Nowhere Near Milkwood
Read Nowhere Near Milkwood Online
Authors: Rhys Hughes
NOWHERE NEAR MILKWOOD
Rhys Hughes
Copyright © 2015 Rhys Hughes
Cover copyright © 2015 Theo Badiu
All rights reserved. This book and any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Ebook Edition 2015
Gloomy Seahorse Press
Swansea, Wales, UK
http://gloomyseahorsepress.blogspot.com
“Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature... As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English.” — MICHAEL MOORCOCK
“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.” — JEFF VANDERMEER
“Every Hughes story implies much, served with wit and whimsy and word-relish, high spirits and bittersweet twists.” — IAN WATSON
“A dazzling disintegration of the reality principle. A rite of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like Beckett on nitrous oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humour.” — A.A. ATTANASIO
“There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes’ fiction; it’s so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered.” — JEFFREY FORD
A Gloomy Seahorse Production
“Any book that quotes itself should be banned.” —
Nowhere Near Milk Wood
Foreword
This volume was originally published by Prime Books in 2002 and was my first book to be published in the USA. In fact it was my first book to be published abroad. It remains one of my most successful books, and the paperback edition still sells regularly. Almost thirteen years later, it has finally been turned into an ebook.
Nowhere Near Milk Wood
is made up of three sections and although (I think) they work as an harmonious whole, so that the book is a novel as much as a story collection, the separate sections grew up alone and were introduced to each other at a relatively late stage. In late December 1991 I wrote a story featuring an absurdist policeman by the name of Titian Grundy, who arrested not only criminals but natural catastrophes, abstract ideas, logical paradoxes and even the concept of ‘arresting things’ itself.
Annually thereafter I wrote a new ‘Titian Grundy’ story, usually on the last few days of the year. I did this without fail until the end of 1999, finishing the series as the end of the second millennium loomed. I gave this series the overall title of ‘The Long Chin of the Law’ because an overall title keeps its contents clean...
At the same time I had written most of the short tales that would eventually be collected into the cycle called ‘Taller Stories’. This series had a haphazard genesis indeed. Unrelated tales were connected by a framing device and bolstered by new tales that provided continuity in spacetime and also slotted into the framing device.
These two story cycles had been conceived independently and rather loosely but seemed to have much in common. And I made minor adjustments to draw them closer together. Then one day I found on a floppy disc a fragment of a story I had started but left uncompleted a long time before. I set to work and finished it. Then I saw it needed sequels, so I wrote them. These three tales quickly became ‘Martyr to Music’.
The ‘Martyr to Music’ series is the glue (or fulcrum) that holds the other pair of organic constructs together and makes the whole into something more than its parts. As is typical of my work, the glue (or fulcrum) comes
first
in the book, before the hemispheres it is joining (or balancing) are presented... There is little need to say much more. When I first held this book in my hands, I was delighted at how neatly the sections fitted together and worked as an integrated whole. I had not really been expecting this.
Nowhere Near Milk Wood
is random order out of deliberate chaos.
This ebook
is dedicated to
three people connected to it in various ways:
Lisa Duesing
Nathan Blumenfeld
Bridget Wells
Despite what some readers have assumed and some reviewers asserted, the title
Nowhere Near Milk Wood
is in no way at all a disparagement of Dylan Thomas’
Under Milk Wood
, which I regard to be a work of lyrical genius.
It is merely a playful variation.
This ebook contains a bonus story at the very end that does not appear in the paperback edition.
I was walking down Habershon Street, heading towards a party. I had my banjo in its battered case, a real happy instrument, untuned but as sexy as a suspender belt snap. There was power in my right hand. I was hoping to perform for the guests in return for something, I don’t know what, a bowl of peanuts maybe. Darren was waiting for me there with his fringe. He was a generous, mutant host.
My band — Disability Bill & the Cussmothers — had revolutionised the local music scene. Everyone knew where it was at now. Except me, who forgot to look when it changed. I could taste the anger in the air. The fumes of this lovely lowly city slapped me in the face. Cars roared sly mockery as they sped past. I offered a wave in return, kissed them all, cast my lips like wedges of cheese.
People always ask me where I get my ideas from. They say: “Bill, where exactly do you get your ideas from?” And I just evasively hunch my multiple shoulders. But at last I’m willing to let you know the answer. Why friends, I get my best ideas from the moonless gutter. It must be a moonless one, or the idea will fool nobody and appear as it is: like the torn ear of an old teddy in a box.
In the moonless gutter, if you are lucky, you too might be able to find some ideas. This is how you go about it. Leave your cares behind, on the mantelpiece if you like, and stroll out with a bottle of arrack. The tongue will burn like a flag in some Iraqi city during a time of suitable crisis. As you walk, don’t bother to look where you’re going. Take regular sips from the bottle.
