DEVIL IN DISGUISE

February 19th, 2014. 04:00am

"You look like an angel... Walk like an angel... Talk like an angel..."

This is one of those postings that you really have to think twice about before posting because it's likely to cause you far more pain and heartache than can be gained from simply sharing one of life's little horrors with the unknown and unseen not-very-much wider world.

I don't really dream all that much, or, at least, if I do, I seldom have dreams which are vivid enough to be all that memorable. It is, perhaps, a side-effect of the insomnia, in that I rarely sleep deeply enough to go into a full dream state, which is probably not healthy. Either that or I simply don't have the imagination to dream properly, and my concrete brain is incapable of doing anything so creative.

No matter.

That said, the other morning, I was awoken by a vision so terrifying that it took me a full half hour to regain my senses, by which time I was far too afraid to go back to sleep and, instead, I got up, made myself a cup of tea and tried to calm myself down.

It was her, you see. Oh, not the real her, I'm sure of that, but the memory of her. The woman as she appears in the photographs, the version of her as she once was, as she was then. I knew it was the woman from the photographs because I recognised the jumper, and the denim skirt, and the hairstyle from an old snapshot that I once took, although the patronising, condescending manner, that was all her own, and no picture could have done it justice.

In the dream we'd already broken up, but had both been invited to a party or something, and I'd decided not to go, and went off, as I often do in life, to hide away from it all rather than having to face the reality of the circumstances. So there I found myself, hiding, rather surprisingly as I seldom stayed there, in what seemed to be the spare room of the second house my grandfather built. As I tried to hide myself away, the door opened and in she walked wearing that jumper and skirt and with that once-familiar oh-so-superior look in her eye.

She came over, sat down on the edge of the bed and was about to tell me in no uncertain terms about what was wrong with what I was doing this time...

…when, thankfully, I woke up.

At home and in bed at four o'clock in the morning with my heart beating like a pneumatic drill on a hot summer's day, and shaking like a leaf in sheer terror, a state which it took me a full half hour to calm down from as images and long-buried memories from my past flashed painfully across the forefront of my mind.

It's been over two decades now since she tore my life up into little pieces and went off to grab a tight hold on the much better life she'd already been finding for herself. We shared some mutual friends, although she shared them in far more intimate ways than I would have liked, and so we tried to remain civil with each other for a time, although it's probably more than sixteen years since we actually saw each other in person, and well over a decade has passed since that final, stilted, telephone call which finally put paid to any charade of attempted continued friendship.

"…But I got wise... You're the devil in disguise..."

Hell, I don't even know if she's even still alive. I mean, I know that she's younger than I am, but given the track record of the people we knew back then at not managing to make it out of their thirties or forties, that's really no guarantee any more, is it…?

That's why I've made a note of the date and time of this strange visit to my subconscious, just in case I find out later that it was, you know, significant in some disturbing way. Not, I hasten to add, that I'm wishing any misfortune to befall anyone here, it's just…

Odd…

Damned peculiar...

That's all…

That my mind should choose now, of all times, to conjure up someone so firmly locked into my past...

There are still, however, the photographs of those years, all lurking in the old albums upstairs, all just waiting to trap me, but they're in an inaccessible part of the house at the moment, and I haven't actually looked through any of those painful volumes in years, despite the fact that I do seem to have hung on to them because, especially for an old hoarder like me, it's terribly difficult to throw away the vestiges of your past, no matter how painful the reminders can be.

After all, it's all these things that make us the person we now are, for better or worse, and they were my holidays and days out too, even though it's difficult to remove someone who's so significantly hanging around in the foreground to disappear and let you concentrate upon looking at the scenery.

I am confused, though, because it was those very same images from those photographs which were flashing through my brain during that terrifying half hour after I woke up in that state of abject fear, and, obviously, it had been a particular image from one of those pictures which had reformed in my mind and made this awful visitation, but...

