Contents:

[Cover design: Andrew Forsberg (2000)]

Title

Acknowledgements

Chapters:

1 - Grafton Amours
2 - God-Botherers
3 - Clubbing
4 - G.D. [God?]
5 - Going East
6 - His Girl Friday
7 - Gris-Gris
8 - The Great Hunger
9 - Government Issue
10 - G.K.'s Weekly [Ghost / Gutter King]
11 - I Gather the Limbs of Osiris
12 - Magus

Narratives:

The Open Boat
[Element: water]

Act I: Wreck
Act II: Setting Sail
Act III: Sabotage
Act IV: Drifting
Act V: The Ship

Kings of Infinite Space
[Element: fire]

The Archer
The Ram
[Extracts from Julie's Diary]
The Lion
[Extracts from Julie's Diary]

Scenes from an Antarctic Journal
[Element: earth]

Primus-Pricker
The Heart of the Snow
Dark Depths

The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
[Element: air]

Valentine's Day
Glasgow's Miles Better
Artist
Diva
Siren
Trampled Grapes
Byron
The Necklace
The Gateway

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Verso
Game for One Player

Title

[Cover image: Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonte (1933)]


NIGHTS WITH
GIORDANO BRUNO


Jack Ross

Recto

Nights with Giordano Bruno
Copyright: Jack Ross, 2000

First published by Bumper Books
“experimental texts & investigative
cultural studies charting moments
when definitions changed”

ISBN 0-9582225-0-9


“Grafton Amours” appeared, in slightly different form, in Pander 9 (1999): 18-19;
“The Great Hunger” in A Brief Description of the Whole World 14 (1999): 34-37.

Acknowledgements are due to these journals for permission to reprint.


Any person who does any unauthorised act with this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

for my brother, K. M. Ross
miglior fabbro

1

Grafton Amours

A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
– Guillaume Apollinaire, “Zone”


Et comme on passait sur un pont, le prince se mit à la portière pour contempler le panorama romantique du Rhin qui déployait ses splendeurs verdoyantes et se déroulait en larges méandres jusqu’à l’horizon. … A kind of muscular, living pressure – not rubbery, exactly, though it has that same attribute of stretching and contracting, systole and diastole – a portal which does not so much let you in, as allow you to distend yourself. … “And as they were standing below a bridge, he leaned over the grave-stone to observe the romantic panorama of the gully which … displayed? deployed? … its green splendours and wound away in large curves to the horizon.”

You pant and groan – rough, hoarse as an animal. Which is what you are, of course, though circumstances may sometimes obscure the fact for a moment or two. But scarcely here, now. Your ribs crack, crackle with the contrast between sweat and chill. Il était 4 heures du matin, des vaches paissaient dans les prés, des enfants dansaient déjà sous des tilleuls germaniques. Une musique de fifres, monotones et mortuaire, annonçaient la présence d’un régiment prussien et la mélopée se mêlait tristement au bruit de ferraille du pont et à l’accompagnement sourd du train en marche. … Is it four in the morning? Quite possibly. Are there cows in those fields? Not likely; but the children are certainly dancing beneath the disordered boughs of the trees: these children of your city, ill-dressed and ill-nourished, smelling of earth and rain and flesh. And, hark! far-off, through the death-fed trees, the music of a police siren, “monotonous and mortuary, was announcing the presence of an authoritarian constabulary, and the sweet sound blended with the humming noise of cars proceeding over the iron bridge.”

“F … f … fucker, bloody fucker …”

No reply, at this point, seems appropriate or called for. But that is increasingly the case in most of life’s situations, for you. A simple greeting across the lunch counter, a cheery “Enjoy the film!” from a cinema usherette, they each seem to demand the one, correct reply: that witty twist or humorous acknowledgement which would seal your commonality, commensals at the feast of life. You cannot achieve it. It demands a thousand words of long

2

I was a quartermaster and had charge of No. 4 lifeboat.
– Angus Macdonald


• Scene [Opening Credits begin in darkness]:

Bruno Lawrence
in
A Louis Malle Film

THE OPEN BOAT

As the words fade out, it becomes apparent that there is movement in these dark depths, but the audience is uncertain, disoriented. A faint pinging is heard, a swirling. Perhaps we are underwater? Is there a shape, black against the blackness, moving through it? We think there is, but are still straining to make it out when …

EXPLOSION.