When you’ve finished and reality is not quite the place it was, sit on the pavement and let the cars flow past like wavelets on a stinking beach. Roll the bottle under the wheels of a vehicle. The driver might stop and greet you directly. He may, or may not, strike you over the head with a bat. If he does, then rejoice, for the gutter will seem moonless whatever the time of day.
This is the method I choose for my inspiration. In the centre of the city, somebody is guaranteed to strike you over the head. The ideas become songs. For example, a song came to me while I was lying all but unconscious after being clubbed and left to choke in my own blood in a particularly moonless, almost starless, gutter last week. It was the song I planned to play at the party.
But I wasn’t there yet. I was still walking down Habershon Street, which is a street where the houses look all the same. Suddenly this girl came up to me. She was pretty: about twenty, tall, slim with long black hair cascading over her shoulders, and she wore black satin trousers and a dark top exposing a bare golden midriff. She asked if I was interested in business. That’s what she asked.
“Why yes,” I replied, “actually I’m thinking about opening a small ironmongery or maybe a shipyard.”
She burst into tears and sat down, with the drops cascading down her sculpted cheeks. I tried to cheer her up. I sat right next to her, in the moonless gutter, and I took out my instrument and I struck a dim chord. I played ‘Gallows Pole’ and one half of ‘Duelling Banjos’, which was an easy win for me. But she wasn’t cheered. It was probably beyond her appreciation. Youngsters know nothing about music. So I finished and wiped my snotty talent on my sleeve.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Selene,” she sobbed.
“Well, come to the party,” I urged.
What do you know, she did.
Darren wasn’t at the door to greet us, but thankfully his wife was, and she kissed my cheek and I said: “Thank you.” She looked bewildered and answered: “Nobody has ever thanked me for a kiss before.” Her name was June, but she was a bit late for the season, which was winter. In a low voice, I introduced my new friend as my girlfriend. I don’t believe she was deceived. There were fifty people in the house, most in the kitchen. Only one in the lounge. Just dandy.
“Where’s your band, Bill?” I was asked.
“I lost them getting here,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter because I want to try out a new solo set.”
The fridge was full of beer and the chairs were loaded with cats. That’s the way I like it, especially when I don’t have a choice. Darren turned up soon enough, with a pet monkey balanced on his shoulder, but when I mentioned it, he denied it. I stroked it anyway. He looked just a bit uncomfortable. I wondered where the people were going to dance. The rooms were too narrow for strutting your stuff, unless you did it partly up the stairs, which can be tiring.
Darren had this amazing way of moving, a sort of glide. Then I saw he was balanced on rollerskates and that the carpets had been removed to facilitate his locomotion. The trundle of his wheels on the floorboards was real bluesy. I imagined myself back in the delta, though I’ve never been there, on a lonely night at a station, waiting for a train to come and chug me to where the
southern cross the dog
, whatever that means. I feel rather than know things.
“What does his monkey play?” I asked June.
“His organ, do you mean?”
“That sounds about right,” I agreed.
She went off to deal with some other guests who were lonely. There were a few faces I recognised. Brian was there, and Woody, and Mike from Pink Towers, who everyone said was gay, but who never tried it on with me during my entire stay. I guess I have too many knees for his hands. Or perhaps he just didn’t fancy me.
I briefly spoke to Ros, who was an artist for book covers. She was insistent that I serve as a model for some appallingly bad novel. I was tingling with a peculiar passion as she prodded me over, calculating the angles of my monstrous contours.
“How many shoulders do you have, Bill?”
“More than several,” I responded.
She smiled. “Don’t shrug. I might lose count.”
“I have a larger share of other things too,” I said. “Sometimes my disability has many advantages.”
“But I don’t need those for the book.”
I think she had an eye on my new girlfriend. Ros is like that. She is an equal and opposite reaction to Mike. That’s fine by me, for I’m a bohemian type. I really enjoy my gay friends, because having them makes me look tolerant and progressive, whereas the mirror just makes me look hideous. I even prefer cleaning my teeth in front of a gay friend. But I was fully accepted here. Darren was a mutant too. He hid it well. It was all in the fringe. His hair had a life of its own, like tentacles, like worms, like little licks of despair.
When I reached the centre of the kitchen, on my way to the fridge for a beer, I found myself teetering on the edge of a deep circular pit. Nobody held me back, so I saved myself. I must have sweated in anguish for a full minute, as I tottered on the rim. But I pulled back at last and wiped a cuff across my brow.
“A bottomless hole,” explained June.
“How did that happen?” I cried.
