Secret Fragments #3

Do you realise,’ his uncle said, slowly, ‘…she was born exactly one hundred years after Bobo ... Now that’s a thought, isn’t it!’

‘Good Lord, is that right?’

That summer, away from London to the sunflowers he had gone with his uncle and Alma and their children. Sofia had come too and everyone had said how much their cousin looked like Sofia, and Sofia smiled and their cousin smiled; she shyly, Sofia indulgently. He had thought that there was more of Sofia then in her now than in Sofia now, and he wondered how much of Sofia now would be in her then. When she spoke gently to her brother or her face was startled into a little ‘o’ and her black eyes grew, or silently at breakfast when her shoulders caved about her Coco Pops, yawning, and she refused to be goaded by uncles.

‘We can only imagine what we would find in that book,’ his grandfather said, grizzling, and placing tobacco in his rolling machine. His eyes flickered over his hands at work, and ten rested still, his voice quiet. His sons were silent either side of him and looking steadily at nothing.

He rested his head back and wanted to close his eyes. The room was running around them. For a moment the wind picked up outside, rattling the window in its frame just for a second, and a draught ran cold over him. His grandfather looked asleep. Tired, he tried to imagine him a little boy like Lutino. At first gambling, like a twinkling cub but quickly became a great, old snowbearpolabear pawing a landscape of white rock. He looked about the horizon, out over the flat white ocean and over the sprawling iced beach embedded in dark cliff leading up to an empty sky and the dark lip of cliff where the wind howled.

He looked upwards, hitting the ceiling, and thought of Pest and Buda, with whom he had spent the night earlier that week. The twins hadn’t look well. One was getting fatter each time he saw her. The other was wasting away, slurping at her drink and sucking cigarettes.  In Angel they had planned to go to the funfare that weekend at Battersea Power Station. When they arrived it was already closing down. Only a small selection of the smallest, and squeakiest, and brightest rides were still in operation and they were scowled at as they approached and asked for a go. They retreated to a bench at a beer tent that was half packed into a van.

They sat amongst employees of the funfare morosely celebrating the end. They sat and drank and he tried to keep the twins talking, or at least listening to him talk, and because he wouldn’t stop they did and the three drank cheap beer fast. Later, as the last of the sun shone, multi-coloured on the tarmac he had gazed up at the sky and watched as the planes flew past. One by one they came, one always following upon the other; in straight lines they flew, black, geometric birds.

He left still unsatisfied and so kept the girls walking with him, speaking loudly and holding hands and swinging their arms. And although Buda’s dyed red hair was faded as her dark brown roots took hold, and although Pest’s shoes were tattered and splitting they still clung to her feet, and so they flowed into a quiet but full pub and ordered drinks and laughed and shouted raucously and discourteously as they drank them and the other punters made mute sign language behind their backs.    

Afterwards he had gone back to Buda’s house and they had bought a bottle of wine, and, crept around the back of her building passed the bins to the swimming pool. They had uncovered it, and taken off their clothes and slipped in. They took their glasses of wine with them into the water. They drank and whispered and chuckled and he looked up to the sky and heard the train rolling past. Each train sounded thunderous and brought drama into their little quiet world in the water. He was smiling into the sky when Buda said that they should go in, and their white dripping bodies scrambled out of the pool.

Walking home along the river he had stepped up on to the ledge to pee into the Thames but couldn’t. Voices gave him quiet juddering startles and one person amongst goads and squeels slapped his ass as he went past. Buda and Pest hadn’t texted him since that evening – one had stabbed herself on a metal railing; the other just went silent.  

But now, sitting at his grandfather’s table, he returned, as he often did, to the sunflowers. On the final days he had walked with Lutino up a long road to a park full of bushes and plants and great trees. They walked up to two great pillars at the entrance; upon which crouched a fierce dog, puppies straining up to her dripping dugs while she turned to the other pillar, snarling and spitting at a wolf, as large as the bitch, legs spread and hair bristling. Under her belly there were also puppies, but dog-puppies not wolf-puppies. He was unsure whether they were dead or alive, writhing or frozen below her bridged belly. Looking up at them, Lutino’s eyes expanded for a moment, into smooth black buttons, and then his head turned back to the other, and he looked straight forward and stumbled into the park, leaving behind a cloud of dust where he shuffled his small legs forward.