ACT I: Wreck


• Scene [Awakening (Friday, November 6, 1942, c. 1 a.m.)]

CLOSE-UP of Angus’s eyes opening out of some fathomless depth. Was the noise only in his dreams? It seems not: there are clanging pumps and sirens, shouting voices, all coming from outside.


WIDE-ANGLE shows his narrow, cramped cabin. There are a few pitiful ornaments: a little china cup, framed photographs. He rolls out of his bunk, starts to huddle on clothes and sea-boots.


Out on deck. Angus comes out from behind a steel bulkhead, and is shown pushing his way through a chaos of people running and shouting.

Voices scream: “Over here!” “Out of the fucking way!” “Diana!”

3

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4

Angus is shouting now, too, has seized someone (a seaman) by the lapels: “Make way there! Get those lashings loose.” He is clearly in some kind of authority, because people, mainly half-dressed civilians, are climbing into the lifeboat, as he points and yells, overseeing the operation.

We see a name painted on the side of the lifeboat: City of Cairo.

“Heave out there, heave out!”

The boat is now being lowered, and Angus takes a moment to look around him.

“Angus, Angus.” Through the confusion of sound and activity, it gradually becomes clear that someone is shouting for him. He looks a little puzzled, as if the voice were coming from elsewhere, some other place or time.

• Scene [Helping Bob (Friday, 6/11, c. 1.10 a.m.)]

Angus re-enters the slipstream, and starts to make his way to starboard, pushing past busy sailors and milling passengers.

He collides with Bob, who shouts, clearly on the edge of panic: “I can’t lower the bloody boat.”

Angus climbs inside the stalled lifeboat to try and clear a rope, which he does (after a couple of tries) with a violent flick of the wrist; then stays there, fending the boat off the side with a boat-hook, as they begin to lower it into the foaming sea.

EXPLOSION.

Splash.

The camera draws us down into the water.

“Angus, Angus.” A voice is echoing in his ears, but now it sounds like a woman’s voice; we cannot tell whether young or old.

• Scene [Swimming (Friday 6/11, c. 1.15 a.m.)]

CLOSE-UP as Angus’s eyes open again. The camera draws back to make it apparent that he is now floating in the sea, supported by his yellow Mae West lifejacket. His lips move. Though clearly dazed, he is trying to say something. It is a name: “Ellen.”

5

The Archer


His first impressions were of a dark wet street, with buildings on either side – high blocks of black windows and walls – and a continual sense of shadow. Of course, the shadows were more illusory than real, for here there could be no sun. His boots rang on the sunken rivets of the paving.

Eventually he came to a tall iron door, with an intercom tube beside it. He pressed on the bell, but heard nothing from within. After waiting a little longer he pressed again. At this, the stained and discoloured video monitor beside the door crackled into life, and he saw the face of a young woman appear. Her hair had been cropped close to the skull, which gave her something of the appearance of a porcupine – an impression assisted by her sunken cheeks and forward-tilted face. Only her head and shoulders were visible, and she was wearing, from what he could see, a rumpled white singlet. She looked as though she had just been awakened from sleep.

“Wha’ fu’?”

“Sorry to disturb, but orders given to report to Building 7, quadrant 34. This is?”

She knuckled her eyes a little and gave a great yawn before replying: “Sorry, yeah. This is Building seven. But I don’t think … we weren’t told anything about you.”

“Orders given. May I come in?”

“Ah … dunno really. Where’re we gonna put you?”

She seemed to be speaking to herself, rather than continuing the conversation. He looked at his watch. The figure it showed was, of course, quite meaningless: a set of arbitrary numbers. He had not yet been issued with a sidereal chronometer, indispensable for the Stations. This was, it seemed, the middle of the night – or possibly, given the girl’s disorientation, the deepest hours of sleep before morning.

