Freewriting

Here's the next stage of development: Prose — Working Drafts Prose In the sea where the demons dwell, in the darker waves beyond our sight, where shadows hide, the water grows, curling and swirling like open mouths. Islands appear where the lad disappeared over the horizon, sliding off the face of the world. Salt encrusted your tongue from morning to night, and the stars fell one by one through the dark. You could count them from the deck, one by one, making an explosion of wave and spray and fire that vanished as soon as it touched the water and made you wonder what there was to be afraid of. One day the sea opened up, and a hand seemed to stretch up from the depths and seize the boat in its palm. You could swear you saw the garbled bristling fingers grabbing the frame of the boat and toying with it. The mast beams of the outer deck seemed to have taken an entire forest to make, but that was nothing compared to the mast: a forest in one mighty fist of wood, banged up into the air, heaving, slamming it aside, and as wide as a house. No one would ever know where the tree had come from, but it was lucky, they said, charmed, possessed even. Had come from a wood in a forest on the far side of the hills, dragged by twenty or a hundred or ten thousand horses and double the number of men, some of whom were killed under its weight, especially when the bridge gave way on Christmas Eve and the frozen stream took eight young men away. Each had followed the other in the brook to save the first one, whose head had been cut asunder and was dead anyway before his friends could arrive. What made it so lucky was that the five worst storms ever had already battered, shredded, torn, flipped and evacuated smaller ships, traders' boats and looms, as well as older galleons and rusting warships, but not the ocean. It would never break from the deck, and even if it did it would float better than the very ship it pushed and save them all. He held on to the banisters that were made of rotting wood but somehow swayed in rhythm with the waves. If you held them right you were perfectly safe, and so he did. His hand gripped the splintered wood with the ferocious edges where gun shot had splintered them. No one had yet bothered to repair it, though there were plenty on hand and plenty of materials to do it. There was little to fear, and so it was left. When he gazed down into the water and watched it split apart at the front of the ship, the water was greeny wavy black and foamy brown. He loved it here, seeing how the world opened up before you. Nowhere had he been other than in this ship, other than on this ocean. No one knowing what was on the other side of it except Dane. Legends of the land that they were about to encounter must be true: people laden with all kinds of precious jewels and golds and rubies, with eyes that pierced right through you, could tell your fortune and find you your wife from the memories and the people and the people you were going to meet. Endless tales of paths that led through contented woodland, where there were nothing but flying bears and creatures that slid through the grass and wound themselves around your waist and looked up at you with the eyes of a doting girl. This was the land they were going to, where faces appeared in the middle of trees and peered to sing and whisper and murmur you into their embrace, where the leaves rustled in music and harmony that had never been heard in the world where they had come from. It was this world that they were going to, a world that they didn't even know for sure existed. Dane went back up on deck and looked for land. He found the dolphin first and grabbed Dane by the belt. “Now your father can be cured and evil will be no more.” “What do I have to do?” “You have to jump from the ship and seize the animal.” Dane looked down into the foaming sea being cut apart by the ship's prow, the curling waves like hands ready to seize him and keelhaul him. He heard his father cry: “Do it, son. Help me.” He waited till he saw the fin of this gleaming glistening fish. “What do I do when I get hold of it?” He jumped as if pushed by the whinging voice of his beloved father. He felt the air sweep, raking him with splinters of salt ocean, and the world surge over him. He reached out, felt the animal's side. The animal was on him and pushing down into the depths. His snout flicked and toyed with his body. Dane reached for a hold and the tip of the fin presented itself, too slimy to hold. He thought he heard it say, “Give this to him, give this to him.” A surge of light leapt from the weight of its body as it twisted and slid, glided round him. He felt a violent storm go through his bones so he could see the bones of his leg and hand pushing vainly to the surface. But he'd got it. The surge from the animal was in him. He would give it to his father. Opening its mouth as wide as it could, the dolphin screeched. Water parted and a stream of air smashed apart the water to surround him in a cocoon of air. When he broke the surface, now some way behind the ship, which had turned and headed back for him. Even from where he was he could hear the derision of the crew: ‘What kind of man are you? Use your dick to swim.’ But they were amazed and their derision stopped when they saw how quickly he was scything through the water. How did the old man he know about the electric dolphin? It was he who held out his wizened hand and Dane climbed up his arm, falling to the deck as if a back of broken bolts. The old man knelt by him and whispered, ‘You felt it. You have it. Don't you.’ Water still locked in his chest spouted now, and when the torrent was over he found himself saying, ‘Yes, I think I have it. It's like every bone has come alive and all my blood has turned to air. That's how I'll save him, by giving him my bones and my blood.’ The old man seized his arm. ‘That's my lad,’ he said. ‘You see how the ocean can cure you of doubt. Trust the drowning. That's how you become brave and helpful.’ He dragged him to his feet and hauled him down the deck, slammed him down the stairs and stood him before his father. ‘I drowned there too,’ his father said, ‘but you won't be able to help me. There is something I must do first. Someone I must see, and you must get me there. The wars, my son, the wars will make a man of you. The visit of the deep was not for me, not for me.’ And the old man coughed a lump of green sputum to the floor, ground it with his heel into the grain. ‘Nothing there anyway. Load of shit.’ Dane seized his hand. ‘Respect, old man, show dignity here.’ And whether it was true or not, the old man thought he felt an eel slide up into his arm when he touched Dane's hand. He shook it free. ‘Valleys dip and dowl in the sunshine, lakes of gold wherever you look, wafting undulations and female-shaped thighs lying on the ground,’ Shell said as loudly as he could. ‘Can't you see her, the rolling in the earth and peering through the stalks at us, can't you see it?’ If he had said nothing there would have been more reaction; as it was, men came running from their scythes and fucked the earth as hard as they could, some of them actually trying to get hard enough to force an entry through the clods. ‘Day late,’ called the man made of leather, and nothing could dim his enthusiasm once he saw the effect he'd had. The women followed, splitting themselves as wide as they could, some crouching, some spreadeagled, hopping, crouching, squatting, defecating, urinating in violent torrents from bladders kept full for days for just this purpose and the avoidance of any kind of fluid, and for exactly this moment when Shell would sing of the readiness of earthly thighs for this very moment, the gathering of the fruit of the earth and the replacing of its life with the stuff of life itself. All right, picture. Here we go. So, with the sight of half the field workers steadily ploughing the land with their own bodies, Shovel thought to himself that this village needed more than he could offer and that he would have to find what he needed. The words he had were the ploughs themselves, the blades themselves that cut the earth and allowed the fertility to begin. It was his words. It was the fact that his breath opened up a world in this way. My God, this is absolute lethal out here. Fuckin' hell, pardon my French, these cars are zooming round me. You could not believe their speed. I mean, I could go for it. Woo! Walk on the outside again. But anyway, so back to it. But he thought to himself, my life is incomplete. I need more. Even though the word springs to life because I say the word. So, he tried. He joined in. He took his clothes completely apart, either to take part in this act of fertility, this meeting of the land, this love of the earth in all its possible senses. He wanted to roll the teal hills between his body. To hold it in two hands, to bunch the soil into his fists, to feel every part of himself blending with the soil and the air and the water and the seed. The master of this village for a hundred years knew what it meant to take on responsibility. He knew what it meant to have to learn the script, each and every line of the lyric of life, and he had to learn them so that not a single syllable was wrong. And of course, he could do it. His mind had been trained by the minds of his forefathers and his ancestors who had all been lyric masters in the past. They knew too. The words were never to be written down. His father had told him so. Uh, every night, every night that he slept, his father knelt by his bed and read him the words of the lyric, the words of the lyric of life, and every night, they would repeat the words more that he began to learn them. And he would repeat the lines with his father, repeat the words. But they would do it in a whisper. There was a voice, his father said, which you should only use when it was for real. He stood by his father. Stood by his knee, and watched his father bring life out of the earth once a year. The whole village would be in tumult, parties, food, giant white cloths laid out over trestle tables in the middle of the village square. And the wine would flow, and all kinds of foods would be brought from last year's harvest to this one, and the sowing of the seed. And his father would stand on a chair and address the entire square and ask them to follow him into the field where he would bring life and sustenance to them for the following year, and every year after that. Every year after that. But every single year, all the village would look at Shal and think, are you up to it? They would even say to him after his father had finished, ruffle his hair and tug his ear and say to him, are you up to it? Of course, he thought he was. Part of the job that his father did at an early age was tell him the story of how the lyric came to be and of its words and its rhythms. He would also tell him how confident he was that one day Shal would take over from his father and become the words themselves. It was not enough to simply know them. The words must become part of him. Night after night after night, such was the fate of the son of the village master. Master would be there by the side of his bed, making him learn, forcing him to remember, charging him to repeat word by word, intonation by intonation, and always, never in the voice, but in the shadow, simply a low whisper in which only they could hear. His mother was downstairs, of course, packing away with her blade at the prize that her husband had brought, severing limb from limb and head from neck in almost balletic movements with her knife, and for her too, this moment of ritual was the disassembling of an animal that would keep them alive for the rest of the month, for the rest of the season, dismantling of the body of this, rupturing of its guts, the hollowing out of its intestines, curation of its blood, and at this time of year, it's not ordinary storing of