Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The King

Faceless Ageless was a king. He had a face, and was of some age. He was a very wise king, and to show you how wise he was, I will tell you he wore his hair and beard clipped short. In those days men were always saying to each other:
Look how long my beard is!
And then stepping on it and tripping themselves. And then the man behind would tread on the first man's hair, and a war would begin. It was all very silly, but the men liked to have their beards and their long hair. Faceless Ageless was laughed at and scorned, but he could run through a thicket without getting tangled in a bush, and he never had a sore chin from stumbling on his own beard.

Before Faceless Ageless became king he was a peasant. The queen of the realm fell in love with this strange man who could walk without tripping up, and so he went with her to her castle and became her husband.

Many people did not like to bow to one at whom they had yesterday laughed, so when the king went to meet his subjects he was pelted with rotten fruit and insults. His queen was very angry, and then she was embarrassed, but most of all she was sad. She raised her arms and all fell silent, for no one had ever laughed at the queen. She gazed at the crowds of people and deliberated in her head. And then she began.

When I came to this throne, she said, you were glad to have me. I repaid your service with money and land. I have tried to judge you fairly. You have not complained.
Now I bring you a king. We will rule together. If you find him unfair, or foolish, you may complain. But if a king does the duty of a king, what care you of his appearance? Until he is dead or deposed, he has no face but that of a king, no age but that of his reign. All queens are called the Queen; all kings are called the King. You have made it so, and we need no other identity.

The crowd was very still, and they remained so, until the royal couple went back into their castle. Whether this was because they were awed by the wisdom of their queen, or because no one understood what she said and no one wanted to admit this, we shall perhaps never know.
But so it was that ever after the king was called Faceless Ageless. He was not called 'the King' at all.

Monday, August 8, 2011

Shops with Chandeliers

I’m in a shop. Wooden counters and gleaming but spotted glass - the kind of wood on which sunlight pools, as if it likes the feel of it - and chandeliers. One chandelier is grand, nine is bizarre. Bizarre. I look down and the labelled cupboards by my right hand proffer a handle marked 'Bazaar' so I draw it open, and beckoned by the buzzing chatter without, I climb through.
Balloons sway in coloured clouds above wonder-eyed kids, and nearest me a man stands behind a tray of wrinkled-looking rocks. “Bezoars,” he tells me, smiling and gesturing to his wares. When I look away from him I am sure he is a goat. I look back. He is a goat-like person, all right: thin face, pointed beard, long horns - horns? yes, it could be the fashion here: horns - and he is wearing the kind of neat dark green coat a goat would wear, if goats wore coats.
At my right, on the door leading back to the shop, is a coat of arms. The most boring of all coats of arms: black, above white. The Power crest. My husband's arms hold an eagle, perhaps even fish. But though it is undoubtedly a better crest, I did not take it. It wasn't mine. And if the wrong crest were on that door now, would I be allowed back in?
I push it, and it opens.
What's in a name? Everything, everything. The names I've been given and the names I give myself, all are here, labelling different compartments. On a shelf I still keep the same copy of the novel I studied in school. Inside the back page, all four of my names love all four of my husband's, with the superstitious precision of a seventeen-year-old girl. I was guarding that most elusive of finds: a boy who did not believe bad moods made him more attractive. He has a shop, too, probably. But I don't know if I have a door to it.
I wheel the dial on the radio and it sputters and then Kate Bush is singing. She is out on a wiley, windy moor, rolling and falling in green. When Heathcliff has let her in the window (or not), Laurie Taylor comes on, voice like a welcoming scarf.
“In the studio with me today I have St Peter,” he begins. “Are we asleep or are we dead? How can we tell?”
Well, I think, you're an atheist, and so am I, come to that, so if we're here, this can't be the afterlife. I chew my lip. The thing is, I bought that book on Logic, but I never actually read it.
I glance around at the cupboards and drawers and doors. If I am sleeping, one of these will lead to our bed. I will open my eyes and one of us will make coffee, and we'll slowly wake up while staring out the window watching the pigeons in the trees. But if I am dead, the same thing could happen but you wouldn't be real. And I might not even know. Or I might know.
I look again at the doors. And then I boil the kettle behind the counter. I change the station: static, static, then David Attenborough talking about fireflies. I have an odd feeling I've heard this before, but I don't know when. I sit by the radio, petting a marmalade cat that has just slinked up, and I think about you sitting somewhere, in a shop with chandeliers.