Misinterpreting his gesture, the girl frowned slightly and rapped out, “Well, anyway, you can’t stay out there. ‘Orders given,’ you say. I don’t know who the fuck you are, or why we haven’t had any orders about you, but you’d better come in.”

The screen died back into greyness and a short buzzing noise supervened. At once he was transported back to another apartment building, aeons away in

6

buttocks, now that you’ve achieved lodgement between them, angling them this way and that to persuade yourself of the pleasure you must be feeling.

And he? What are his sensations? His large hard cock must be throbbing against the lifeless stone, as the gradual surrender of his anus feels more and more like a sharp steel knife swallowed up by quicksand, or like a backed-up case of constipation. Sharp, painful, unclean, fascinating. He’s jerking about more, now, as if losing control of the process, the procès: the trial.

«Attends, dit Mony, reste assis.» Yes, stay still, little one.

Et, se couchant sur la mourante, il fit entrer son vit bandant dans le con moribond. You cannot help but visualise Estelle lying on her back, with the subhuman assassin Cornabœuf straddled across her shit-stained face. Prince Mony thus placed himself between her thighs to enter the dying pussy. … Il jouit ainsi des derniers spasmes de l’assassinée, dont les dernières douleurs durent être affreuses, et il trempa ses bras dans le sang chaud qui jaillissait du ventre. “He thus enjoyed the victim’s last spasms, which must have been horridly painful, and bathed his arms in the hot blood which spilled from her stomach.” You are bent over your victim, victim more of economics than of your insignificant lust, as your cock begins to spasm. The frustration of the double membrane – living and manufactured – is compounded as you retreat, frustrated at the lack of fleshly contact. The condom receives your seed, nevertheless, along with his mingled blood and shit.

Quand il eut déchargé, l’actrice ne remuait plus. Elle était raide et ses yeux révulsés étaient pleins de merde. “When he had discharged, the actress was no longer moving.” A prostitute, no matter how amateurish, must be a kind of actor, must feign enough humanity to promote the customer’s arousal. A boy who bends over to get money may have no interest in the act, but he knows that his masculinity is at the very least called into question by it. You disengage yourself quite quickly from him, half-expecting an elbow in the face or a gob of spit. What he does takes you therefore quite by surprise. “She was stiff and stark, and her revolted eyes were full of filth.” His eyes are bright and alive. He seizes you by the back of the neck (jeans halfway down, limp-dangling cock still cocooned in its ridiculous plastic cover, business shirt rucked up and clinging sweatily to your back) and kisses you hard on the open mouth, his tongue squirming deep inside, bad teeth forgotten.

You are Estelle, his willing bitch, at that moment, albeit fresh from mastering his arse (though could you ever, from the first, think that was what you were doing?) When he releases you, defiant and upright in his grey sweats,

7

It is very dark, and he is surrounded by ghostly shapes. A body floats by, and he clutches at it before seeing the huge gaping wound in the back of the young sailor’s head. He recoils, then pulls at the light-switch on his jacket, but nothing happens.

He is now muttering under his breath: “Got to keep moving. What’s that over there? Bugger me. Better go and see.” He does not seem to be conscious of what he is saying, which is getting more and more disjointed. At times he appears to imagine he is speaking to Ellen. “Ellie, we got to get rid of that cat,” he says. “That’s the third time the little shit’s tripped me coming in the door.”

There is a light swell, but little wind. As he swims on through the darkness, he sees that the largest nearby object is in fact a lifeboat. It is extremely low in the water, half-swamped, but there are still a few people sitting in it. Others are clinging to the ropes and trailing ends of canvas around the sides. Their faces bear an indescribable look of apathy, mixed with dawning shock.

• Scene [Bailing out the boat (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

With no help from those on board, Angus flops across the almost submerged gunwale.

“Some of you have got to get out so we can bail her dry,” he says. Nobody moves. “Come on, you’ve got to,” he repeats, more coaxingly.