Why now...?

Why would such a not-really-a-memory-at all bubble up to the surface now, after I've barely given the woman a thought in this century…?

What the hell is all that about...?

Sometimes the inner self is an utterly unfathomable creature and makes us pay a terrible price for all of this rational thought, self-awareness, memory and cognisence.

Like the version of me in the Beloved's dream the other day who was so unreasonable to her that she felt the need to take it out on the far more reasonable and, as far as I know, utterly real version of me the following morning.

Our minds are complicated things, but what horrors lurk within...?

OBLIVION

Last night I dreamt of oblivion again.

As I lay in my bed, my mind drifted out into an endless silver sea and I was tempted to stay there forever, and I knew that I wasn’t scared and I really didn’t mind and nothing else really mattered. There might be sadness left behind, of course, but not from many minds, and being able to painlessly slip away from the world like that did feel ever so appealing, if not really much of an awfully big adventure.

Maybe it was the early beginnings of a cold coming on, I don’t know, but, on a day which promised so much, I ended up achieving very little. I just managed to slot in a visit to the cinema, a swift rattle around a supermarket, the delivery of some of the purchased food to my mother’s flat, and replacing a bolt which had lost its nut on her walker before headed home for a late lunchtime sandwich. Once there I put on another edition of “Horizon” to learn something about the latest in telescope technology, or at least the “latest” as it was back whenever it was we first set the machine to record it, and started dozing off.

So I went back to bed at four-thirty in the afternoon and slept, and slept, and slept… and dreamt of oblivion…

I had been for an early morning showing of the latest blockbuster movie on the vague understanding that it might be a “quiet” time to turn up. As I stood in the vast queue of early birds with a sea of ankle-biters to wade through, I began to think that this may have been a bit of a mistake, especially because, as is usual at these “quiet” times, there was only one till being used and, when I did get to the front of the queue, the person in front of me was only in the queue to explain the problem she’d had with the automatic ticket machine a few minutes earlier, which turned into another of those “typical” moments which suddenly draws the attention of the entire staff and which I am always, always, standing right behind.

Several hours later (or at least it seemed that way) with my tickets grasped firmly in my grateful paw, I swam my way towards the cinema for more anxiety. The place was completely empty except for two people who were, almost unbelievably, sitting in precisely the two seats which the computer had allocated to us.

So, a dilemma. Do we make the ridiculous point of asking them to move in an otherwise empty theatre or do we just take two nearby seats and let things lie…?

Naturally, I took the second option, the path of least resistance and the one which involved no actual confrontation of any kind. This meant an anxious half hour as the place started to fill up, and fill up with the kind of people who were prepared to ask people to move despite the vast availability of empty seats in the place, although happily, because the place never got exactly brimful, no-one tried asking me to get out of their seats, as that way other madnesses would have had to unfold.

I paid the price anyway, as two young lads slid into the seats to the right of me and spent the entire length of the feature film sucking the very last of their ice-water from their supersized cola drink cartons and rustling the rustliest popcorn packaging in the history of popcorn packaging to get the very last crumbs out of there, most especially during the quiet bits. The bloke sitting in front of them did turn around at one point and ask them to “F***ing stop doing that…!” which seemed to bewilder them, but I knew where he was coming from even though I was far too polite to actually mention it…

Cinema can be a funny old beast. I always leave with a bit of a headache, and I always leave with my views on humanity and desires of spending any time in a room with any of them feeling severely diminished. Sometime I wish that they could afford to cut out the “cinema release” part and go straight to my TV set at home, but then, I’m old fashioned enough to want the “cinema experience” just as long as everyone else stays at home.

The “surprise” ending of my movie hadn’t turned out to be that big a surprise, to be perfectly honest, given the fact that people only want to keep the story secret when it seems that they know it’s going to be a “game-changer” but then you realise that it is going to be a “game-changer” and there aren’t that many things that could be considered to be that significant, so you can narrow it down and probably you’d be right.