essence, but the ones made from granite that had been hollowed out, but the granite stone, the size of the head of a god. And the day master was shamed out of his post was the saddest day, a ritual shaming with corn burned round his neck until a collar of ash had formed and would remain till the end of his days, and now, with his days so few left, he sat all day in the middle of village market Square under an umbrella Shell had made from birch and ivy so it looked like it had grown straight out of the ground. There master sat, no longer master now. Disgust was his new name and he kept his face turned outward all day hoping someone would then release him, only no one wanted to, even Shell and his mother, for they would be walked warily around. If the family had failed to perform the lyric well enough, everyone started, so of course there needed to be punishment. It was a promise to speak, to train in the voice and then use it for love. Master sang, trying to recover the voice, and all Shell and his mother were allowed to do was glance sideways at him as they passed. Master could say what he liked. He needed to find new words, words that would release him from sitting in his own shit all day, and Shell longed for him to find them. He'd pass him each day and leave a bound script with what he hoped would be the releasing words. Of course he had to make them up, but this he did, diligently, each day, so that at 4am, when the stars were still knife-sharp and the suns hadn't risen. Free him. Free yourself, came the answer. His father would scribble replies, ink made from ashes from the burning. Ink got thinner and thinner until all Shell could find were crude indentations in the paper and he had to sprinkle ink on the reverse side and printed out master's writing. It grew steadily more lyrical, as if he was trying to recover his skill. The year the harvest failed was a matter of great contention. Metman had declared it a failure because barley came up once, not twice. Two suns, two harvests was the crike. Master had denied the sun its worship, its food. There was nothing to burn. Nothing to offer the stars. Eat one. Offer the other. Only this year, second harvest flew away. Short brittle stems and earth that had turned to mud so you actually see some of the seeds soft and crumbling in the water of the earth. So. Now it was him lying flat in the earth. His wife alongside, her feet to his head so he could kiss her dead centre, the middle of the concave arch of her foot, and her hand in his, and her song to him the reply from the woman to her husband who had sung the words to both suns. She gripped him so tightly he felt his fingers pop at their joints, and smiled. His wife noticed and leaned over, kissing him once, and for a second, no more, so he didn't know whether it had happened but knew it had because he was asking this precious question. And then his duty to fuck her as calmly as he could, so exactly the right example would be set for the other men and women in the field that day, a soothing, enduring coming together with as much solace as lust, precious little fumble or grumble though, just silly laughs and whispers. Calmness now, calm. His hands under her skirt and she wriggling down to him. ‘Fucking earth on my arse,’ she whispered. ‘You didn't tell me about that.’ ‘What did you think, then?’ ‘Give it to me.’ ‘No. No. Set an example.’ But she did it anyway and she was setting example. She bit her lip at him and raised her eyebrows a sharpsfoot. ‘We don't want a waning,’ she murmured, and that was the thing to piss him off, so speed and bigman would energise things. ‘Told you,’ she said. ‘Now, then.’ And he did know, having to see this every year since he was allowed to the land as a man. Father now, he must spend the last into the earth as token and genuine, scientifically calculated to help, not harm nor hope. So he did, while in the edge of his gaze saw heaping bottoms seized and lifted and driven. ‘Calm,’ he shouted. Little difference did it make. They copied he and his wife and did as they now were, lying giggling on their sides, sticky with slow earth water in the two suns' light. Even from where they lay Shell could hear his father's morning song, let me go, I am no animal, I accept it is just, over and over as he was supposed to, his father knowing what day it was and what encouragement his son would need. Such is love. Then they all ate, still stripped or dishevelled at best from the waist down, letting the ground soak up what it needed from the bodies and from their hands. Now the bread and cheeses and knest was crumbled and licked and coughed into the air. All seeds, all goodness. Returning hand in hand with one another, they led a dance to the village hall, sat in a circle for an hour in the evening loom with one candle lit in the centre, cradled over by the oldest woman in the village, who held the light as if it was her only child, gently whispering to it the story of its flame, how God himself had brought fire to earth and here it was, the same and not the same, from the first sun, not the second. Better fire, hotter light. The second sun, further away by a million million kilometres from the ground, in an orbit that strained at its leash, pulling as best it could to escape, so it always had a haze around it, bright blue and shimmering deeper than the sky blue, and if you weren't concentrating you could forget it was there, but catch sight of something in the edge of your vision like a bit of your retina had come away. Dancing, if you were lucky and you mirrored its movements, like now because he was thinking about it and his feet couldn't keep still, the left and right neither wanted to touch the ground until one did, on the earth. It meant you fell and cracked your head, like now. What this current was that flooded the air and came to a point if you thought about it hard enough, no one knew. Until now, of course, but then was a different story, as well you know. A