He walked up to one of the pillars, looking up at the snarling beast above, and scratched upon one pillar the words liebe luxus anarchie.

Alma followed with her camera.    

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #2

 ‘My aunt was thirteen years older than Bobo. She was already crawling out of her youth as her sister was emerging out of childhood and into her beauty. My father was engaged to my aunt first, you see. But one summer he fell in love with Bobo. Over card games and chess. She would slink up to him and ask if they could play a game and he wouldn’t be able to say no, and they would play, and she would ask for one more, and he would lose on purpose until he realised he could no longer win. I can see him at it now, twirling a circular counter in his hand under the table, while attempting to raise her eyes to his …’

‘He used to do it to our nannies and young waitresses on holiday in Portugal-’

‘But my mother’s eyes would be fixed on the ball, the board, the table, watching his hands. It’s how she always was.’

‘Yes I remember her teaching us Poker and it was just like that: eyes on the table, on the cards, on the chips, only looking at us for a moment to check we were paying attention-‘

‘But it was over chess that Dad fell in love with her. And after chess he would chase her in the garden or try and catch up with her in badminton … and it was perfectly obvious, to my aunt at least, what was happening.’

That which was perfectly obvious to his grandfather’s aunt was hidden from his father. Bobo didn’t see it either, lost behind the wonder of her own ascendency and the world it brought. And because it was perfectly obvious, it was only a matter of time before the loser, without a struggle, gave up trying to find reason or compensation for the perfectly obvious, or look for what lay beyond the reflection, and joined the great multitude who pass gently from reproach to lament to submission.

The food had been set down. He had already finished his wine and now he swallowed the last of his water. He picked up the bottle and filled everyone’s glasses up as they had also finished. He then did the same with the water jug.   

‘The Book of Secrets was a book owned by a lady called Florence Baxter-White. She was a great lady of society in London between the wars. She was also a great friend of Bobo’s. She would host these fabulous parties, and at these parties, when the guests would be leaving, she brought out this great book in which she asked them to write a little remark or impression of the evening, or a snippet of gossip perhaps. Because it was like a visitors’ book apart from that no-one would be able to read what the others had written-’

            

‘A cloth,’ his grandfather said, ‘with a circle cut out of it was placed over the pages when someone was writing in it so they could only see their own blank space and their own words.’

           

‘And there was absolute trust that Florence would show the book to no-one-’

            

‘When Florence died, hit by a taxi on Marylebone Street, she left the Book to Bobo. But –‘

            

‘It never reached Bobo-’

‘Why?’

‘Years and years after that summer it was …’

‘Fantastic chicken, Dad.’

Years and years after that summer, working on the dry banks of the Thames, Bobo’s sister found herself forced by unhappy circumstance to seek her sister at one of Lady Baxter-White’s fabulous parties. Waiting, she stretched her neck like a stalk’s through red curtains to the dancing beyond.

‘Her ersatz presence at Florence’s attracted the attention of a guest by the name of Hoogerwerf, who on discovering her identity, subjected her to a celebration of her sister from great purple lips …’ 

‘I am yet to pin that little tyke down in a game of tennis! One of these days … Tell me, was she so delicious when she was younger?’

And it was only a few months after that-

‘Could you pass the potatoes, Dad?’

'The elder holds the secrets of the younger! My aunt was entrusted to pass on the book to Bobo but on the day Florence died she spirited it away. It was only a few months later when-’

‘Are you finished here Dad?’

Only a few months later, as men in black and white shuffled about the Baxter-White house, a young girl, a favourite of Florence’s, hid the Book of Secrets in an old stone oven in the garden kitchen while she attempted to reach Bobo.