But then I mull over many things as I drift off and dream of oblivion. Like films which are specifically designed to be about Halloween or Christmas… Once those “significant” dates in the calendar have passed, do those films then feel like the presence of an awkward house guest who’s far outstayed his welcome…? Films about Santa Claus are all well and good in the exciting run up to Chrimbletide itself, but do they suddenly feel massively inappropriate on a wet Wednesday in mid-January…? After all, the “Panto Season” used to stretch as far as March in some cases, but watching “A Christmas Carol” on St Valentine’s Day might seem to be a little bit “odd…”

Ah, well… So many questions, and always so very few of them are ever getting answered.

Perhaps oblivion really does sometimes seem to be the far better option.

THE SUNDAY SCHOOL BUILDING

I originally posted this in “The Alternative” during my “sulky” old month avoiding Lesser Blogfordshire, but, as I’m currently in a better mood about such things and because  was considering the whole notion of “dreams” yesterday, I kind of thought that it maybe seemed appropriate to pull out the file from that dusty old archive and have another look at it and, because it didn’t seem quite such an embarrassment after all, decided to let the rest of you have a peek into one of the other nooks and crannies of my little life after all...

(Be warned, more items from “The Alternative” may yet resurface as I struggle to come up with anything new to talk about...)

It’s funny, but (perhaps rather appropriately) on one recent Sunday morning, I was so tired that, after doing my usual rounds of sitting at a keyboard and extracting the nonsense that had popped into my brain during the wee small hours and which had been keeping me awake, I went back to bed and dozed for an hour or so.

Rather strangely, because I don’t “dream” as a rule (at least not in any memorable sense of the word), I found that my subconscious took me on a bit of a “mind tour” through a long-gone building in which I used to spend a lot of time: the Sunday School building attached to the church I used to be forced to attend when my free time was spent in pastimes which were allocated at the whim of my parents.

That is, of course, grossly unfair. For many, many years my closest friends were the ones made in that place and it was hardly that I was “forced” to go there at all, and, even when I was old enough to have realised that “going to church” was not really for me, I spent many years socialising with that particular crowd both at the “Youth Club” and later on in the pubs, clubs and at various parties that were held, until we got to an age where we went our separate ways and inevitably lost touch with each other.

But I was still surprised at how vividly that building came to mind, and how strong the recollections were, presumably because I spent so much of my time and did so much of my “growing up” inside that ramshackle brick-built building.

I can remember that you entered the big hall with the arched glass window at one end and which used to have a badminton court marked out on the floorboards through a double set of rather beautiful double doors. The main set led out onto the street and the “porch” with its sand-filled red fire buckets was enclosed by those and another set which led into the hall itself.

Ahead of you, beyond the “badminton court” was a stage which I remember jumping off from its giddying three-foot height on various Sunday mornings (you see, I was once capable of excitement and feats of daring-do), and upon which, later on in life, many evenings of entertainment were performed, not least my less-than-legendary first performed stage play “Dash Creosote’s Trip to the Bingo Hall” and various other plays in which I usually played the villain (and mispronounced “Batta Poo Dinn” as “Barter-Poo” during at least one pantomime, such was my “evil voice…”)

Typecast as ever - it looks as if they could see “the divvil in me” even then.

If you stood in that doorway, looking straight at the stage, on the wall behind you and to your left would be distorted glass and wood panelled door to the ladies’ toilets which, if they were anything like the gents’ to the right, were no doubt testimony to the plumbing of a bygone era. I remember robust “Twyfords Adamant” ceramics and real sturdy pull chains and cisterns high enough up on the wall that small boys could swing Tarzan-like from them if they chose to.

