DARK COMETS

They kissed, crushing out her cigarette between their lips.



The boy crouched at the foot of the stairs in the halving light of the late afternoon. Unable to see to the top where, presumably, the landing lights were off, he could only resort to playing cat's cradle with his shadow and the black ectoplasm such a shadow seemed to extrude like dead cigarette smoke... until darkness expunged even the shadows as well as the smoke.



The girl was seventeen, but she looked younger. She was working in a bread and cake shop until her first University term began in October. He had been staring meaningfully at her for days, ever since first spotting her behind the crusty loaves and jam doughnuts. However, she had failed to meet his eyes fully: that is, until the day he tried small talk upon her. The amount of traffic in the High Street was his chosen topic, since he always avoided broaching the subject of weather. In fact, anybody who hangs an encounter between two separate human beings upon whether the sun shines is cheating both parties. That's because the sun is always either shining or not shining. Come to think of it, the sun does always shine, whether it's behind clouds or not (or even when it's night time). Clouds cast shadows but are nothing compared to smoke spilled by exhausts.

She merely smiled half-heartedly as she plopped the toasted macaroons one by one into the crinkly bag, finally crunching up the saw-edged opening into a fuse of paper. He must have purchased more bread and its accessories during that holiday than he would eat for the rest of the year.

Eventually, she responded to his prattle of pollution with a willingness he had never previously dared to expect. The voice was as pretty as the face. In many ways, the bakery overall made her body strangely sexless, yet this was an intrinsic part of her charm, having no pretensions to flaunt, keeping her goodies, as it were, done up like a surprise parcel for Christmas. She had no choice, really, since all the girls in the shop had to wear such overalls. But the others seemed somehow more careless with their top button or had bigger busts. He could not see any legs behind the high counter, so comparison was impossible that far down. The fundamental mystery centred around the fact that, whatever time of day he arrived to buy bread, however long the queue and however quick its demands could be fulfilled, he was always served by the nice girl. She always seemed to be the one who had just finished serving another customer when it was his turn. Not intentional on her part, nor his for that matter (how could it have been?), but it always happened - without exception.

And he visited the bread shop twice a day for a whole fortnight.

When his stay in the area was fast approaching its end (a particularly sunny one as it turned out, spending most of his time feeding the smoke-stained pigeons in the park), he decided to pluck up sufficient courage to ask her out. He had debated whether to wait until the bread shop closed in the evening, and follow her home. Then, at least, he would be afforded a glimpse of her without an overall, thus, perhaps, releasing him from any desire to ask her out in the first place. However, he did not want to tarnish her innocence with any such surrepitious behaviour. That was the last thing he wanted.



Quite close to the boy on the stairs was the broom cupboard. He leaned towards its ill-fitting wooden door, his ear against it like a pressed flower. He had grown accustomed to a voice from one of the bedrooms which led off from the landing. It was speaking in smoke-corrupted tones. The words then grew wilder for a time and gradually tailed off into undergrunts of love ... drifting eventually into silent puffs.



He asked the nice bakery girl out, whilst she was still in her overall, at the optimum moment when all the other girls' attention was elsewhere, either wielding cake-tongs or haggling with an ugly customer over cheap offers of stale bloomers. She said yes, without vacillation, filling him with wordless excitement and, yes, surprise. During their little chats over the bread, they had never reached anything more personal than that she was due to go to University in October (so she must have been at least seventeen) and that he was on holiday, whiling away a fortnight until work started again. She probably failed to guess how old he was.

Of course, she never turned up for their date. Or he got the wrong venue. And on the Saturday, the last shopping day for him in the area, she was nowhere to be seen behind the counter. He asked after her, but one of the other girls simply shrugged her padded shoulders and indicated that the nice girl was "off sick". Something about a cough.

He was off sick, too, for the first few days after his holiday. The doctor said it was constipation resulting from too much starch and carbohydrates, next to no green things and lack of exercise. As far as his emotions were concerned, they were left relatively unscarred, since, if he was honest with himself, he had been relieved she did not turn up for the assignation. Her innocence remained unsullied. He knew she existed somewhere on the face of the Earth, somewhere under sun and sky, even if he never saw her again. And, because of their relative ages, this would surely be true for at least as long as he should live. That thought unaccountably gave him enormous pleasure. The rest was imagination.



The broom cupboard door abruptly banged violently on its loose hinges. He thought a yellow-stained corpse (flesh still solid) was hammering from the inside with its head.

"Mummy, mummy..." murmured the boy, a dewdrop welling like a milky emerald from between his nostrils. The battering forthwith ceased, harsh stunted breaths ensuing.

The boy's head was literally massive, with a wide forehead which bore honest, unfurrowed innocence. At birth, his mother had strained to force him through into the nest of her loins, the flesh cracking and bones creaking to bear the giant skull.



Her name was familiar, or so it sounded when she half-enunciated it between alternate bites on a British Rail roll - with no concern at all about hurting feelings ... the name's or the roll's. Indeed, he had been travelling towards a dark city and one could imagine his surprise when the lady in the next passenger seat struck up a co-traveller's conversation. It was all very well and good for some half-cut old fogey with a smoker's cough to launch forth upon sterile small talk: one almost expected it in railway carriages. But for a well-heeled, vaguely attractive lady to "chat up" a middle-aged bore such as him - well, it was enough to set his tongue lolling from his open mouth with the weight of words mustered in response. Pity about the scent she used, however, more a waft of stale tobacco than anything else.

Life was too precious to waste on stop-gaps. Where, how, why, only magazine stories would stoop so low as to recount such wastelands of existence between the initial meeting on the train and their first official date. Words are meant to be used sparely since, like natural resources, the semantic sperm-bank could very well dry up any day and all the writers in the world will suddenly find no ink in their pens nor gumption in their computers. Mushy words instead of processed ones.

So, the long and the short of it, here he was with the lady from the carriage - and me. All three of us. It is merely left for me to say that I am no shrinking violet nor wallflower nor gooseberry. I just have the knack of being present at even the wildest passionate kisses. Externally, I am able to leave the faintest tinge of yellowy brown stain on the gentlest fingertips. At best, minor scorch marks. But deep down inside where the bodily innards blossom...

Should I continue when only music has the power to express the inexpressible? Whatever the case, there are not so many of us like me left now to do what we are able to do to prevent you people wasting your lives with simple existence. And, yes, at the fag-end of everything as we know it, we do, indeed, we creatures do have real sympathy for minor creations such as you human beings, since our own lives are mercifully shorter than yours; yes, even my own life, a previously well-packed life stubbed out between one word and the next. The rest is imagination.



The house was too quiet for comfort. Someone had left, stepping over the boy's shape of slumbering pretence at the foot of the turning stairs, but leaving a small heel-mark in his cheek like a dimple. And from the broom cupboard, the boy could hear a low voice, vaguely reminiscent of someone who had once suckled him with rhymes of baby buntings and rizla rabbit-skins. That voice used to tell him not to worry about the outlandish size of his head, and he remembered he had always felt safe in her arms ... as if all the future was preserved within her soul, like a pearl in an oyster. But all he could hear tonight was something addressing him over and over again from the cupboard with words that smelled like burnt toast. His head exploded with all the life he never lived to use - spilling shadow thoughts and doughy brains.



The nice girl waited for him at the wrong street corner, in tight short skirt, high heels and smoky black stockings - with me between her lips. The rest is indeed imagination or worlds that whirled on even after death.


(OUTER DARKNESS 1997)