But no-one knew where Bobo was. The house was filling up with more sweeping black coats and jackets and they young girl began to panic. Just as she was about to shriek to the other young girls that they ‘simply light the oven and let the Book burn!’ one of them said that she had recently seen Hoogerwerf with a woman who claimed to be Bobo’s sister. They hadn’t believed Bobo to have a sister but Hoogerwerf, who was holding his hanging head in one of the long corridors of the house was brought forward and consulted and irritably assented that there did indeed exist ‘a tall, dry giraffe of a woman’ who called herself Bobo’s sister. Enquiries were made and the reality was verified and before midday the dry giraffe with the weak flutter of a resurgent heart was being hustled down the back passageways of the Baxter-White house and then presented with the Book of Secrets with the fierce instruction that it was to be delivered to the hands of no-one but Florence’s ‘Darling Bobo’. Little moist hands pushed her down the garden: ‘Tell her to send a note when she has received it. To Victoria!’ And then with a desperate nod the door was slammed shut.

Cut off from the garden, standing still, amidst a damp, charcoal alleyway Bobo’s sister clasped the Book of Secrets to her bosom. Summer was ending and the chill morning, with clouds overhanging, held the essence of decay. Her long trembling fingers stroked the black leather and played at the while linen cloth that poked out of the Book’s white lips.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #1

Up against a stone pillar, the light shone down upon his head and chest like a halo or a Tudor ruff, or a large, translucent bib, as white as his skin and the flower of hair that sprung at his temple. At his mouth, about his chin, a stain sat; mud or muck or chocolate, like the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist.

‘Alma took it. Not a bad snap eh?’ His uncle sported neither beard nor ruff but a speck of red chilli dip – conspicuous as a black mole hair or white-head – hung to the crevice of his mouth. He smiled at his father and him and put the picture back on the shelf. His uncle’s voice fluttered about his ears and he hoped that a smile would suffice as a response.

‘I sent this to Dad last week. He has pictures of the other two when they were the same age. Hmm? Yep, two.'

His father reached for more crisps and chilli dip and smeared it over his own mouth. His blackberry blinked on the table. ‘Two already! Good Lord …’

‘Young Lutino two already!’ His grandfather entered the room, grinning, the skin about his mouth stretching out in wrinkled folds. He walked briskly with the stiff edge of a decommissioned rocking-horse. He saw that a drop of urine had formed on his grandfather’s crotch and also spotted a speck of green caught between two of the old man’s teeth. He drew his tongue over his own teeth and put a hand up to his mouth and chin and felt only the dry beginnings of the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist. 

His father and uncle were up in London. Just for a couple of days, his uncle said. And his father too, ‘Just for a couple of days.’

‘Then back to the country.'

The three of them had come from different corners of the city and met in a pub, a five minute walk from his grandfather’s. It was fun and they were very content to stay but resisted a second round and got up to walk around the corner. His grandfather had greeted them all heartily and fixed them drinks.

Now standing around his table, his uncle said, ‘You know Spangle told me the funniest thing the other day. He said that years ago when he came to stay at weekends and Alma stayed behind on walks after lunch, he had thought that she had been smuggling lovers in behind our back. Because she always insisted so vociferously that we should go out on a walk, but would never come herself. Each Sunday he had imagined her hurrying them all in as soon as we crossed through the trees into the field!’

They laughed and he thought of the raised eyebrows and meaningful looks that would pass about Alexandria’s table. Sofia would laugh with them and drop a little remark that ripped the seal the others dared not pick at, and they would cackle in a spurt of relief, howling and clawing at the table. This table was as long and light, as his grandfather’s was dark and squat, and sitting around it earlier that Summer, Sofia had said:

‘I’m giving up in the autumn. As soon as I can. It’s disgusting. It’s just not worth it.’ Alexandria silently nodded along, and the girls looked up at Sofia and her cigarette with eyes content to believe in the autumn and she nodded down at them. ‘It’s not worth trying in the first place.'

‘How old were you?’ Alexandria asked.

