe forgets what it is and becomes Eridanos of no fixed designation, the water leaves the foggy gloom and is home to Nyami Nyami, merry snake with his basket of bread, and the banks are green; the Southern shore is the reflection of the fields of Aaru in earthier hues, still ripe with reeds; the Northern shore is Salley Gardens, where pleasant men weep silently to strains of The Waters of Tyne, strummed for coppers by Orpheus, on the lam with his lyre. Lethe remembers sometimes to dip her feet in the river that bore her name upstream, just to be sure it’s still moving. She’s on the Salley side. A jetty juts from either bank a little further downstream, where the meanders of Eridanos first mingle with the flowing of Ymir’s blood from the North Sea. For a flagon of wine, the boatman (Jones to his friends) will take you across from shore to shore. Throw in a golden apple, or even a simple apple crumble, and you might persuade him to take you out to sea, across chopping waves on his little wicker ferry, to the bay where cormorants swoop at the backs of fishermen unawares, the shore where the first of the Eastern guests, the Three Pure Ones and Rostam the champion, have already crossed the beach and are on the road that will take them to the Court of King Jelly Roll, for the feast.

A young woman came down to the jetty one morning where Jones sat smoking his pipe. They were on the south side.

“Boatman,” she said, and he looked up, smiling slightly, “Will you ferry me across the river?”

“Of course dear,” he said, “If you have the means to pay.”

“Certainly I do,” she said, reaching towards her pouch, “Should I pay you now or later?”

“Now, I should think,” said Jones, amusedly, “But what manner of vessel is that for transporting wine?”

Both were looking at the pouch, “It... isn’t,” said the young woman, “It’s full of money and such things.”

“Ah, yes. Hard currency. It’s wine I’ll be needing, though. That money stuff’s wasted on me, dear.”

“But I haven’t any wine,” she protested, “And I do have rather a lot of money, coins of all denominations, and traveller’s cheques too!”

It was no use, though, and Jones told her, kindly enough, to return again with wine, and passage would be assured. And so she headed off, somewhat frustrated.

The next day, or two days later, she arrived at the jetty just as Jones’s boat returned, unladen, from the other side. She walked down and crouched to repeat her previous request.

“Of course dear,” he said, “But I shall need a sip of that wine first, for it’s thirsty work being a boatman. More than you might realize. You do have the means to pay, yes?”

“I did…,” she began, hesitantly, raising the remnants of a flagon, “But it was spilt on the way…”

“Oh dear.”

“I was hoping, perhaps, to offer you this instead,” she said, holding out a diamond ring.

“Hmm,” pondered Jones, “I’m sure it’s pretty enough to look at, but I daresay it does very little for a dry mouth. It’ll have to be wine, I’m afraid.”

She sighed and headed off.

Jack Countenances the Water

For your collective titilation, and by popular demand, the following is from the chapter entitled "Onions", from the work in progress that is "Aboard the Ship the Sunday Morning":

Jack may have countenanced in his consciousness the onions and their quantity, indeed, he may even have been amused by them. The dirty water, however, for it was nothing if not dirty, leapt to his mind’s forefront, shoving aside any notion of onions, or anything else, vegetable or otherwise or indeed the swabbing of decks, for that matter, following Fat Pete’s addition, and in spite of Clancy’s reiteration. Gladly such states of single-mindedness didn’t tend to linger too long in Jack’s well-defined skull, but, perhaps even more gladly, major realisations reached during these states, as we shall call them, were moderately frequently remembered. Little Jack the scullion reached the following realisation: “The water acquired in Penitence at Pig Gantry’s insistence, and I couldn’t be more certain that coincidence isn’t so much as a shadow of a factor in this matter, is so dirty as to be, at very best, infected, but quite possibly poisoned in addition” Jack, wide-eyed to allow as much light as could be harnessed in the gloom of the galley to assist in thought processes pertaining to survival, reached the following conclusion: “By all possible means, I shall avoid drinking the water in question.”

This would prove to be more complicated than Jack might have hoped it would, but until he felt particularly thirsty he continued in his conversation with the other galley-folk without mentioning the seemingly fetid water.