Insert: [Dark night. Angus is on the far side of a pane of glass, with frost streaking the edges. “Ellie, please,” he is saying. “Let me in. You’ve got to. It’s bloody freezing out here.” His face continues to stare in, registering little hope, but an immense resignation. Is there movement from our side of the window?]


One of the older women says “Come on, children,” and begins to climb clumsily over the side of the boat, assisted by her eldest daughter, and followed by her other two children. The others reluctantly imitate her, including (latterly) the men.

Angus stops one young woman with two babies, and says, “No, that’s enough.” He would clearly like to do something more for the cold and shivering girl, but has to content himself with patting one of the babies on the head. “Good girl, good girl,” he croons. The baby begins to cry.

8

complicated pockets and harness. She had not troubled to put on her boots, so her bare feet poked out somewhat incongruously from the heavy, stained folds.

“Here I am,” he said, feeling the occasion demanded some comment. For some reason, this seemed to amuse her greatly.

“Here you are! But who’re you, and what are we supposed to do with you?”

It was only a token protest at this stage, though, as she ushered him through the door into a little apartment behind. As prescribed, the first thing he did on the threshold was to stop and quickly pan around the room, recording its contents.
Misreading, again, his reactions, the girl pushed him half-playfully from behind: “Go on in. She won’t bite!”

She was referring, he inferred, to the presence of another young woman in the room in front of him. This one was wearing a blue terry-cloth dressing-gown, and was far more feminine in appearance than the spiky young uniform behind him. She had long black hair, which she had evidently just been washing, for she was dabbing at it with a rather ratty-looking towel, and looked distinctly put out to see him.

“Excuse … intrusion.” He managed to come up with the second word eventually, although it was a struggle to remember it. They had warned him of the possibility of some such partial aphasia in the secondary speech areas, but he had not since then had his abilities so tested as in this particular encounter.

As he walked into the room, he found himself regarding the new young woman with immense interest and curiosity. She too had her feet bare, and he concluded that there were no irregularities in the steel floor to damage them. Her toenails, he was interested to observe, were painted purple, though the finger nails were regulation length.

“My God, where did they find you!” the new young woman (he found himself mentally classifying them as long-hair and short-hair) exclaimed incredulously.

Short-hair had now come in, closing the door behind her, and stood observing the scene with malicious pleasure.

“Julie, I’d like to present to you our guest, Mister Orders Given, from Outside. His hobbies are ringing bells, running up stairs to impress people who couldn’t give a fuck, and hanging around in doorways …”

He waited a little to see if there was any more, but her fund of invention seemed to have dried up, and said: “Lieutenant.”

9

Primus-Pricker

We decided to camp for the night. Some hours later I woke up to hear a blizzard blowing outside, and to find Filippo fumbling amongst some gear at the head-end of the tent. From inside my bag I called out to inquire if there was anything wrong, and received a reply that he was looking for the primus-pricker. Then he slipped back into his sleeping-bag, and all became quiet, except for the snow beating against the tent … Revolving the incident in my mind, and dimly wondering what use he could have for a primus-pricker in the middle of the night, I again fell asleep … On inquiry I found that Filippo knew nothing of his midnight escapade. It was a touch of somnambulism.


The snow beating against the tent. Soft flakes piling up into hard, sculpted drifts, blown into aerodynamic contours – sastrugi. Snow is so soft and deep. And slushy-wet and burning-cold and diamond-hard. Snow is like sleep.

The day is stink of men and food and foul air, dogs barking, fingers pricked by needles which slip from the hands. It is the itch of an unwashed body, the rub of harness. It is longing for a hard steel hut, and desire for the wind to stop. Stop just once, just once long enough for us to stand clear and see – see that ethereal stillness so few feet above our heads – the silence of those infinite spaces.

This afternoon I found myself thinking about Melbourne, and that led me to the evening I met that girl. She was clean enough, I suppose, a scrubbed little thing – quite boyish as she minced along. I can’t remember what she said, what I said. We went back to her room (on my insistence), so I had to wait while she ran in to check that the coast was clear. That was strange, standing out in the alley thinking about what I was about to do, or rather trying not to think about it, smoking a cigarette and watching the shadows. She was back soon enough.

