Stately, plump Steve, her cat, stood at the top of the stairs and eyed her with contempt. He then left. There are times when everything seems to come together perfectly. This was not one of those times. Somehow the day had strung itself out in a long string-like mess, tangled and limp.
She had two
books demanding her attention but she didn’t want to read. Still two figures,
each representing one of the books, goaded her. They were the Monkey King and
the Joyce she’d made in her mind.
They were
like a pair of dogs, content to mix but each determined to get their own way. They
jostled, these figments of her recent reading. Joyce would enter with a smug
tip of his hat and a flourish of words that grabbed her attention. The Monkey
King, meanwhile, was dancing about.
She put on
a programme about the Irish writer. This playlist of Joyce’s musical interests
would help her along. Joyce was not a grumpy man the radio-voice said. He was a
man, the man from whom the voice on the radio was bubbling, with a deep rich
voice, a voice like fire, or smoked ham. He drew out his words like each one of
them needed to be held up to the light and looked at.
It was now
obvious the man on the radio wasn’t talking about Joyce at all. He was talking
about Vaughan Williams, who was being spoken about at the end of his own show,
before the one on Joyce began. You’d think these iplayer episodes would be
better edited, but it was nice to have the feel of listening to live radio.
Life went on, chores could be done, if she could be bothered to do any, but
culture and music and drawn out words could drift through everything, getting
into your thoughts anyhow.
Joyce, she'd learned from somewhere, was a pervert. He talked about his wife's farts and how much he liked pushing them out of her. She could imagine him squat and gurning. He was moustached grotequely in her mind's eye.
"Here he is" she thought "he enters in a whirlwind of words, all highs and lows. He says our girls are delightfully ugly, though we know they're the prettiest in town. Meanwhile, the Monkey King needs no fancy wordplay but tells a hundred stories in the way he walks, a glint in his eye suggests mischief and you want to go with him."
Lying back,
she heard the radio voices discussing Joyce. They were speaking from a Martello
tower where he once lived. Him and his friends would tear it up they said,
afterwards, coming home along the beach, they asked well-to-do people for
change so they could go on drinking.
She liked
the way that the Monkey King tricked anyone he encountered. He took no time
over it. He came up with a solution as soon as a problem presented itself.
One of the Joyce experts said, laughing “that
song is associated with many things Joyce loved, like girl’s knickers and
things, you know”. The song sounded silly, like old-fashioned seaside
entertainment.
Around this
time, the Joyce she’d made in her mind and the Monkey King got bored of waiting
for her and went drinking together. They fought demons the size of cathedrals
and tied up water beasts together. The radio programme finished playing and she
was left alone, laid on the couch with her books out of reach.
Sleep overtook
her and she dreamt the following dream:
The Monkey
King got up on Joyce’s back and it seemed like Joyce was the biggest/the
tallest/the up with the clouds. The Monkey King became small though he was
still big. In the river they were wading and smiling though it was cold. She
stood on the shore with a towel and got panicked and they laughed at her panic.
She was the one losing it for no good reason.
She woke up
with a start.
No comments:
Post a Comment