Next to the ladies’ toilets, through another corner of similar dark wood and frosted glass panelled doorway on the left hand wall, was the office of the Sunday School Superintendent which, for one very proud period in my young life, was inhabited by my father and I recall it being a magical place full of mysterious machines and endless amounts of paper which would no doubt seem appallingly drab to me now, but then spoke of an adult world of mysteries I as yet knew nothing about. Next to that, a series of similar doors led through to the “coffee bar” which had been built by knocking through various small rooms into one larger one, which was another of those small childhood miracles when it was first unveiled.

I remember that the floor was tiled because I spent many hours in there painting banners and making posters (my limited - but slightly useful - skill-set being evident even then) and scenery for plays and it was the only large and “paint proof” floor that I could find to do the job, and I vividly the curved service area that served as the “bar” itself at the end where the room came into line with the stage area. I have a sudden recollection of trays of scores of packets of fish and chips arriving in that room, the sheer quantity of which also seemed rather magical once upon a time.

Sometimes that room also served as a “waiting room” as we waited to go on stage and perform, but mostly that occurred in the strange network of rooms that led off the corridors at the back of the stage. There was the relatively “posh” décor of the room that connected to the coffee bar – there was even a serving hatch - which acted as both the place where the respectable and elderly (they were at least fourteen!) “Seniors” were taught on Sunday mornings and where proper evening church services were held in the evenings.

Moving along the corridor that ran parallel to the back of the stage, you would fid the mighty glass and wood double doors that led through to the huge kitchen which had a massive central table, huge cupboards full of very plain crockery, a massive sink under a huge set of windows, and a strange smell all of its own.

Next to the kitchen door was the cellar door to another world into which I rarely ventured, but I think they stored collected newspaper down there and high above your head was a trap door leading to the attic. This was another area that I vividly remember from a filthy weekend spent up there assisting Mr Jones and another friend of mine with some plumbing, which sounds far ruder than it, in all innocence, really was.

After the cellar door you came to a “T” junction in the corridor. To the left was a set of racks where people would leave their newspapers to be put in the cellar until they were sold on later, and which I would rummage through, looking for old issues of the “Radio Times” to nab the articles for to put inside my television-themed scrapbooks. Beyond those was the back exit, a door I remember the outside of very well because of the hours spent waiting there as I was always early for things even then. To the right the corridor led back into the main hall where we began. Ahead of you was the huge “Juniors Room” which also doubled as our “Youth Club” base and I spent many happy hours there. Beyond that room was another lobby with door leading to another ancient toilet to your left, an exit with scissor-doors to the right, and another large and rather cosy room ahead of you – we read stories there - which eventually served as the fund-raising second-hand clothes shop where I bought an overcoat that I still have and stood more-or-less where my mother’s flat now is.

Returning to the main hall, there were more rooms off to the left most of which I am less familiar with. I slightly remember the “Infants room” because of birthday candles I rarely shared as my birthday fell in the time of year when most people were on holiday, and the crèche, but both of those were rooms I spent time in before I was really old enough to remember them, so I only recall being in them for other reasons in later life, most probably involving manual labour of some sort, although another memory popped into my head of shamefully not knowing the “alphabet song” to join in with, when it was obvious everyone else did.

It’s astounding to me how vivid it suddenly all seems to me now. The place was demolished nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1988 in order to build those flats I mentioned, and even then I’d not been inside the place for maybe half a dozen years or more, and yet the hours of fun spent in and running around the outside of that peculiar little building, with all its peculiar shapes and odd little nooks and crannies, suddenly seem to be quite astonishingly important part of my past right now.

DREAMS AND REALITY

I can tell that my sleep patterns have gone all awry again because I’m having dreams again, or rather I’m having dreams which I can actually remember having, and that usually implies that I’m waking up far too soon after I’ve been in my deepest sleep cycle. Not that I really need my subconscious to be telling me that, because the generally staggering about and early morning clumsiness is enough to demonstrate the fact quite clearly, even to my addled early-morning self.