Once in her room I insisted she undress completely, although she was very reluctant. I could see why, afterwards. She had a long scar running down the length of her back – a long red curve of cicatrice. It must have been devilish deep at the time. A whip? Too clean for anything but a stock-whip at full stretch, I’d say. More likely a knife. I didn’t ask her about it. Felt ashamed to, I suppose. In any case, it didn’t make me any less interested in what I’d come to do.

10

you grope your own pants up and reach out the fifty dollars you had ready in the back pocket. He takes it and moves away with a smile, saying, as he goes, something to the effect of “goo’ night,” though it might well have been followed by “cocksucker” or “whitey” or some such epithet. It had, after all, been he who approached you, spoke to you, offered you sex for money; who tongued and fisted your cock hard; and who finally leant himself, his youthful arse, across the tombstone. The Golden Ass: Apuleius. Why didn’t he simply rob you, you wonder? The money was there all along.

It’s funny how a picture forms itself of many small items, half-apprehended. As you walk back up the slope to your car, through the dark whispering tracks of the cemetery, you think of a dream you once had, a long time ago, a dream where a stone statue turned itself head over heels through the grounds of a park, crushing its way, unstoppable, through ponds and woods and walls. His dark buttocks against the white of the tombstone seemed like an indignant sideways face, about to shout out hoarse commands. The rest of the black and white complex of leaves, shadows, trees might have been made to harmonise with this conception into an Arcimbaldo crowd-scene, faces made of bark and flax.

And what are they doing, the bizarre faces in this crowded canvas? They’re roaring blindly at the leper, the excluded one. Even a boy prostitute can be more in command of his moment, his place, than that bleeding face, shoulder bowed under the weight of a crosstree. So what does that make you? The crucified Christ? The martyr complex is the first thing to explode when the physical organism goes wrong. In this case, when the arsehole-fucking, graveyard-haunting, prostitute-poking, French novel-quoting, extreme experience-craving – Miracle-in-Mary-of-phlegm – blaspheming fucker cannot … cannot what?

GA

ZA

11

He and the other men start bailing as hard as they can, the water spraying in all directions.

Shot of the other women and children clinging to an upturned oil-drum.

• Scene [“There she goes” (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of Angus and another man, Tiny, trying to resuscitate the sodden-looking body of an older man, a passenger. They’re rubbing at his arms ineffectually, and dosing him with little nips of brandy until he coughs and chokes.


WIDE-ANGLE of the boat, now full of miserable-looking people, many of them clearly injured. There’s perhaps a hint of light in the sky as the camera begins to move up from them to show the stricken ship sitting low in the water not far away. Other boats are circling around it like water-beetles.


The City of Cairo is shown silhouetted against the horizon in a succession of near stills, with gradually increasing light providing the time index.

A voice says: “There she goes,” and the ship’s bow lifts up and begins to slide back inexorably into the sea. It is dawn, now, a cold dawn.

12

“What?”

“Not Mister, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, look, I’m being really rude here. I’m Hartnell and this is Baker, Julie Baker. It’s our job to look after the dormitory here, and answer the bell. Sit down, please. Can I get you anything? Coffee, water?”

He sat down, stiffly, in the chair furthest away from the long-haired woman, Julie. He felt she didn’t like him already, whereas the other one, short-haired Hartnell (probably a private, or at most corporal, given the job she was doing) was still reserving judgement. He found himself wondering what her first name was, and whether it was a pretty name. He hoped it was. They had warned him also of such emotional imbalances – at first, until his new system adjusted to the stresses and strains.

Objectively, he knew it was of minor importance whether the two young women liked him or not. He had a job to do and so did they – but what he knew and what he felt no longer connected in any meaningful way. He felt that if neither of the women gave him a kind word in the very near future he would howl like a dog in pain and disappointment. Their approval seemed to him, for the moment, the most important thing in the world.

“Please,” he said. “Please. I’m very tired.” And started to cry.