“It’s a sculpture of one of Ros’s paintings. She usually paints a picture from a model, but she didn’t have a model of a bottomless hole, so she did the painting first and then made the hole. Just for the sake of consistency, you understand.”
I peered once again over the lip. The circular pit was shaped like a funnel, unless that was a trick of perspective. The opening was like a new moon, a non-moon, or maybe a lunar eclipse without a gutter to loom over. That was disturbing. There couldn’t be anything at the bottom, because it didn’t have one, but my mind loaned a brooding presence to the base of this deep nothingness.
“What was the painting for?” I wondered.
June answered: “A book about the pitfalls of the publishing world. We had no room for the model anywhere else. We want to buy a new carpet anyway, so it’s fine right there.”
“A book about the music business would need an even deeper pit,” I joked, but nobody cared to giggle.
“Where do you get your ideas from?” asked Brian.
“From the flat field?” prompted Woody.
I let my guard down. “Never. In the flat field I could get bored. I find them in the moonless gutter.”
“How reliable is that?” they chimed.
“You’ll see,” I promised.
The girl I came in with had wandered into a dark corner, attracted by the relative emptiness like a magnet to an iron eyebrow. I decided to play there, for romantic reasons.
I knew there was something wrong as soon as I plucked the first note. It wasn’t the one I was expecting. And the first step of my dance bore very little resemblance to the routine I’d worked out. I was confused but the solution was simple enough. The idea I got from the moonless gutter the previous week had been superseded by another. Then I realised I had sat in another gutter to comfort Selene when she commenced weeping. The idea from
that
moonless gutter must have replaced the other one. This wasn’t too bad, certainly not a disaster. It just meant I was unprepared for my own set. Frequently that can be an improvement. I might impress myself as much as the audience. I hoped that would be the case now, so I went with my destiny and continued playing.
As if through a fog, I saw Darren’s monkey clapping its hands. Then I wondered if ideas aren’t the only things which can be deliberately or accidentally picked up in moonless gutters. And maybe gutters aren’t the only places to pick up such things. What if types of jungle beast can be acquired while, say, balancing on rollerskates? Maybe Darren didn’t even know he had a monkey living on him. That’s a terrible thought, isn’t it? But it helps to explain all manner of apes and their locations. Climbing flights of steps while weighed down with gibbons, making an extra pot of tea for perched chimps, showering under the shadow of a gorilla: all of them unfruitful responsibilities.
I continued to pluck notes and dance. I did this faster and faster. Each step of my dance followed a note. I know that’s not original, but I think it sometimes still works.
Then it was done. I bowed politely.
“What the heck was that?” spluttered June.
“Was it a crate?” asked Ros.
“Was it a rusting crane?” suggested Brian.
“I thought it was a bag of nails,” offered Woody.
“Or a capstan,” sniffed Mike.
“No, it was an adjustable spanner.”
“Surely it was a porthole?”
“A mast without a sail.”
“A saw with seventy-three teeth.”
“A frayed orange hammock.”
I was shocked. “It was a song, wasn’t it?”
“Whatever it was,” said Darren slowly, “it wasn’t a song. It looked like all the items and objects one might find in an ironmongers or maybe a shipyard. Tools, cables, rails.”
“You mean the notes were solid?”
“Yes, and they had definite practical shapes.”
I stamped my feet. There was minor thunder in the house. I shouted with joy: “This is marvellous! I have all the stock I need to set up in business! The music world can go hang itself. I’m tired of the headaches involved in the creative life. Exhausted with all the worries and little insecurities, the relentless doubts, the struggles. This is much better. And I’ll set up my ironmongery
inside
the radius of a shipyard. With all those items, that’s what I can do.”
“That’s incorrect,” said June.
“Why?” I almost screamed.
“Because those objects no longer exist.”
“How?” I nearly shrieked.
“Your dance kicked them down the pit,” she said.
“A funky dance,” added Darren.
I believed him, but it was small consolation. I took it anyway, but I had to give it back. He wasn’t referring to my performance. No, he was looking into the future. He was making a prediction about himself. For suddenly, he skated directly into the mouth of the bottomless pit. I ran forward and peered over the edge. He had plunged in at a tangent and was now skating on the sides of the hole, round and round, down and down, in a tight spiral. Like dishwater.
His speed increased rapidly and his fringe awakened. Abortive style kept the hair fastened to the man, and centrifugal force kept the man fastened to the circular wall. His monkey glanced up and our eyes met. I saw a touch of madness in its look and a pinch of infinite sadness. Then it turned its head away and started spanking Darren with one of its very long arms. Enough monkeys have been spanked by enough men in history to justify one getting its own back.