Still the dreams themselves are interesting enough and I seem to get to visit people and places about which I haven’t thought in a very long time, and the fact that they’re all acting rather oddly doesn’t seem to matter to me all that much because I think I’ve got to a stage in my life when I’ve finally realised that “behaving oddly” is what people actually do, and their oddness can do me far less harm in a fantasy world that it ever does in the real one.

A few nights ago, for example, I was visited by a brace of Marilyns Monroe and, although this strange “out-of-time” visitation might possibly have been the perfect fantasy for a lot of the members of other generations, my own virtual experience was not, I suppose, the strange wish-fulfillment-fest that some people might, rather wickedly, now be imagining it might have been.

No, instead, “my” Marilyns seemed mostly concerned about their hair and which hairstyle I preferred. Younger Marilyn with her tight blonde curls seemed more than a little distressed when the more mature Marilyn with longer, straighter hair seemed to be getting all of the attention, which probably should be telling me something or other about something or other, but I’m not sure what.

Perhaps I was just overdue for a shave…?

Last night’s journey into the world of the undermind was far more esoteric, however, and dated back to the days when our little band of busy bees who worked in the Yellow Pages hive were being bought and sold to various companies as if we were so many pieces of fruit and vegetables.

This time we were trudging around our new home which turned out to be some kind of death-trap filled version of a supermarket – possibly “Fine Fare” - in which you had to constantly be on your guard to stay out of danger (sorry, Mo, but you plummeted off the edge of a non-staircase at one point… In my defence, you got better later…!), in a situation that was, quite literally I suppose, a health and safety nightmare.

Worries about the future interspersed with far too many episodes of “The Avengers” (and just a smidgen of “South Park”) I fear…

Or perhaps it was something I ate: “There’s more gravy than grave about you, Marilyn, and you too, Marilyn…”

There was something else, too… another distinct event involving “Twitter” that came into my mind on a couple of nights, the second one specifically to remind me of the first, but it’s now drifted away again on the morning air, just leaving the slightest hint of ennui behind it to find me wondering whether I’ve forgotten something that once seemed to be very, very important…

Still, as with most things experienced in a dream-state, I was never to know how any of these situations unfolded because my natural internal alarm clock found me wide awake and watching those red digital numbers dance around in what is, at least, the darkness once again, and I was soon up and about and demonstrating both the shuffling gait and the clumsiness as another typical day started to unfold.

And so the average day consists of getting up, taking pills, making a packed lunch, attempting to write some nonsense dressed up as a blog entry, breakfast, a drive to the station, the morning commute during “drive-time”, a morning’s work, eating that packed lunch, an afternoon’s work, the evening commute during “school-run” time, home, a drive out to the station and back again, the evening meal, a bit of telly and… and they’re all (more or less) exactly the same, and rarely involve dead celebrities rowing with themselves, or orientation days in deadly supermarkets…

There are, naturally, variations within this sad routine. Different things do happen. From the choice of cereal or sandwich filling, to playing a CD instead of listening to the radio, the days do manage to be different despite the obvious similarities, and I suppose it’s those little variations that do make all of the difference in the end.

Perhaps that’s why we do need the dreams, to make the banality of everyday existence seem at least a little more bearable, and it’s from the dark corners of the imagination and the ideas formed in dreams that, in my case at any rate, my “creative” writing emerges, transformed by my own ineptitudes into something far more banal than those unfettered flights of fancy by the process of my ham-fisted word-wrangling.

The Marilyns have already been transformed and reappeared in the “Blog Tag” exchanges, and those angst-filled career worries and distorted memories of people and places will no doubt get filtered into another entry in these sad little pages sometime fairly soon.

There, that’s something to look forward to, isn’t it boys and girls?

Stay tuned…

I’m sure even the prospect of that will be sending you all off to dreamland in an effort to escape, so sleep well, my angels, don’t let your own inner demons bite you, and tell the Marilyns that I said “Hi…”

They’ll know who you mean.