What once would have embarrassed him almost beyond endurance was now something of a relief. The tears flowed. At first he wiped them away with his sleeve, but then he found himself starting to sob, which necessitated covering his face with both hands. At length he stopped, and blew his nose. Only then did he think of the effect this might be having on the two women, who had been shortly before the centre of his universe.

Hartnell was now sitting next to Baker, who had her arms around the shoulders of her friend. They were looking at him with consternation – “Gob-struck,” he thought, proud to have recovered this useful word from his cerebrum.

He felt no need, now, to take the initiative or say the first word. He felt strangely at peace – as if, by humiliating himself so utterly before them, he no longer had any need to fear their reactions. The rest was up to them.

“What’s wrong?” the softer, more feminine girl Baker asked at length.

“Nothing,” he replied, perfectly deadpan and affectless once more. He knew that now they would not take him solely at face value.

“But … do you often do that?” she continued, apparently determined to pursue the matter to its conclusion.

13

Afterwards she cuddled up to me a little and asked me if I wanted anything else. Funnily enough, what I wanted most then was a cup of tea. I wanted to ask her for one, and to watch her getting up and making it for me, like a good girl, a girl of good family. Like Effie, or one of the White girls in the old days. I knew she wouldn’t understand, though, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just started to put my clothes on. She helped me with the boots, then started to pull on her own clothes. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t dare. Funny, really, when you think that I’d just fucked her, but somehow that seemed less intimate than treating her as a person, a real girl, now, afterwards.

I just walked out of there, then got pissy drunk in a bar by the river.

I suppose it was thinking of the snow that did it – her body was very white, I remember, which made the long scar stand out that much better. God, it must have hurt! Though maybe not: a scar that deep might have a temporary anaesthetic effect. The blood would pump out, but you might just feel a pleasant warmth from it – a kind of narcolepsy, just as we all thought sleeping in the snow would create.

It’s bad thinking about girls. I got a stiffy right away, and even though no-one can see it in these baggy furs it makes you crazy. I could feel myself licking her along her scar, tongue touching every inch of it. Why didn’t I do that then? I could have talked to her more – told her to do any number of things I can think of now. She was a pretty girl, not that it matters. Not pretty like the girls at home, but like a sleek little animal, furry and dark as an otter. She would have done anything for a few more coins. She might even have liked it, to be able to stay in bed instead of going out on the cold street again. Perhaps she ended up with some sailor who belted her arse for her – or some paterfamilias who buggered her while dreaming of his own daughters. She would have been better off with me. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.

I’m certain I could never have whipped her, but now I find I’m thinking of her when I strike the dogs, wondering what kind of a whip had been used on her. On consideration, I think it probably was a knife – like those long gutting knives we use on the seals. Not so long and sharp, of course, or else all her guts would have fallen out on the table and would have had to be stuffed back inside before she could be sewn up.

That was the thing, of course. I can see it now, more real than the wind-flurries, the solid ice visible only a few yards ahead. There were no stitch marks

14

Valentine’s Day



The family lived at the top of a long stepladder – a kind of tree-house in the sky. It had been built by their father, with the help of Paul, the eldest son; but Father was dead now, and Paul was the man of the house. Besides Paul, there was Kevin, the second son, and then the two girls.

Melanie was the elder: blonde, lissom, straight-limbed – a golden girl. The youngest was Gillian, darker, somewhat inclined to dumpiness, and always lacking her sister’s grace (and, in consequence, her brothers’ favour). They were never very nice to Jill.

One evening, when the whole family, mother included, had been getting at Jill for her moodiness, lazy ways, and general inability to learn, she burst into tears (this was nothing unusual), rushed out of the room (nor was this), and then started to climb down the ladder to the forest floor (this was going a little far, however – heaven alone knew what might be roaring about down there at this hour of the night).

Paul and Kevin came out to stop her, only to find that she had taken their father’s lighter, and was holding it cocked against the dry straw of the hut platform. Now, fire is something you never joke about if you live on a platform in a tree. It can destroy you in minutes, and so a naked flame was never allowed in the house.