firefly holed up in the back of your jelly, that's what it felt like, only bolt blue and covered in torn sky, opened a hole in the sky. Well, he knew the steps and hardly needed to feel the white light reach all over his insides. He'd seen it many times before in older men, though that was the only thing he really worried about, what the women would say if they saw the dance. Women could be more unforgiving than men, with tongues much sharper than our knives, at least so we quietly testify under the secret oath that only men know. He reached up his hand and felt the dark light of this shuddering little insect star. Warm up me, make me look like the night and the heart of a tree. Scuttling always. The lane bore the dancing steps of the men with their arms held out to catch the energy from their secret star in the secret language that possiby didn;t exist at all. Then they strode, the women, h next ot their men hoping glqncing from one womans fac eot another hopign she’d see there the possibility of the end if th child she bore before it had even begun for the child born first or strongest or holiest would be sure t spread roots more deeply into the next woman. Each meant fertility for themselves, and when she led them into the fell hall, they each knew there would be this competition to be the first, the healthiest, the most fertile in inheritance. This precious thing, the boiling blood, the sudden popping of being of electrons and vacuum out of apparently something. Something—nothing. That's the inoxia in fell hall. Drinking of the air, spinning, rolling, embracing, taking each other’s hands in a scuffle, a fight, a waist-holding wrestle to see how much of your body you could touch the other with so one. Moment the whole was a knot of bodies wriggling and giggling, and the next three smaller groups bumbling across the hall and rolling into each other, reforming, renewing the shape, something a cloud, sometimes the inner workings of the muon wrapping themselves around gravity. Life. ‘Where we go is of the utmost importance,’ he shouted. Something nothing. Something nothing. Don't forget, and they laughed at him partly in derision and partly out of respect. They knew it and were open to whatever burst out of the air became something from nothing, the purest hymn, the purest breath, the purest movement was possible at any moment, the most likely to cling to chromosome or protein chain, something beautiful like that, the perfect transmission. At this moment, while sweat rolled down their backs and was touched away from their skins by whoever held them in the writhing knot of bodies. Something from nothing. But what was this while Shell twisted himself under the brag and looped his head under her arm, catching the heady scent of her skin and found himself plunging into her heart, burrowing for all he was worth. “I don't know where I am,” he shouted, and the others held their breath for a moment. Was this it? Was this the moment their families had foretold for generations that one day the lyric singer would find nothing from something? Even Shell wondered every time this happened when he got so close and wondered whether he’d get himself back from the borderless land. It had only happened twice before, and both at a lyric, but this time with the salt and bacteria, something opened a different door, and beyond the gristle there was more wide nothing that it became impossible to look at or tell apart from himself. Everywhere there was simply an absence of something. So sure was he of this that it was this thought that returned him. The nothing he’d seen was so convincing it had to be, yes, something. And he felt Freki’s arms round himself, picking him up from the floor where he lay face down, body sinking into the timber boards, blood pouring from his face, an eye socket, and the bones in his nose rattled. But what a triumph, fuck forever hard, forever shouted the woman and turned to their men as if to compare weak with strong. It didn’t happen often that the lyric would be smashed in the face, so also new to shell, who jumped on to the shoulders of his brothers, and they carted him round the hall, chased by the women and laughed at the men who wanted to chase but could not, only the woman if blood was spilt and you had to get as much as you could on your lips. He flicked a little stubble-strewn flakes from his wounds here and there, and mostly it got on his brothers, but Freki was the one who got the rest, though a bite-like trail of droplets landed on Granti, who had her eyes wide open, saw it coming, and twisted her head so it would land on her cheek. Accurate, she was Granta. Freki reached to wipe it off my blood, my blood, she hissed, pulling the farm girl to her, who, stronger than she resisted, pulled Freki down on top of her. Shell galloped round and round on the shoulders of his roaring brothers, all of whom wanted Freki to win; she must win, nothing must be lost by the lyric holders. Year after year, after season, after season, nothing must break that, or we’ll break you. And with that, he went out into the square, picked his father up on his shoulders this time, and carried him into the hall to the yell of hungry wolves. This was a different animal now than themselves, taken away from his hole in the ground for all to see and to spit upon failure of a men’s dickless cock would could when it really mattered, get it up. But his things were round the head of his son now, and such a look of terror on both their faces. The candles had grown low by now, so it wasn’t really possible to see which was devil and which man. Despite everything love could only carry a boy so far and shell’s kneees began to buckle and he found himself in the lance of pain that in his knee as he brought his father down heavily face first so they both now had wounds across their face and suddenly, shell knew why he’d brought his father here. And he shouted into the faces of the wolves, you will not have him.