‘How old were you?’

His grandfather lit a cigarette and passed the lighter.

‘I remember the first time they met. We went on a walk and the two of them were lagging behind and he was telling her all about the books he had read and his favourite jokes and stories from school. Funny to him but awfully dull to poor Alma. But she laughed and listened and asked questions and I remember looking back and saw him allowing her to help him over the style, the silhouette of them as she cautiously guided him over ...’

Once, on a walk with his grandfather, blackberry picking, hanging back to pee into the bush, he had spotted a voluptuous blackberry amongst the thorns. As he reached out to pluck it the mole hill he was standing on collapsed and he tottered into the ditch peeing over his trousers. For the rest of the walk he stayed back from the others so they wouldn’t see. Later he would hang back and try to surreptitiously smoke one of his grandfather’s cigarettes. Walking with his uncle and Alma in the sunflowers that summer he noticed Spangle hanging back and wondered whether he was smoking or had peed on his trousers.  

‘It kills us. I know it kills us; we’ve just finished burying Dad after it killed him, and look at me!’ That is what Alexandria had said while she smoked in the fireplace and he and Sofia wished to smoke crouched in the fireplace themselves, but couldn’t so she had gone to the bushes at night and he to the bins in the warm sleepy moments after lunch. But then Alexandria had woken up one morning and recognised it as the foulness it is and that was that and Sofia now really wanted to stop and that would be that, and he now loved not going to the bins but went to the flowers instead and thought of his grandfather’s curt cough and his rolling machine.

He offered him another drink saying, ‘He should try some of mine. You boys’ feet never grew to my size I think. Though I think they are now beginning to shrink …’

‘-I haven’t told Alma. I don’t know what she’d think! …’

            

‘-It’s funny actually I was talking to someone at work …‘

            

Alexandria was giggling somewhere while Sofia gave him a gesture as she had earlier. ‘She will probably have a rosé but go and check.’ He had gone out to try and find Alexandria and hadn’t found her but found the sunflowers and he had sat and in the end she had found him on her way back from the bins and he had offered to get her a drink and they walked back together, him helping her over the gate and back towards the house, and she told him stories that hovered about his ears and didn’t require a response.  

            

‘She was having her nap of course,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s all it was.’

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

     

Begin again, and again: Phia at the English Theatre Berlin

She is often referred to around the lines of, ‘that girl with that funny instrument who does the looping thing’ and this was the accumulation of my knowledge on Phia as I went to see her this October at the English Theatre Berlin. Shuffling within the bustling crowd that was fidgeting to see the final show of her tour, at first no-one I spoke to was particularly sure what the instrument she played was. ‘A mobiro,’ someone eventually said, nonchalantly. ‘From South Africa’. This created a momentary flutter of excitement in our corner of the lobby, and a little scepticism too. ‘It certainly doesn’t sound very African to me,’ someone said.

Amidst the wires and mics and lights, as Phia begins her set I crane my neck forward to get a better look at the thing in her hand that she introduces as not a ‘mobiro’ but a ‘kalimba’, a thumb-piano, a descendant of the South African ‘mbira’.  The kalimba, with the dexterity of the cell phone generation, can be played with just one hand by plucking at the mettle strips that run across the wooden tablet, creating a sound like a xylophone or a little bell; but the sound is cleaner than a bell, and has more body than a xylophone. With her loop pedal, Phia records a melody with the kalimba, or a beat made with her mouth or hands, or sings an introductory refrain, and plays it back, allowing it to loop again, and again, throughout her song, as she adds layer upon layer, created with her hands, or mouth, or the kalimba. Phia isn’t the only one to use a loop pedal, or indeed to play a kalimba, but she’s one of few to use them together, and it is this unusual aspect to her music that brought many of us to the English Theatre Berlin that evening.

In her songs Phia expresses the relationship she has with ‘home’, which was Melbourne for her until she moved to Berlin – ‘this village’ – two years ago. As Lily Allen presented her home in ‘LDN’ with crack-whores and Tesco bags ...



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