“What are you doing, Jill? Come back at once!” said Paul, in his customary petulant, exasperated tone (by now Melanie and her mother had come out as well – nor was it simply to see the fun, because neither was smiling).

“No,” said Jill quietly, as she eased herself down the first few rungs of the ladder.

“What’s wrong, Jill?” asked Melanie, leaning out to look into the upturned face of her sister.

“You should know, of all people. You were the one they always chose to do the solos in ballet class – you were the one who was excused dish-washing because your hands had to be kept smooth … Well, I’ve had it. I’m off.”

“Don’t be stupid, you little cunt. You won’t get half a mile,” shouted Kevin, the meaner of the two brothers.

“Oh yes, I will. I didn’t start planning this yesterday, you know. But before I do go, I have to tell you some things. The first is, I’m queer. I don’t like boys. I doubt you’ll understand what I’m talking about, but maybe you do, Mel.”

The older sister blushed.

“The second thing is, I’m a witch. I speak to the dead, to dead people. They tell me things. Not always things I want to know, but useful things sometimes.”

15

God-Botherers

rimettere il diavolo in inferno
– Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decameron (Day 3, story 10)


“Putting the devil into hell.” Quite an elastic concept also, in its way. Then there’s that trick of taking a lighted match, holding it between two fingers, and letting it burn right down to the stub before you suddenly pinch it black with two pads of skin. It stings, scorches, sears (if you’re lucky).


“Gracious ladies, you who have (perhaps) never heard of the operation of putting the devil into hell, there was once a young man who couldn’t sleep. It began, at first, with too intense a concentration on the things of the day. He would lie awake, for hours, in his little apartment, as his mind went over the immense things he could accomplish in just a few hours, or days, or years – starting next morning. When the morning came, however, he found he was invariably too tired to put any of these plans into practice.

“His friends noticed his persistent fatigue, and began to prescribe antidotes. ‘Take a hot bath before you go to bed,’ said one. ‘Clear your mind of the things of the day by repeating these few words,’ said another. ‘Pour yourself a drink of whisky / hot milk / camomile tea,’ chorused the others. All of these remedies he tried, but none of them worked.

“Finally he went to the doctor with his problem, and was given a sleeping draught. At last he could sleep again. But when he awoke he felt as tired as ever: stale, used-up, thick-headed, as if his sleep had not refreshed him at all. So he stopped taking the draughts, and lay awake as before, his mind going over and over the things of the day …”


You are writing in your notebook, a little story about a man who couldn’t sleep, when the doorbell rings. You think (as one does) of not answering it, but curiosity is too strong. Your story bores you [and me], anyway.

There are two of them, quite young. She (perhaps eighteen?) is wearing jeans, a halter top, bare midriff. No, no, no: in order. Long dark hair, hanging down upon slight shoulders, serve to frame a tanned, unblemished face. Her

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“The third thing is, I’m leaving for good. I know I can be happier somewhere else, somewhere I’m not shut in at the top of a stepladder in the sky, cut off from the earth and the sea and all the other people. Mel, you can come too, if you want. The rest of you stay put.”

Mel did want to come, for a moment. But then she thought about the first thing her sister had said and, looking at the shocked, uncomprehending faces of her mother and brothers, knew that she didn’t dare. She shook her head.

Jill shrugged and, still brandishing the – long-evaporated – lighter, continued her descent into the dark depths at the foot of the tree. They never saw her again. Melanie cried herself to sleep that night, though, and many of the nights that followed.

[This I dreamed … 14/2/98]

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on her scar, so it can’t have been sewn up. Amazing she wasn’t finished off by infection; more amazing that she didn’t bleed to death straight away.

I can see her dancing ahead of me, just ahead in the wind. She’s not naked, but in her furs, with her feet bare in the wind-furrows. How old is she? Fifteen? Fourteen? She’d been had many times, I could feel that, but was still narrow and tight, as only a young girl can be. That’s filthy talk, though. A filthy thing to think. I only want to see her dance, to beckon me on. Her skin is so white, her body so smooth and firm, her little tongue is red as she puts it out to catch a snow-flake.