dream diaries… 118

04/08/23

Beefhook was now the name he went by; Captain, he was not. Having come all this way, tramping open landlocked miles, highways, county fields, with thumb aloft, righteous finger on the trigger of his god, blackened middle brother, coughing like a Durham miner, and familiar with not a lot, but determined, of a sudden, to fix his mother’s grave.

He carried trowel and clutch of flowers, red and orange, Pentax slung around his neck; the leather strap of which had rubbed his collar to the colour of a blood orange. Despite the spell of heavy weather (the dampest summer of the decade, the unseason, as they called it), Beefhook marched toward the setting suns, levelling the mornings, bruising every afternoon. The clouds sped westward, too.

The seabirds, painted, rode carousel, rising up, and then falling, almost, almost to the ground; he could no longer tell if they were laughing or moaning; they brought no meaningful message, but he collected them onto film all the same as souvenirs for a later date. He also captured the maids of metal – let’s name them Consul, Corsair, Zodiac – as they approached and passed – silent, blurred momentoes.

05/08/23

They had lived, once, in a tidy, blue apartment in the centre of the Spanish town. The floors of the four rooms were swept daily. As a boy, he remembered, the two of them would sit out on the tiny balcony in a pair of blue and white striped deck chairs, who knows where they came from, watching the busy street below, passing back and forth opinion on the clothes of the people, their styles of hair, as they went about their business on the pavement. They listened to The Ronnettes, The Supremes, and a particularly scratchy disc labelled on one side as The Girl From Ipanema. The B-side was a piece entitled Vivo Sonhando; the grooves of which were corrupted, locking the fade-out into an endless, off-beat cycle of one, strange, truncated minor piano chord, a slide of honeyed strings, and an incessant, insistent, insect-click of a rimshot, that became, with acceptance, quite soothing.

06/08/23

Around mid-morning, his brother would arrive. His brother’s smile was golden and kind. You boys decide what you want for dinner, she would say. His brother took the rubbish out: the metal dustbin lid sounding like a call-to-arms. The sun warmed the tiled balcony; it danced there. On a distant street, unseen, a car horn sounded- one, two, three – and from, or in the vicinity of, the red and orange spire of St. George’s, rose, a congregation of pigeons, silent, one after another, one after another, one after another…